Every company I meet is built for efficiency and hopes for resilience. The order is wrong.
Every company I meet is built for efficiency and hopes for resilience.
The order is wrong.
We spent thirty years removing slack from organizations. Buffers, redundancy, the second supplier, the person who knew how to do it by hand. All of it looked like waste on a spreadsheet. All of it was resilience. We optimized it away and built companies that cannot function for six hours without a system they do not control.
Then the world stopped being polite. Ransomware on a Friday night. A cloud region that disappears. A cable, a port, a border, bombings even. And now attackers who no longer need a team or a month: AI writes the intrusion, finds the path, adapts in the middle of it. What used to take a syndicate weeks takes one person a couple hours.
The attack takes a night. The rebuild takes months. Systems restored one at a time, nothing trusted until it is proven, data that comes back wrong or does not come back at all. Boards prepare for an outage and then live through a year of frustration.
The question is no longer whether a company will be hit. It is what stays alive while it rebuilds.
Most organizations answer that question with a document. A plan, a PDF. More often than not, stored in the very systems that will not be available during the crisis.
The Minimum Viable Company is the answer we owe ourselves.
The minimal set of processes and data a company must keep executable, by whoever is available, when everything else is down. Vital Activities: what cannot stop. Critical Processes: how they run without your ERP, your authentication, your normal life. Vital Data: what those processes need, kept fresh, kept elsewhere, kept usable. Not documented. Executable and tested, or it does not exist.
This is where it stops being a resilience project and becomes a way of working.
Naming what truly cannot stop is the most clarifying decision an executive committee will ever make. When everything is critical, nothing is. Name the ten things the company cannot live without and the argument ends. A company that knows its vital core can cut harder everywhere else. Resilient, then efficient. In that order.
And the people change. Today a crisis means improvisation, heroics, three nights without sleep, someone rebuilding a payment file by hand at 2am. We call them heroes because we failed them. Give them a process they have already run, and they walk into the worst weeks of the company's life with their hands steady.
Yosra Jarraya