Resilience Is the Oxygen That Transformation Needs

I’ve been part of enough transformations to know how much hope and energy they start with. Funding, strategy, executive sponsorship everythng in place.

What most programmes didn’t have was resilience.

When pressure showed up in form of AI disruption or market shifts or board scrutiny, the system tightened. Decisions slowed. Control increased. Learning dropped.

That’s not a change management problem. It’s an operating system problem.

A pattern I keep seeing

In one AI transformation, the tech worked. The pilots delivered value. The data checked out.

What broke wasn’t the model. It was the leadership behavior around it.

Fear of irrelevance crept in. Authority felt threatened. Suddenly, every decision needed one more meeting.

AI didn’t stall the transformation. A lack of resilience did.

Let’s clear up the myth

Resilience isn’t optimism. It’s not grit posters or mindfulness used as damage control.

Resilience is the ability to stay effective when certainty disappears.

For executives, that usually shows up in simple ways.

• Holding ambiguity without freezing.

• Separating ego from outcomes.

• Leaders who don’t flinch when assumptions break

• Teams who recover fast from experiments that fail

• Systems that learn instead of blame

A hard truth

You can’t transform faster than your leaders can self-regulate under pressure.

In the next article, I’ll get more uncomfortable.

Because most transformations aren’t broken by bad intent or poor strategy. They’re broken by smart, capable leaders doing what feels right under pressure—and getting it wrong.