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Fallen Eagles: Bet on Resilience, Not on Strategy 23

4. The organization is able to take timely action. (By the time a threat
emerges, it is often too late to turn it into an opportunity.)

Succeeding at resilience, as defined above, requires not simplistic
formulas but business savvy.

In Resilience Engineering, Hollnagel and Woods (2006: 356–357) talk
about the importance of viewing surprises not as failures of analysis but
as opportunities for learning and adaptation. They write, for example:
“If ‘surprises’ are seen as recognition of the need constantly to update
definitions of the difference between success and failure, then inquiry
centers on the kinds of variations which our systems should be able to
handle and ways constantly to test the system’s ability to handle these
classes of variations.”