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.
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Enjoy the journey!
