Resilience in the Everyday
Introduction
When people think about resilience, their minds often go straight to major crises: hurricanes, cyberattacks, pandemics. These are real and consequential, but they are not the only tests of resilience. Every organization experiences small disruptions: an unexpected absence, a system outage, a delayed shipment. Even this minor disruptions can create ripple effects across operations. These moments rarely make headlines, yet they reveal just as much about an organization’s capacity to adapt.
The myth of “Big Event Resilience”
There is a tendency to treat resilience as something reserved for catastrophic events. Leadership teams pour time and resources into continuity binders, emergency response plans, or disaster recovery protocols, while overlooking the daily interruptions that quietly erode performance. A staffing gap in a critical function, a breakdown in communication during a short outage, or a sudden vendor delay may not sound dramatic, but they often expose the same weak points that would magnify under a larger crisis.
Everyday Disruptions as hidden teachers
Small disruptions are not just inconveniences. They are opportunities to observe how systems and people react under pressure, with lower stakes. They show whether communication is clear, whether responsibilities are understood, and whether teams know how to shift priorities when plans are derailed. Leaders who pay attention to these moments find early warning signs of brittleness and can correct course before those same gaps threaten survival during a larger disruption.
Building resilience into the daily routine
Treating resilience as an everyday practice requires a mindset shift:
Use small disruptions as “mini-simulations.” Debrief them, even briefly, to capture lessons.
Normalize adaptability by encouraging teams to see interruptions not as failures but as practice.
Build redundancy into workflows where possible, so single points of failure don’t cause disproportionate impact.
Reinforce communication routines, since clarity is what often carries teams through both minor hiccups and major crises.
Conclusion
Resilience is not only about how an organization responds to the once-in-a-decade disruption. It is built and revealed in the smaller, everyday challenges that test systems and culture in quieter ways. Leaders who recognize the value of these moments and treat them as practice will find their organizations better prepared when the larger shocks inevitably arrive.
