There are 3 ways that we talk about strengthening defences:

• Reliability

• Resiliency

• Anti-fragility

Reliability has to do we preventing disruption and most often by preventing failure of equipment, processes, systems, and other measures to prevent risk from becoming a reality.

When reliability fails, we need Resilience to recover from the disruption created when that happens. In a storm trees need to bend and snap back and so do businesses.

Anti-fragile is about getting stronger, better at what we do, as a result of disruption. This has much to do about learning and improving our defences to make them more robust.

The airline industry has a strong safety record partly because after every incident they took a deep dive and learned from what happened. They became stronger at preventing accidents over time. They did not waste any knowledge that could be learned from disasters.

All of this applies to meeting all our obligations and keeping our promises.

We need to prevent non-conformance, recover from them should they occur, and get stronger when we learn from our experiences.

• What strategies have you adopted so that you endure in the presence of uncertainty?

• Are you abilities at keeping commitments to all your obligations getting stronger or weaker?

• Are you extracting all you can from your incidents?