The only reason history remembers Captain John Edward Smith is because of what he did (and failed to do) one night in 1912, just weeks before his planned retirement, after his ship sailed at full speed into an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Smith went down with his ship, but he was strongly criticized in the investigations after the fact. Ninety minutes into the disaster, much of the Titanic’s crew still had not been told what was happening. Even if they had, they had not been trained in what to do. The result was that sailors were standing idle at their stations, awaiting orders, instead of saving lives as the ship went down.
Smith believed that better training and communication protocols weren’t necessary because the Titanic was unsinkable. The result of his hubris was that, though there weren’t enough lifeboats for all the passengers, the ones that were launched were only partly filled, and many more weren’t launched at all. Two-thirds of the passengers and crew perished. The iceberg caused the tragedy in the same sense that Gavrilo Princip, Archduke’s Ferdinand’s assassin, caused World War I or a tossed cigarette causes a forest fire—it was the precipitating event, but the factors that made it catastrophic were baked into the processes and the culture that Captain Smith presided over.
How Your Career Will Be Defined
Your career will be defined by moments of crisis, not by years of smooth sailing. The next rogue wave that hits your company might be a natural disaster, a war, a data breach, or a financial implosion. Whatever it is, you will be in charge, and it will be the processes that you have installed, not your individual performance, that will drive results.
A ship that is constructed for resilience in heavy seas is built differently than a pleasure craft that hugs the shore. Today’s companies are built for performance because investors are primarily concerned with profits. Since Covid–19 put the brakes on the worldwide economy, the conversation has shifted to survival and resilience. In the coming years, your investors, your board, and your C–suite will demand profits and resilience. They may or may not be saying it yet, but they are thinking: are you, the profitable pleasure boat captain, the right person to refit your ship for stormy seas?
This puts leaders like you in a tough spot. Resilience requires inherently inefficient processes, so how do you drive performance while improving it, especially in the coming period of structural slow growth and rising competition? The only answer is to pursue resilience in ways that drive growth by removing inefficiencies and by training yourself and your team to think long-term. You don’t need to hire rocket scientists to futureproof your company. You just need to fully understand your operating context, know how to deconstruct problems into solvable parts, and be able to ask: what if? While it takes some effort to embed this type of thinking in your organization, new digital training tools make it testable and scalable.
When organizational thinking and behaviors are realigned in the ways that I describe, you can have confidence that your people will spot both the weak point in your hull and the coming wave before it’s too late. If you’ve installed the right command, control, and communication processes, they’ll have already patched it and put the ship on a better course by the time you hear about it.
Analysts had pointed out the danger of operating as the Titanic did. Captain Smith and the White Star Line were neither the first nor the last to turn a blind eye to an imminent threat. Whether it’s Kodak or Blockbuster, Enron or AIG, there is any number of cautionary tales about companies that were brought low because of impending disasters that they saw coming but were afraid to discuss and prepare for because any response would have run against their way of work.
The past 40 years of business culture have encouraged managers to prize agility, nimbleness, and efficiency over sustainability. Investors have become obsessed with short-term risk, the measure of investment uncertainty, and boards have responded by prioritizing growth through M&As and incentivizing hitting quarters over investing in the future. The perverse impact is that the value of shares has become more important than shareholder value.
Conclusion
All of these trends serve to silence the people who spot potential problems first. They are often in the engine room, not on the bridge. They don’t speak up because they don’t know how to articulate their apprehensions and they fear the political fallout. They haven’t been trained to describe the obscured outlines of an iceberg moving in the dark of night that they can feel yet not see—hidden players whose impact amplifiers and nudges can founder your flotilla.
If you want to be prepared, you need to provide your team the space and the training they need to look out for the unknown, the processes that will give them the confidence to speak up, and the assurance that they’ll be heard.
