Resilience Is Designed Between the Dominoes
Dr. Anju Sharma MrsSustainability
The last 12 months have made one thing increasingly clear:
1) The most resilient companies are not necessarily those that avoid disruption.
2) They are the ones that stop one failure from becoming five.
That is where substitutability becomes interesting.
A cyberattack on Collins Aerospace in Sept 2025 disrupted automated check-in systems across several European airports. Brussels cancelled dozens of flights and Berlin suffered prolonged delays. Dublin was affected too, but reported limited disruption while some processes continued manually.
Same technology dependency.
Different propagation.
The first domino fell everywhere.
It did not travel equally far.
Manufacturing offered another lesson.
Jaguar Land Rover’s 2025 cyberattack led to a prolonged production shutdown, with the effects travelling beyond JLR into its supplier ecosystem. Even a year later, Reuters describes the company as recovering from the disruption.
Neither incident is directly comparable.
But they expose something Boards should care about:
Recovery is not binary. Propagation is.
Does a technology failure remain a technology problem?
Or does it become a production problem, then a supplier problem, then a customer problem, then a cash-flow problem?
Aerospace gives us the reverse example.
When normal transport became too slow and buffer stocks tightened, Airbus and Boeing used giant Antonov An-124 aircraft to move critical aerostructures.
Expensive? Absolutely.
But the alternative was allowing logistics delays to become assembly-line delays.
This week GE Aerospace went even further agreeing to acquire precision-castings supplier CPP for $12 billion as it tries to secure access to one of the industry’s most constrained manufacturing capabilities.
Different actions.
Manual fallback.
Restart capability.
Alternative logistics.
Vertical integration.
But strategically, they do the same thing:
They insert a circuit breaker between dominoes.
That may be a more useful way for Boards to think about resilience.
Not:
How many risks do we have?
But:
Where does each risk stop?
If the cloud fails, does production continue?
If the supplier fails, can another source carry volume?
If logistics breaks, is another route economically executable?
If one expert leaves, does the knowledge leave too?
Because organisations will never eliminate every first domino.
The governance advantage is building enough substitutability, optionality and operating muscle that the second one does not automatically fall.
Resilience is not preventing every domino from falling. It is deciding, in advance, where the chain will stop.
Dr. Anju Sharma
Originally published on LinkedIn on 2026-09-10 02:59:33: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3AgroupPost%3A38770045-7503648329365581824
