OPERATIONS
Operational Resilience Is Built
At 3:30 on a Friday afternoon, my team learned we would be hosting an informal meet and greet for our new president, first thing Monday morning. The goal was simple: give our new president a relaxed, unscripted chance to meet the team before the formal agenda took over, which meant we needed catering, a properly set up room, and working audio-visual technology, all with less than three days' notice.
By 5:00, vendors had been contacted, a room was reserved, technology requests were submitted, and a full schedule for the morning was taking shape. Nobody worked the weekend. By Monday morning, everything was ready.
From the outside, this probably looked like speed. A team that moves fast. Somebody's hustle carrying the day. That story feels true because it's the part everyone can see. But it's incomplete, and the missing part matters more than the part we tell.
What actually made that Monday possible had nothing to do with Friday afternoon. It was a vendor relationship built over three years of steady, unremarkable interactions. It was a team that already knew, without being told, who owns what when priorities shift. It was a standing process for reserving space and requesting technology that didn't need to be reinvented under pressure. None of that showed up in the room on Monday. All of it was the reason the room was ready.
The Challenge: Mistaking the Visible Moment for the Real Work
This is the operational challenge worth naming, and it's one nearly every COO eventually runs into. Organizations tend to reward and remember visible responsiveness, while quietly under-investing in the invisible groundwork that makes responsiveness possible in the first place. If leadership only sees the sprint, they'll keep asking teams to sprint, without ever asking what was banked in advance to make the sprint survivable.
Left unexamined, this becomes a habit. Teams get praised for heroics instead of infrastructure. Leaders mistake a fast recovery for a healthy system, when it may just be a system running on reserves nobody is replenishing.
Why It Matters
This distinction changes what leaders choose to build.
If you believe capacity under pressure is mostly about effort, you manage for effort. You praise the people who stay late, and you unintentionally signal that heroics are the model. Over time, that produces burnout, not resilience. It also produces fragility, because a team that only knows how to sprint has nothing left when the sprint that actually matters shows up.
If you believe capacity under pressure is mostly about prior investment, you manage differently. You start asking which relationships, systems, and decision rights are strong enough to hold when something breaks the routine. You invest in those deliberately, long before you need them, because the moment of pressure is never a good time to start building.
COOs and operations leaders feel this tension more than almost anyone else in the org chart. We're the ones who get the 3:30 call. How we treat that moment, as a fire to fight or as a test of infrastructure already in place, says a lot about how we lead.
A Framework: Invisible Deposits
I've started thinking about this in terms of deposits. Every organization is making deposits and withdrawals against its own resilience, mostly without noticing, and most of them are invisible until the moment they're tested. Three categories of deposit matter most:
● Relationships. The vendor who picks up the phone on a Friday afternoon isn't doing you a favor. They're responding to years of being treated as a partner rather than a transaction.
● Systems. A documented process for a routine request removes the need to invent one under pressure. The value of documentation isn't the document itself. It's the decision it already made for you, in advance.
● Trust and decision rights. A team that acts without waiting for permission is a team that was given real authority before the crisis, not just responsibility during it.
Withdrawals happen constantly too, usually invisibly: a vendor relationship left untended, a process nobody documented because everyone already knew it, a team that hesitates because they've been second-guessed too many times to act independently.
The organizations that respond well under pressure aren't the ones that try hardest in the moment. They're the ones that have been making deposits for years, often in ways nobody outside operations ever notices.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A few questions worth asking regularly, not just after something goes well:
● Which of our vendor and partner relationships would hold up if we needed something on 24 hours' notice? Which wouldn't?
● Which processes exist only in someone's head? What happens the day that person is unavailable?
● Where does my team wait for permission when they could be acting on trust already earned?
● What did we do this quarter that was a deposit into future resilience, rather than a withdrawal against it?
None of these require a large initiative. Most of them require a habit: reviewing where the organization's resilience actually comes from, instead of assuming it will simply appear when needed.
The Takeaway
Resilience isn't built during moments of pressure. Moments of pressure simply reveal whether it was built at all.
The work that gets an organization through its hardest Friday afternoons rarely happens on a Friday afternoon. It happens in the quiet, unremarkable months before, in relationships maintained, processes documented, and trust extended before it was strictly necessary.
For COOs and operators, that's the real job. Not to be the hero who saves Monday. It's to have already built an organization that didn't need saving.
COO Forum Peer Membership
