You’ve just woken up, you’ve got a heap to get through before you go to work, and joy of joys the cat has just gifted you a live rat that is currently being shepherded around the bathroom. Not dead. Not politely retired. Alive, alert, and moving with the confidence of something that has never once had a performance review. The cat, meanwhile, is strutting like it’s contributed meaningfully to society, while you’re standing there half awake in your underpants trying to decide whether you deal with the rat first, or make coffee and pretend you didn’t see it, like someone who still believe denial is a valid strategy.
This is where most plans die. Not because we’re incompetent, and not because we’re “bad at time management,” but because mornings are a fragile system. There’s low time, low cognitive capacity, and a high probability that something unexpected will show up and start rearranging the day like it owns the place. The rat isn’t the real problem. The real problem is whether we’ve designed the system to have enough room to absorb disruption without everything else collapsing behind it.
Design is rarely heroic. It’s boring. We pack the bag the night before. We prep meals ahead of time. We remove known decisions from the morning. That doesn’t prevent chaos, because nothing prevents chaos, but it creates buffer. It gives us breathing room and options. If nothing goes wrong, we start the day calmer. If something does go wrong (here’s the cat and comrade rat), we’ve got room to move, which is the difference between a small inconvenience and a full system meltdown.
That’s what designing for change really is: creating space before we need it. It’s foundations-first thinking in practical clothing. Resilience isn’t about taking on more. It’s about being able to let go of more, and design is how we make that real.
Organisations behave exactly the same way. Many talk about change. Some have pockets of capability. But as a shared, consistent discipline, designing for change is often scarce. Capability tends to sit in siloes – a sharp operator here, a thoughtful leader there – and without a common design rhythm it doesn’t compound. Under pressure, it collides. Everyone gets busy, nobody is aligned, and momentum quietly leaks out of the system.
Planning assumes the future behaves itself. Design assumes it won’t. If we’ve already done the work of anticipating change, design is what turns that foresight into something usable. It answers a blunt question: when this happens, do we have room to move, or do we immediately fall into firefighting? If you want to revisit the anticipation side of this equation, it’s unpacked in more detail here.
Designing for Change Creates Space to Adapt
Victorinox is a useful illustration, and it’s one that Simon Sinek often references when talking about long-term resilience and leadership under uncertainty. For decades, Victorinox was almost synonymous with the Swiss Army Knife. It wasn’t just a product; it was a category, a default gift, and a staple of travel culture that felt solid and predictable.
Then 9/11 happened, and no one could have predicted an event of that scale or horror. Prediction wasn’t the differentiator. Preparation was. As air-travel security tightened and knives were restricted, demand for Victorinox’s core product was hit hard. This is the moment where many organisations reach for the blunt instrument: cost-cutting, retrenchments, and short-term survival thinking that often creates a second crisis while trying to solve the first.
Victorinox didn’t respond by immediately gutting itself. Under the leadership of Carl Elsener Jr., the company had maintained financial strength and reserves that created strategic breathing room when the world shifted. That buffer gave them options, and options are what matter when the rules of the game change without warning. Instead of dismantling the organisation, resources were directed into innovation and diversification, accelerating the move into adjacent categories like watches, travel gear, fragrances, and lifestyle products.
The specifics matter less than the principle behind them. Organisations don’t usually fail because they lack effort or intelligence. They fail because they run out of room.
I’ve written about this example in more depth before, including where it comes from and why Simon Sinek uses it so often when talking about organisational resilience and preparation for uncertainty. You can find that context here.
Change Readiness Needs Contingency Planning
This is what contingency really is, and it isn’t pessimism. It’s respect for reality. Without contingency, we default to firefighting and the language shifts instantly to “we’re on fire, everyone grab a bucket, just get us through today.” Strategy collapses into survival, people work harder rather than smarter, and the system tightens precisely when it needs flexibility. That’s how anticipation turns into anxiety and implementation turns into burnout. The work doesn’t stop, but the organisation becomes brittle.
That’s why designing for change can’t be a once-a-year exercise. It needs to be a rolling discipline, surfacing whenever meaningful planning and reflection is happening. Two questions should be revisited continuously.
The first is simple, but uncomfortable: What could realistically go wrong? This isn’t the moment for polite realism where everyone nods and suggests “maybe the timeline slips by a week.” When we say there are no stupid suggestions, this is where that promise gets tested. Sometimes the idea that sounds exaggerated is the one that reveals the blind spot. History has a habit of humiliating certainty.
But uncomfortable truths only surface when people feel safe enough to say them. Psychological safety isn’t a cultural slogan in this context. It’s a design input. If uncertainty or dissent is punished, we don’t get honest risk mapping, we get theatre. We get reassuring plans that hold up beautifully right until reality arrives.
The second question is where design earns its keep: if that scenario plays out, what space have we already created to work with it? The solution doesn’t need to be elegant. It just needs to exist. It needs to give us margin, time, and options so we can respond without immediately breaking something else.
This logic doesn’t stop at organisations and balance sheets. It shows up in people too. When leaders move into higher-pressure roles – like stepping from Senior Leadership into Executive Leadership – the environment changes. Scrutiny changes. Expectations change. If we don’t design for that shift, we leave people to improvise inside it, and improvisation under pressure is how good humans become stressed humans and stressed humans become reactive humans.
Designing people for change doesn’t mean turning them into robots. It means agreeing small, deliberate behavioural shifts that are visible, measurable, and usable as anchors as the pressure changes. It gives people tools to self-evaluate during the transition, not months later when the cost is already visible.
Leadership Under Uncertainty Requires Psychological Safety
Design also rarely works well in isolation. Design quality improves with perspective diversity. The broader the thinking pool, the stronger the design. The best design work often comes from the person who felt safe enough to say the uncomfortable thing first. This is where the idea of the Incomplete Leader matters. When we understand where we’re strong and where we’re blind, we stop pretending we have all the answers and build teams and systems that compensate, challenge, and extend our thinking.
Designing for change doesn’t eliminate disruption. It gives us room to move when it arrives. It gives us enough slack in the system that the next live rat doesn’t turn into a full-scale organisational emergency.
And if we want to know how much room we actually have, we can measure it. If we’re curious about how well we, or our organisation, currently anticipate, design, and implement for change, the short diagnostic below offers a practical snapshot of where we have breathing room, where we’re already running tight, and where pressure is quietly building.
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