Certain Uncertainty

1Resilient, Net Positive Leadership

Andrew Winston

It was the missing toilet paper that shook the world. The empty shelves that used to overflow with basic necessities finally woke us up to a harsh reality: our economy and our supply chains are fragile. The lack of resilience in the system created massive product losses and waste.

Supply chains are still a mess, in large part because they're not flexible. We built an economy that values efficiency above all, with limited redundancy or back‐ups. That certainly keeps costs down and pleases shareholder value purists, but it's completely unfit for a volatile world. The pandemic was (we hope) a once‐in‐a‐century phenomenon, but clearly the world is more uncertain than ever. Sudden shocks to the system are the norm. The only real way to prepare and lead is to build resilient organizations, communities, and economies.

At all scales, from companies to sectors to economies, leaders will need to change how they think about business. With a resilience lens––and I'll argue a sustainability lens as well—a company can greatly increase the odds of surviving, doing better than its peers in the face of deep change, and bouncing back faster from disruptions. From my work and observations of companies (and people) under stress, it seems that resilience is built on three fundamental pillars: (1) diversity and redundancy; (2) strong networks (i.e., friends you can trust); and (3) purpose or mission.

Before diving into those three areas, it's useful ...