Resilience is often described as the ability to keep going. Matthew Bennett (Willow Ethos Founding Partner) explores that perhaps the more useful test is what we do when the plan we were relying on suddenly becomes irrelevant.
Last week, I went to Heathrow expecting to catch a 4pm flight to meet a client overseas the following morning. At 3pm, the flight was cancelled. A technical failure affecting the UK’s air traffic control system had begun causing widespread disruption. Hundreds of flights were delayed or cancelled across the country.
In the space of an hour, a carefully organised travel plan became almost useless.
There is a quote usually attributed to Mike Tyson that captures this rather well. Before his 1987 fight with Tyrell Biggs, Tyson responded to talk of his opponent’s strategy by saying: “Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.” The line has since evolved into the better-known version about being punched in the mouth.
Organisations get punched in the mouth all the time.
A key person resigns. A supplier fails. A client changes the brief. Technology stops working. A competitor does something unexpected. The numbers suddenly look different. The carefully constructed project plan meets reality.
The question is not whether the plan survives; it is what happens next.
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When the plan stops being the plan
At Heathrow, we had several problems to solve simultaneously. Could we find another flight out of the UK? If we could, what happened to the rental car we were supposed to collect? What about the accommodation expecting us that evening? Could we still reach the client in time? And how quickly could we physically get ourselves from Heathrow to another London airport?
We found another flight from Stansted and made the decision to take it. Then came the next punch.
We discovered that the problem was national, which meant our replacement flight might not leave either.
So we waited.
The flight from Stanstead now flashed up as being ‘Delayed’ to midnight. Then this pushed back to half past midnight. Eight hours at Stansted later, and eventually the flight departed. We arrived in the early hours and spent four hours sleeping on the floor of the arrivals area waiting for the car-rental desk to open. We contacted the client and moved our first meeting slightly later so that we could arrive properly prepared rather than simply turning up exhausted because the original timetable said we should.
It was not elegant.
But it worked.
And looking back, that is perhaps the important point about resilience.
Resilience is not stubbornly sticking to the plan. It is knowing when the plan has stopped serving you, making a new decision and committing to it while remaining prepared to change again.
There is a temptation in organisations to mistake persistence for resilience. Teams continue pursuing the original course because considerable effort has gone into creating it. Changing direction can feel like failure. Sometimes it is exactly the opposite.
Adaptability requires enough confidence to say: this is no longer the situation we planned for.
But adaptation is only half the job
There was another thought I had afterwards. Once the immediate problem was over, did we actually learn anything from it? Organisations are often very good at firefighting. Something goes wrong, people respond brilliantly, the crisis passes and everyone immediately moves onto the next thing.
The learning disappears with the emergency.
That is why reflection matters. Research into after-action reviews suggests that deliberately examining what happened, why it happened and what should be carried forward can materially improve future performance. A meta-analysis covering 61 studies found substantial benefits from structured debriefing and after-action review.
The questions themselves do not need to be complicated.
What happened?
What did we do well?
Where did we hesitate?
What would we do differently next time?
What have we learned about ourselves?
Thinking about our own experience, I was pleased with how we responded. We stayed calm. We acted quickly. We made a decision rather than endlessly comparing options. Once we had a new plan, we committed to it but remained ready to adapt again if circumstances changed.
That is probably as useful a definition of resilience as any. Plans matter. Planning matters even more. Perhaps the real test of an organisation, a team or a leader begins at the moment reality decides not to cooperate.
And, thankfully, the flight home was entirely uneventful.
About Matthew Bennett
Matthew Bennett is the Co-Founder and Founding Partner of Willow Ethos, a leadership and organisational development consultancy specialising in workplace culture, leadership effectiveness and organisational performance.
Drawing on his experience working with organisations across multiple sectors, Matthew helps businesses strengthen leadership capability, improve decision-making and build cultures that support sustainable growth.
