In the spring of 2020, Patrick McBrayer was the CEO of ACell Inc., a medical device company with a workforce that had gone home, a supply chain under pressure, and an industry landscape that was changing by the week. The pandemic was not a problem that could be solved with a good quarter or a clever strategy. It was the kind of sustained, compounding disruption that tests not just a company’s operational capabilities but its fundamental character.

What Patrick told me afterward was that the company’s ability to navigate those years came down to one thing more than anything else: the culture they had built before the crisis arrived.

What Resilience Is Not

Most discussions of organizational resilience focus on operational preparedness. Contingency plans, redundancy in critical systems, financial reserves. Those things matter, and I am not dismissing them. But operational preparedness is a different thing from organizational resilience, and conflating the two leads leaders to invest in the wrong places.

Organizational resilience is the capacity to absorb disruption, maintain coherent function, and emerge from hardship without a fundamental loss of identity or trust. Resilient organizations are not the ones that avoid hard times. They are the ones whose culture proves equal to the hard times when they arrive. A company can have excellent contingency plans and still come apart when the pressure is sustained long enough, because plans do not build trust, and trust is what organizations run on when everything else is uncertain.

The Culture That Was Already There

ACell had been working within the Level Five framework for several years before the pandemic hit. They had invested in belonging, in psychological safety, in mutual accountability, in a clear organizational azimuth that their people understood and had genuinely bought into. None of that prevented the disruption. What it did was give the organization the internal resources to respond to disruption without losing its footing.

The organizations that navigate genuine disruption most effectively are the ones where people trust each other enough to communicate honestly under pressure, where leaders are calm enough to see clearly when the picture is chaotic, where the mission is understood well enough that people can make good decisions without being told what to do in every new situation.

Patrick McBrayer’s company came through the pandemic and was subsequently acquired, a strong outcome by any measure. He wrote in the foreword to *The Power of Being All In* that the Level Five work they had done was central to how they navigated those years. The real credit belongs to the leaders throughout that organization who, when the pressure was highest, acted like the people their culture had developed them to be.

Disciplined Attention to Reality

There is a quality I have observed in Level Five cultures that I have come to think of as a healthy sense of disciplined attention. These organizations are not complacent. They are continuously aware that current success does not guarantee future success, that conditions change, and that what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. This is not pessimism, and it is not anxiety. It is the kind of clear-eyed engagement with reality that allows an organization to adapt before a crisis becomes a catastrophe.

Complacent cultures tend to be surprised by disruption. Resilient ones are not surprised, because they have been paying attention all along. The difference is not intelligence or resources. It is a set of habits, built deliberately over time, that keep the organization honest about where it is and where the world around it is headed.

Resilience Is Built in Ordinary Moments

Building resilience in your team is not primarily a task for crisis moments. It is a task for ordinary ones. The way you respond when things go wrong in a normal week trains your team to respond when things go wrong in an extraordinary one.

This is a more demanding idea than it sounds. It means that every time you stay grounded under pressure rather than becoming reactive, you are building something. Every time you communicate clearly in uncertainty rather than going quiet, you are building something. Every time you make a decision with the information available, rather than waiting for certainty that is not coming, you are building something. Your team is watching all of it, and what they observe over months and years shapes their confidence in the organization’s capacity to handle whatever comes next.

Leaders who understand this do not treat the everyday challenges of running an organization as inconveniences to be managed. They treat them as the raw material from which a resilient culture is built.

What the After-Action Review Actually Develops

The After-Action Review is one of the most practical tools for building resilience systematically, and most organizations underuse it. The AAR is not a debriefing session designed to assign blame. It is a structured conversation in which everyone, regardless of rank, answers the same questions: What did we set out to do? What happened? Why was there a difference? What do we do differently next time?

In organizations where resilience is strongest, teams debrief regularly, not just after failures but after successes. They treat each significant experience as a source of learning rather than a chapter to be closed. Over time, this practice builds a kind of organizational memory and a capacity for self-correction that is genuinely hard to replicate any other way.

The AAR also builds the trust that resilience requires. When leaders participate with the same candor and vulnerability they ask of their teams, they reinforce that the standard applies to everyone. When a team learns that honest reflection is rewarded rather than punished, it becomes willing to surface problems early, before they compound. That early-warning capacity is one of the most valuable things a resilient culture has.

What Your Team Is Watching

Patrick McBrayer told me that one of the things that held his organization together during the hardest months was that his leaders at every level kept showing up the same way. Calm. Clear about what they knew and honest about what they did not know. Present. Those behaviors were not accidental. They were the expression of a culture that had been building for years.

Your team is forming its judgment about your organization’s resilience right now, in the ordinary moments of this week. How you handle a missed commitment, a disagreement, a plan that did not work, a piece of news that is harder than expected, all of it is teaching. The competitive advantage of a resilient culture is that when the genuinely hard moment arrives, your people already know who they are and what they are capable of. The crisis does not form them. It reveals them.

I’d love to hear how you have seen culture affect an organization’s ability to get through a genuinely hard stretch. Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!