Campana Schott | Resilience: A conversation with an old friend

Uncertainty is a global public cost — the mirror image of a “global public good.” It touches every organization, whether we invite it in or not, and an entire industry of metrics and reports exists just to measure it. The good news: uncertainty doesn’t have to mean your business or productivity suffer. As Condoleezza Rice once recalled her parents telling her, you may not control your circumstances, but you can control your reaction to them.

That distinction — between the situation you’re handed and the response you choose — is the foundation of resilience.

A Fortune 50 Stress Test

We recently supported a global Fortune 50 company through a high-stakes IT transformation tied to critical financial systems — the backbone processes that record revenue, trigger invoicing, and keep order-to-cash moving across every region the company operates in. The plan called for updating two central financial organizations simultaneously, in a single day, during peak order season, when transaction volume and market visibility were both at their highest.

The complexity went beyond the technology. The two systems were tightly interdependent, so a rollback in one could ripple into the other, and the cutover window was fixed — once the clock started, there was little room to pause without disrupting operations across multiple countries. The upside of modernization was real: faster close cycles, cleaner data, and a platform the business could scale on. So was the downside: a misstep risked financial, reputational, and job losses touching 10 billion dollars in combined revenue and hundreds of positions. Inside the company, people only half-jokingly called it their own Cuban Missile Crisis.

Layered on top of that technical risk was a human one: the people executing the cutover — engineers, controllers, regional finance leads — were the same people whose roles were tied to its outcome. Irreversible technical stakes and personal career stakes, compressed into a single day across time zones, made this less a routine go-live than a live test of how well the organization could hold together under pressure.

Working alongside the commercial leadership team, we split our attention two ways: managing the technical transformation itself, and building internal resilience for the people who had to live through it. The core challenge wasn’t the technology — it was navigating critical uncertainty at a moment where the stakes for the business, and for individual careers, were both extremely high. We stepped in as a trusted partner, working to create resilience through empathy and psychological safety. The project closed out successfully across every key market, with no disruption to operations, in one of the most time-sensitive environments imaginable.

The Resilience Equation

The American Psychological Association describes resilience as the ability to work through difficult experiences by practicing flexibility — mental, emotional, and behavioral — and adjusting to whatever internal and external demands show up. In practice, we found that resilience comes down to a fairly simple formula: Resilience = Empathy × Psychological Safety, facilitated by a trusted partner.

Within a business, resilience isn’t a fixed trait some teams have and others don’t. It’s a muscle — one you can deliberately train, in individuals and across an organization.

If uncertainty is the acquaintance you’d rather not run into, resilience is the old friend you can always call.

Building Resilience One Move at a Time

Resilience isn’t about waiting for certainty before you act — it’s about taking concrete steps on incomplete information. Colin Powell’s advice on decision-making captures this well: once you have roughly 40% of the information you’ll ever get, start thinking about a decision. By 70%, decide. Waiting past that point doesn’t buy you more safety, it just costs you the opportunity — and never let indecision become the default just because you didn’t act.

In the transformation project, we put that principle into practice by helping the technology team break the overall goal into smaller packages — one-week, two-week, three-week chunks — each with a measurable outcome the team could point to. We ran “Win the Week” sessions to keep messaging and goals aligned across the team, and built month-over-month KPIs, like percentage-to-completion per work package, that gave leadership both near-term visibility and a longer horizon view.

The result was a virtuous cycle: confidence grew week over week, which gave leadership the room to make strategic refinements for future quarters instead of just reacting. That cycle didn’t happen by accident. It came from deliberately combining empathy and psychological safety — two things that matter individually, but that only produce resilient problem-solving when they work together.

Empathy Is a Business Imperative

Research and practice both point to empathy as essential when facing uncertainty. As Harvard Business School’s Howard Stevenson and others have noted, empathy isn’t about agreeing with someone else’s decision or point of view — it’s about genuinely understanding the impact of decisions on the people living with them.

On this project, leadership understood that with the stakes so high and jobs on the line, even small next steps were met with real trepidation. Here’s how we helped the team put empathy into practice:

1. Get in the room. The more consequential a decision, the more it matters to be physically present. Face-to-face time builds a kind of rapport that no video call fully replicates, and that rapport pays off when things get tense.
2. Have the candid conversation. It sounds obvious, but the more complex a project gets, the more likely different team members are quietly defining “success” in different ways. Picture a room where one person is declaring victory while everyone else stays silent — that gap is exactly what candid, upfront conversations about what success actually looks like are meant to close.
3. Coach instead of advise. Consultants have a reputation for parachuting in and prescribing fixes. We took the opposite approach: rather than trying to override the team’s existing instincts and traditions, we built on them. We asked why the team had chosen certain actions, then made decisions together from that shared understanding — co-constructing the path forward instead of just handing one down.

Exercising empathy early gives a team a sturdier foundation for every tactical decision that follows — and during periods of real uncertainty, those tactical calls matter enormously.

Psychological Safety Makes Empathy Possible

Empathy depends on understanding the other side’s perspective — but that can’t happen if people don’t feel safe enough to actually voice it. People instinctively scan the room before they speak up, and in uncertain times, honest feedback is exactly what a business needs most. Building that safety isn’t optional — it’s a business requirement.

Three practices we used, and that any team can apply right away:

1. Change the room. People open up more easily in a neutral, relaxed space. Where possible, get out of the formal conference room. A quiet corner of the office, or a rented day at a co-working space, does more to unlock discussion and new ideas than most people expect.
2. Create the micro-event. We’d regularly grab key players and walk to the nearest coffee shop over lunch, just to hear their honest read on the last meeting, memo, or decision. It’s a small gesture, but it consistently put people at ease in ways formal check-ins didn’t.
3. Keep the group small. Every executive claims an “open communication” culture, but most people are still far more comfortable speaking candidly in a small group. We capped our core follow-ups with lead engineers at three to five people, specifically to surface what they really thought could go right or wrong with the system cut-overs. We then distilled that input into tight executive summaries with clear recommendations for the broader audience.

You Don’t Have to Handle This Alone

Uncertainty is universal — every industry, every organization, every nation deals with some version of it. But you and your team don’t have to navigate it in isolation. During periods of uncertainty, a trusted partner — internal or external — can help you build resilient habits alongside your team. The right partner is someone who listens to learn with you, not just at you: look for a track record of solid execution, a collaborative style, and a genuine coaching mindset.

The gap between knowing and not knowing can feel like it’s constantly widening. Uncertainty is that acquaintance you want to avoid but that is not always possible. But the tools to manage it already exist — and like any real friendship, the more you actually engage with resilience, the easier that relationship becomes.

Resilience is an old friend. Maybe it’s time to give it a call.

Authors: Benjamin Figueroa is Vice President of Life Science Transformation, North America, for Campana & Schott Inc., and an adjunct instructor at NJIT teaching Management Consulting and Dr. Eugene B. Kogan teaches negotiation at the Harvard Professional & Executive Development Programs and serves on Campana & Schott’s strategic advisory board.

Compliments of Campana & Schott – A member of the European American Chamber of Commerce in New York