Stability looks safe. But in business, stability is the corporate equivalent of eating plain toast forever – bland, predictable, and guaranteed to kill you slowly while you smile politely for the quarterly report. What leaders actually need isn’t stability. It’s a business resilience strategy – a way of building organisations that can adapt, recover, and grow stronger when disruption hits.
Look at the Vietnam War. American jets were dropping like pigeons in a KFC parking lot. Engineers thought: “Make them faster! Give them more firepower!” Nope. Still toast. The problem? The planes were too stable. They flew like ironing boards with wings – smooth, predictable, and easy to shoot.
Enter the F-16. A jet designed to be deliberately unstable. Without computers, it wanted to nosedive into the nearest rice paddy. Pilots had to fight it just to keep it in the air. But when danger came? That instability was its superpower. It could spin, tumble, and roll like a caffeinated ferret in a washing machine, and impossible to hit. The very thing that made it harder to fly is what kept it alive.
That’s the leadership lesson: stability isn’t safety. Stability is a bullseye. A true business resilience strategy isn’t about looking calm and composed, it’s about staying alive when everything else is burning.
Simon Sinek makes the same point in The Infinite Game. Victorinox, the Swiss Army Knife guys, got obliterated after 9/11 when knives were banned from carry-on luggage. Overnight, their main market vanished. Most companies would have panicked, cut staff, and begged for mercy. Victorinox did the opposite: they poured money into innovation, launched into watches, luggage, and fragrances, and leaned on the cash reserves they’d built up because they knew life is basically one long series of potholes. CEO Carl Elsener said it best: “We don’t think in quarters. We think in generations.” That’s trench leadership.
So what’s the trench?
The trench is the ugly, muddy, boot-destroying space where growth actually happens. It’s the pilot project that flops. The prototype that embarrasses. The bold new market that shrugs and walks away. It’s deliberately sending teams into controlled discomfort so they build the muscle to handle the real storms. It stinks. It’s messy. It ruins your nice PowerPoint decks. But without it, your organisation is just a pampered house cat that curls up and dies the moment it rains.
Here’s the kicker: you don’t throw the whole business in at once. That’s not trench work, that’s bankruptcy. The trench is about small, consistent visits. Think Atomic Habits (great book!), but covered in mud. Regular experiments. Tiny risks. Frequent failures. Little trips into discomfort that compound into adaptability over time. Small, consistent trench work is what turns intention into a business resilience strategy that actually holds under pressure.
And here’s where leadership really matters: you’ve got to cheer for the people who climb into the trench. They know it might not work – but what if it does? They should feel “psychologically safe” (as all the coaching manuals call it) that even if they crawl back out looking like they’ve lost a fight with a swamp monster, they’ll still be supported. That’s how trench work becomes a habit instead of a horror story.
So stop asking, “How do I keep things stable?” Stability is toast. Instead ask:
- Are my teams equipped to intentionally enter the trench?
- Are my people digging trenches now, before disruption digs one for them?
Because in the end, your survival comes down to one question: what’s your business resilience strategy? Are you actually funding resilience – or just buying flowerpots and hoping daisies count as strategy?
Want to know if your leadership team is trench-ready? Run the Titanic Diagnostic and get an unvarnished view of your organisation’s ability to anticipate, design, and implement for change.
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