Strategy: The Disruption-Resilience Axis

In an ever more volatile world, how you plan for and react to disruption is arguably the most important contributor to survival and success for leaders and for businesses.

In most businesses, there is a normal, and work is mostly designed based on this normal. In fact, I’d argue that much of our personal and home lives are also designed based on a normal, what we also call our routine. Most people have them.

And yet, much of the real world doesn’t work to a normal. And most of our executive functions, both in our personal and professional capacity is focused on managing when the situation is outside of normal. An oversimplification might be that normal requires system 1 thinking and disruptions require us to engage our system 2 thinking.

Think of a typical disruption in your personal life: a boiler needs repair, a kitchen appliance leaks, a commute goes awry because of transport problems, or an office day becomes suboptimal because we have a headache.

Our focus then becomes handling the disruption to return to normal as we know it.

A more significant change could be a new job, having a baby, or getting a significant tech upgrade such as getting a new smart phone. Which leads to the design of a new normal.