Resilience That Works When It Matters Most
Real-world results from organizations that faced disruption and emerged stronger.
When crisis strikes, plans matter less than practiced capability. These organizations didn't just survive disruption—they maintained operations, protected their people, and built lasting resilience through pressure. Each engagement represents the kind of clarity, coordination, and confidence that separates reaction from readiness.
CASE STUDY 1: Leading Through a Global Pandemic
When the Crisis Has No Precedent
Three months before COVID-19 became a household name, Brian sat with multiple leadership teams reviewing their pandemic response plans. Every organization had documentation. Most had passed audits. All felt reasonably prepared.
Then the actual pandemic arrived, and those plans proved insufficient for a crisis that evolved daily across borders, sectors, and communities.
The Challenge
Nine organizations, spanning global NGOs with field operations, technology companies with distributed workforces, and national policy institutions all faced simultaneous operational disruption from a threat that moved faster than their planning assumptions. The challenge wasn't just the virus itself but the cascading uncertainties: border closures, supply chain disruption, remote work transitions, stakeholder safety across dozens of countries, and operational decisions that had to be made with incomplete information.
Each organization had continuity plans, but what they needed was adaptive capability.
The Approach
Over the months that followed, Brian provided sustained advisory support to help these organizations move from reactive crisis response to adaptive resilience management.
The work centered on translating high-level strategic decisions into executable operational protocols while maintaining organizational coherence across time zones, cultures, and risk tolerances. This meant:
Establishing decision frameworks that enabled local teams to act with confidence while maintaining strategic alignment. Organizations needed clear escalation triggers, defined authorities, and simple protocols that teams could execute under pressure without referring back to headquarters for every decision.
Building adaptive response structures that could flex with rapidly changing conditions. As governments imposed restrictions, lifted them, then reimposed them, organizations needed protocols that could scale up and down based on local context rather than waiting for corporate direction.
Integrating continuity into operations rather than treating crisis response as separate from business-as-usual. The most effective organizations stopped asking "when can we return to normal" and started asking "how do we operate sustainably in this environment."
Creating shared situational awareness across geographically distributed operations. Regular leadership touchpoints, standardized situation reporting, and clear communication protocols ensured that executive teams could make informed decisions while field operations maintained necessary autonomy.
The engagement required balancing consistency with flexibility, maintaining organizational coherence while allowing teams to adapt to radically different local conditions.
The Outcome
All nine organizations maintained operational continuity through the pandemic's initial waves, though the nature of that continuity varied by sector and operational model.
Organizations with flexibility to shift to remote operations sustained most functions with minimal interruption. Those with essential in-person requirements, particularly field operations overseas, faced more significant operational challenges but developed protocols that allowed them to maintain critical activities while protecting personnel.
More importantly, every organization emerged with strengthened resilience capability:
Practiced decision-making under uncertainty became embedded in leadership teams rather than theoretical
Adaptive protocols and frameworks replaced static plans, creating capability that extended beyond pandemic response
Cross-functional coordination improved as organizations practiced working across boundaries under pressure
Confidence in navigating ambiguity replaced dependence on complete information before acting
These weren't organizations that predicted the pandemic. They were organizations that practiced adapting to disruption, and when unprecedented crisis arrived, they had the muscle memory to respond effectively.
Client Types: Global NGOs with international field operations, Global technology companies, Nonprofit leadership and policy organization
Scale: 9 organizations across 3 continents
Duration: Months-long engagements through lockdown, transition, and operational normalization
Sectors: International development, Technology, Policy research
CASE STUDY 2: Coordinating Response to Tragedy Overseas
When Leadership Under Pressure Becomes Everything
In crisis work, there are few situations more complex or emotionally charged than tragedy involving loss of life. When an international humanitarian organization experienced a devastating vehicle accident that killed and injured nearly their entire country team, the moment called for extraordinary coordination, care, and clarity under pressure.
The Challenge
The organization faced immediate, overlapping crises across multiple dimensions:
Human impact: Multiple fatalities, serious injuries requiring urgent medical care, and the emotional trauma affecting staff, families, and the broader organization. Personnel were scattered across international locations requiring medical evacuation and family notification across time zones.
Operational complexity: Coordinating response across host country government, U.S. agencies, insurance providers, international medical facilities, and organizational headquarters—all while the situation continued to develop and information remained incomplete.
Organizational continuity: With the entire program staff either killed or injured, the organization had to simultaneously manage crisis response, support affected personnel and families, maintain stakeholder relationships, and address the future of their in-country operations.
Reputational stakes: The organization's response would be scrutinized by donors, partners, staff, and the broader humanitarian community. How they handled the tragedy would define organizational character.
The Approach
Brian provided real-time advisory support to the crisis management team from the first hours through the weeks that followed, working alongside the organization's leadership to coordinate a multi-faceted response. Meanwhile, a second advisor deployed to support the families as well as surviving staff with direct assistance and coordination at the affected location.
Immediate crisis coordination: Within hours, we established clear command structures, information flow protocols, and stakeholder communication frameworks. This included coordinating with host country authorities for investigation and logistics, U.S. government agencies for consular and evacuation support, insurance providers for coverage and claims, and medical facilities across multiple countries for personnel care.
Personnel support and family engagement: Parallel to operational response, the organization needed protocols for family notification, ongoing communication, repatriation logistics, and sustained support for affected personnel and families. This required sensitivity, cultural awareness, and meticulous attention to each family's specific needs and circumstances.
Strategic decision support: As the immediate crisis stabilized, leadership needed counsel on longer-term decisions: the future of their in-country program, how to honor those lost while supporting organizational healing, and how to communicate transparently with stakeholders while protecting affected families' privacy.
Lasting capability development: Through the response, we worked to capture lessons and establish protocols that would strengthen the organization's ability to support personnel in elevated-risk contexts. This included insurance response frameworks, stakeholder engagement strategies, and crisis communication approaches that balanced transparency with appropriate discretion.
The engagement required balancing urgency with deliberation, transparency with sensitivity, and organizational needs with human dignity.
The Outcome
The organization managed an extraordinarily difficult situation with grace, competence, and humanity.
Immediate response: All injured personnel received appropriate medical care through coordinated international evacuation and treatment. Families were supported throughout the crisis and its aftermath. Stakeholder relationships were maintained through transparent, compassionate communication.
Lasting protocols: The organization established multi-insurance response frameworks, refined stakeholder engagement strategies, and developed approaches for managing high-stakes crises that required balancing competing priorities under public scrutiny.
Organizational resilience: After respectfully pausing operations for over a year, the program was deliberately restarted with newly hired staff, informed by lessons from the tragedy and strengthened protocols for personnel safety and crisis response.
Leadership through crisis: The organization's response earned recognition for its handling of an extraordinarily difficult situation, demonstrating that crisis reveals character and that prepared leadership can maintain organizational integrity even through tragedy.
"Brian White's knowledge, expertise and experience were critical during the most challenging and difficult period in the organization's history. His expert guidance and counsel in navigating the complexities of a tragic situation that involved loss of life in one of our overseas offices was vital to properly and appropriately responding to and assisting in this crisis. The organization owes a debt of gratitude to Brian for his unwavering support during this crisis."
— Chief Human Resources Officer, Global NGO
Client Type: International humanitarian and development organization
Scale: 25+ countries of operation, ~1,000 staff, $50M-$250M annual budget
Timeline: Hours for initial response, weeks for sustained engagement, year+ for program restart
Sectors: Humanitarian aid and international development
Additional Client Examples
Building Impact-Focused Resilience at a Global Corporation
The Situation
A Fortune 500 global agribusiness corporation wanted to conduct crisis exercises across their international operations. Corporate leadership initially planned directive, cause-specific scenarios, particularly active shooter response, to be rolled out uniformly across all locations.
The challenge: local teams had different risk profiles, operational contexts, and readiness levels. A one-size-fits-all approach would miss critical vulnerabilities while overwhelming teams with scenarios that didn't match their actual exposure.
The Approach
Brian worked with corporate leadership to reframe the exercise program's purpose from directive to integrative. Rather than imposing scenarios from headquarters, we engaged local teams directly to identify their primary operational concerns, critical dependencies, key assets, and actual vulnerabilities to perceived threats.
Using this gathered feedback, we constructed site-specific scenarios for each location rather than deploying a single scenario globally. We then facilitated exercises that guided teams through theoretical response, highlighting issues and best practices as they emerged, including outdated protocols, undocumented local expertise, and communication gaps between corporate and field operations.
The Outcome
Teams embraced the impact-focused approach and participated far more actively than initial engagement suggested they would. Each location completed their exercise with clear, documented action items including specific responsibilities assigned and time-bound tasks established.
The shift from cause-specific to impact-based thinking gave the organization a scalable framework for resilience that didn't require predicting every possible threat. Corporate leadership gained confidence that local teams could respond effectively to disruption regardless of its source.
Client: Fortune 500 global agribusiness corporation
Engagement Duration: 6 weeks
Outcome: Impact-based resilience framework adopted across international operations
Real-Time Advisory During a Reputational Crisis
The Situation
A nonprofit leadership and policy organization was days away from hosting a marquee 5,000-person event when staff at their contracted venue, part of an international hotel chain, initiated a planned regional labor strike. The organization faced an impossible choice: shift venues at significant financial cost and participant inconvenience, or proceed at the contracted location and risk severe reputational damage as an organization seen as crossing picket lines and opposing organized labor.
Both decisions carried substantial consequences. Neither was clearly correct. The leadership team needed a framework to make the decision confidently and execute it with integrity.
The Approach
Brian worked with the event leadership team to conduct both quantitative and qualitative impact analysis of each decision path. We broke outcomes into "certain, likely, and possible" categories for each option, examining financial costs, reputational implications, stakeholder reactions, and operational feasibility.
With that analysis complete, we discussed how to execute and communicate whichever decision they made to the venue, to participants, to the media, and to their broader community for maximum positive impact and minimum reputational harm.
The Outcome
The event was extremely successful. The organization received significant positive press across traditional and social media for its decision to shift venues while also honoring subcontracts and other commitments to smaller vendors.
The event and organization were viewed as supportive of organized labor while maintaining their ethical standing through honoring vendor contracts and offsetting disruption and expense to participants. What could have been a reputational crisis became a demonstration of organizational values and thoughtful decision-making under pressure.
Client: Nonprofit leadership and policy organization
Event Scale: 5,000 participants
Timeline: Weeks of planning support, 4-day event execution
Outcome: Successful event with positive reputational impact
Facing a Challenge?
These engagements represent different challenges across different sectors, but they share a common thread: organizations that invested in practiced resilience before crisis forced their hand.
The question isn't whether disruption will arrive. The question is whether your organization reacts, adapts, or thrives when it does.
Start a conversation Let's discuss how these approaches apply to your organization's context and challenges.