AMPLIFY  VOL. 38, NO. 7
  

Executives fully recognize that the future has become permanently unreadable and unstable. In a world where crises are no longer accidents but permanent regimes — a true permacrisis — the question is no longer if a company will face a shock, but when and how it will respond.

This awareness requires a paradigm shift: companies can no longer simply react to the future; they must learn to design it. In other words, resilience must become the core of strategic thinking.

Unfortunately, the term “resilience” is often misunderstood. Too often equated with the mere capacity to adapt, it is perceived as a defensive stance, a return to equilibrium after disruption. Resilience must now go far beyond that. It cannot be limited to adaptation (the traditional territory of agility); it must evolve into the ability to create futures by acting with purpose amid systemic upheavals.

Creation often remains a distant frontier for companies — constrained by necessity or habit — approached cautiously and used as a tool for incremental innovation, rarely driven by deep questioning or radical intent. Yet it is precisely this concept that must now take center stage, not through disruption or upheaval, but through its power to reshape a future fundamentally different from the one we know.

Companies will have to become radical — not in the sense of extremism, but by returning to their roots, reinventing and redefining themselves in the face of challenges that are, themselves, radically transformative. Let's explore the six territories of this new radical future.

The 6 Territories of Resilience

At my organization, we structure resilience around six domains that are reshaping the contours of today’s economic landscape.

1. The Evolution of Uses

Customer and employee behaviors are evolving at an unprecedented pace. The pandemic accelerated this transformation, and now the rise of generative AI (GenAI) and (increasingly) agentic AI is changing how people consume, work, and collaborate. For companies, the dual challenge lies in understanding emerging expectations and adapting swiftly without losing identity.

2. Technological Acceleration

Since the mass adoption of GenAI in late 2022, the technological landscape has evolved at dizzying speed. Leaders face a paradox: acceleration generates vast new opportunities but also mirages. Many firms focus investments on productivity, but the real lever lies in operational excellence (the ability to transform processes, professions, and customer relationships sustainably). At the same time, new entrants, often unburdened by legacy infrastructure, are creating AI-by-design models that disrupt established rules.

Healthcare services companies Alan and Doctolib, through their ability to integrate AI at remarkable speed, have demonstrated that true transformation goes far beyond productivity gains. By placing AI capabilities at the very core of their organizations, they have not only streamlined operations but also redefined their products, services, and overall value proposition. Their success shows that the real promise of AI lies not in doing the same things faster, but in doing different things, including reinventing how value is created, delivered, and experienced. For leaders, the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to design organizations that can continuously reinvent themselves through it.

3. The Consequences of Climate Change

Most companies have incorporated environmental responsibility into their strategies, but few have measured the true impact of climate change on themselves. Climate disruption is no longer abstract: it affects value chains, resources, supply, and markets. A 2024 Bpifrance survey revealed that 71% of executives identified air conditioning installation as their main adaptation measure, while only 16% planned to revisit their entire value chain.¹ This exposes a strategic blind spot, revealing how many corporate giants still stand on fragile ground.

4. Geopolitical Upheavals

International tensions, tariffs, a scarcity of raw materials, and a rise in cyberattacks have made geopolitics a defining economic factor. A resilient company must “think in uncertainty” and blend its models to reduce dependency on primary resources, embrace circular economy principles, and develop alternative production networks.

5. Regulatory Complexity

The layering of regulations increasingly paralyzes organizations. However, rather than being endured, compliance can become a performance driver. Advanced firms are adopting continuous quality approaches that integrate compliance in real time rather than treating it as an administrative burden. This mindset transforms regulatory constraint into an engine for improvement.

6. Societal Transformation

Shifting social dynamics (e.g., rethinking work, the quest for meaning, the rise of opinion-driven culture) are reshaping internal balance. The role of work, the polarization of political debate, and the fragility of social dialogue are creating destabilizing tensions. We are moving from a knowledge society to an opinion society, in which constructive controversy gives way to endless polemics. In this context, maintaining a strong social fabric within the company becomes a cultural and economic survival issue.

A Weighty Paradox for Leaders

Confronted with these six forces, leaders often find themselves isolated within a persistent paradox:

• Preserving the stability of existing business models while inventing new ones

• Optimizing productivity without compromising the robustness of the value chain

• Transforming the organization while maintaining team balance

These temporal and strategic trade-offs define what it means today to design resilience into a company’s DNA.

But this ongoing “internal revolution” is not without risk. It often manifests as a destabilizing uncertainty, a questioning that can unsettle teams, and a sense of fatigue in the face of what may feel like yet another strategic plan.

To bring clarity (and give this revolution its full potential), we next examine four key pillars that underpin resilience by design: a form of resilience embedded at the very heart of the corporate model.

The 4 Pillars of Resilience by Design

1. Bridge Systems Thinking & User Experience

The first pillar involves adopting hybrid methodologies that not only assess risk but also identify resilience opportunities while ensuring desirability and acceptance. Many companies continue to approach strategy or innovation through product-centric frameworks, trapping thinking within inherited models. Resilience, in contrast, demands methodological mixing. The challenges companies face (technological, societal, environmental) are inherently systemic. They require analytical grids capable of connecting users, value chains, stakeholders, and impacts.

Resilience thus calls for an interweaving of two major approaches:

1. User-centric methodologies (e.g., design thinking, Double Diamond), which place humans (customers, employees, citizens) at the heart of strategic thinking

2. Systemic design methodologies (i.e., holistic approaches focusing on the interactions between elements), which observe the company in all its complexity and interdependence with ecosystems and territories

A user-centric approach yields pragmatic advantages: faster market entry, higher product desirability, and reduced go-to-market failures (most Apple products were built using these approaches). It also strengthens cohesion by aligning teams around the shared goal of user value. Yet on its own, it is insufficient. Resilience requires a broader lens, one that examines how the firm interacts with partners, suppliers, and markets, identifying both vulnerabilities and strengths.

A recent engagement with a major French industrial group demonstrates how hybrid methodologies can redefine outcomes. Initially framed as a request to build a digital tool, the project evolved (through systemic and user-centric analysis) into the design of a new business platform. Instead of another digital product, the outcome was a new business unit with its own P&L and renewed economic model. The shift from “creating a tool” to “reinventing an ecosystem” embodies resilience in action.

Combining user, systemic, and business lenses enables the articulation of economic pragmatism and future-oriented vision. They restore innovation’s triple purpose: to redefine a desirable, sustainable, profitable future.

2. Design Hybrid & Ecosystemic Business Models

Resilience also requires rethinking how business models are conceived. The digital era has driven relentless optimization of value chains — fluid, lean, and hyper-efficient. But this pursuit of efficiency often weakens models, eroding their ability to pivot or withstand systemic shocks. In optimizing everything, many firms lost adaptability.

Resilient-by-design businesses take a different path. Their models are iterative, modular, and regenerative: they start fast, test, adapt, and evolve continuously. They fit harmoniously within their ecosystems (partners, suppliers, distributors) without overburdening or destabilizing them. This interdependence builds far greater robustness than traditional vertical integration.

The automotive industry illustrates the limits of over-optimization. By squeezing suppliers and draining distribution networks, it has become rigid and innovation-poor. Contrast this with Sterne, a French logistics company that builds smart, cooperative loops, integrating diverse resources and clients while maintaining agility. Sterne’s strength lies in flexibility and collaboration, serving multiple ecosystems without fragility.

Many similar cross-sector models are emerging, including in recycling and reuse. By design, these models are being rethought as components within ecosystems of complementary actors, interconnected much like a biological symbiosis. Optimization remains important, but the diversity of resources and outlets makes these models inherently more resilient.

Iterative models share a common philosophy. Rather than seeking perfection, they seek plasticity— the ability to evolve with real-world constraints. Their efficiency comes from fluidity, not rigidity.

Resilience also drives the emergence of hybrid, regenerative models, such as reuse, retrofitting, and circular economy systems. For example, automotive retrofitting, though still niche, demonstrates the potential of such models to address material scarcity and trade disruptions.

Finally, economic resilience extends beyond individual firms. It calls for sectoral cooperation. Climate, energy, and geopolitical challenges transcend corporate boundaries. Shared models (across logistics, recycling, energy, or retail) make strategic and societal sense. Pooling infrastructure, data, and know-how does not weaken; it strengthens. Sectoral commons create robust value chains while unlocking new economic and social opportunities.

Resilience thus redefines business logic. It no longer seeks domination through scale, but endurance through interdependence — a living economy of continuous iteration and intelligent symbiosis.

3. Redesign the Skills Platform

Activating resilient methods and models also requires transforming the company’s skill platform. Skills are generally viewed as an inventory of hard skills organized by siloed departments. In a volatile world, this structure is obsolete. Resilience emerges when a company views itself not as a stack of expertise but as a living ecosystem of soft skills such as curiosity, collective exploration, and intelligence.

Resilient organizations embrace uncertainty. They value doubt, questioning, and unlearning as much as execution. They dare to examine their value chains, highlight weaknesses, and challenge sacred cows. The most enduring firms are not those that find solutions fastest, but those that turn uncertainty into collective exploration.

This mindset is cultural as much as managerial. It requires reframing the role of doubt and failure, creating spaces where questioning is encouraged, not punished. Companies that nurture critical thinking and experimentation equip themselves to thrive amid systemic instability.

Consulting firms can catalyze this strategic thinking, providing fresh external perspectives and challenging narratives. Resilience also requires internal “challengers”: cross-functional teams that question assumptions and propose new frames.

One industrial client illustrated this vividly: its teams, rich in technical expertise, were constrained by cognitive lock-in. By reframing the problem through user and systemic perspectives, it overcame the “impossible.” The result was a new, frugal business model grounded in resource reuse and adaptive architecture — proof that resilience begins with deconstruction and reimagination.

In this way, competence ceases to be static capital. It becomes a collective intelligence system in which curiosity, reflexivity, and courage to experiment are the raw materials of resilience. True resilience begins in this fertile doubt, where the question is as valuable as the answer.

4. Reframe the “Why”

Resilience is not just organizational or operational; it is strategic. It invites top leadership to revisit the company’s very purpose. To be resilient by design is to transcend short-term management and reconnect with the “why”— the identity engine defining the company’s contribution to the world.

In recent years, many organizations have grown disconnected from their stated “why” and the real future their actions are shaping. Behind the rhetoric of impact and sustainability, many models still produce social, economic, or environmental dead ends.

Resilience by design requires rewriting that “why” in light of the coming world:

• How does the company participate in society’s future?

• What future does it make possible?

• How does it project itself into that future?

This is about strategy, not branding. By aligning purpose with collective horizons, companies regain transformative power. Here again, the use of systemic approaches makes it possible to assess how closely a company’s “why” aligns with the outcomes and implications of its actions. The KPIs used daily are often out of sync with the purpose they are meant to serve. This can be a simple yet powerful tool for any leader seeking to realign actions with purpose.

A second imperative follows: attracting and mobilizing younger generations, the living force of resilience. No company can sustain its future without integrating youth — this generation’s values, codes, and renewed relationship with work. But this requires restoring meaning to work itself. Younger generations seek spaces of cooperation and shared creation rather than competitive silos. They aspire to organizations that “contribute to society” as much as they “make business.”

Resilience thus urges companies to become spaces of coherence, in which products, services, and management practices align economic activity with the world they seek to build. By doing so, leaders perform the ultimate strategic act of resilience: relinking enterprise and society, the short term and the long term, action and purpose.

A company grounded in this dynamic does not merely survive crises; it becomes a factory of desirable futures.

Toward a Learning Culture of Resilience

A resilient-by-design company doesn’t merely react faster to crises, it traverses them — and may even transform through them. It is a radical stance and one that dares to challenge four fundamental pillars:

1. It is first a living company of learning, grounded in questioning, lucidity, and pragmatism. It develops technical expertise but, more importantly, comfort with uncertainty and collective exploration.

2. It is also a hybrid-method company, blending systemic vision and user-centered design to create solutions that are both desirable and sustainable.

3. It is an open-model company, inventing ecosystemic business models that are less optimized in the short term but far more robust in the long term, fostering cooperation and regeneration.

4. And finally, it is a purpose-driven company, reanchoring its “why” in society, attracting new generations not through slogans but through coherence between what it does and what it stands for.

This ambition cannot succeed without another key actor: education. Building resilience begins with a new way of thinking. Engineering and management schools must evolve from producing optimization experts to nurturing architects of possibility capable of questioning, blending, experimenting, and transforming.

We must cultivate a generation that eschews reproducing yesterday’s models in favor of inventing tomorrow’s — grounded in serendipity, systemic awareness, and collective intelligence.

Ultimately, resilience is not a management concept. It is a societal project: learning, together, to create the conditions for a desirable and sustainable future.

Reference

¹ “The Adaptation of SMEs and Midsized Companies to Challenge Climate Change: From Ecological Necessity to Economic Necessity.” Bpifrance, 2024.