Preparing for the “Big One” without paranoia
At some point, every serious organization accepts a quiet truth. Something will go wrong.
Not because people are careless or systems are badly designed, but because complexity always wins eventually. A cyber incident. A major outage. A supplier failure. A cascading error nobody anticipated because it sat between two perfectly reasonable decisions.
What I’ve learned over time is that resilience has very little to do with fear, and even less to do with paranoia. Paranoia creates noise. Resilience creates options. The difference starts with how we think about disaster recovery. Too often, DR lives in documents that nobody reads and tests that nobody enjoys. Recovery times look impressive on paper, yet few people can say with confidence how the organization would actually behave in the first hours of a serious incident. Systems may be technically recoverable, but the organization itself is not always prepared.
Resilience engineering forces a more honest question. If something major happened tomorrow morning, who would do what, in which order, and with which authority. That leads quickly to roles. Not job titles, but crisis roles. Who coordinates. Who decides. Who communicates. Who stays focused on restoring services while others handle stakeholders, regulators, or customers. These roles need to exist before the crisis, not emerge during it. Under pressure, ambiguity does not resolve itself. It multiplies.
Decision rights matter just as much. In normal operations, consensus feels healthy. In a crisis, it becomes dangerous. Someone needs the explicit authority to shut systems down, isolate parts of the network, delay a launch, or accept short-term pain to protect the whole. When those rights are unclear, people hesitate, and hesitation is expensive.
Communication is the other pillar that is often underestimated. Not the volume of messages, but their clarity. Who speaks to whom. What is said internally. What is said externally. What is known, what is assumed, and what is explicitly unknown. Silence creates speculation. Overconfidence creates distrust. Calm, factual communication buys time, which is often the most precious resource during an incident.
What ties all of this together is rehearsal. Not theatrical simulations, but realistic exercises that expose friction. Walkthroughs where executives feel the weight of incomplete information. Tests where teams discover that a phone number is outdated or that a dependency was never documented. These moments are uncomfortable, but they are far less costly than learning the same lessons during a real event.
I think of resilience as an engineering discipline because it is built deliberately. It is designed into systems and organizations through clear structures, practiced behaviors, and explicit trade-offs. It accepts that failure will happen somewhere, and focuses instead on limiting impact and accelerating recovery.
Preparing for the “Big One” does not mean living in constant anxiety. It means replacing vague confidence with earned confidence. Knowing, not hoping, that when pressure rises, the organization will respond with clarity rather than confusion. That is what resilience looks like when it is taken seriously.
