Outsmart Chaos 113: The Age of Brittle Strategy is Over.
Build conviction that bends, not plans that break.
The Age of Brittle Strategy Is Over
The world doesn’t pause for your five-year plan.
Markets don’t wait for your perfect strategy.
Crisis doesn’t announce itself.
And yet, we keep building our lives and our leadership like monuments: rigid, permanent, fragile.
We worship the plan, not the outcome.
We mistake stubbornness for strength.
And when the unexpected hits, the brittle breaks.
The Problem with Brittle Strategy
Brittle strategies look good on paper. They’re neat, predictable, and often celebrated in boardrooms—or in our own journals.
But neatness is not resilience.
Predictability is not leadership.
The military has a saying: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Another version: “The plan works until boots hit the ground.”
That principle isn’t just true on the battlefield. It played out in my own career.
When the Plan Cracks
I learned this the hard way during an unexpected layoff.
I had put too many eggs in one basket—tying my identity, my future, and my sense of stability to a single company. On paper, the plan made sense. Stay loyal, keep producing, grow within the system. I was a high performer, after all. Instrumental for a growth culture.
But when the layoff came, that neat plan was shattered overnight. I remember staring at the HR packet in my hands, numb, while two thoughts repeated in my head: “Why?” and “Now what?”
What I thought was security revealed itself as brittleness. And in the disruption, I realized this truth: if your strategy is built on one rigid scenario, all it takes is one disruption to undo it.
What Resilience Really Requires
Whether you’re leading a company or your own life, a strategy that survives pressure bends without breaking.
It keeps conviction at the center.
It adapts to new realities without losing direction.
It focuses on outcomes, not just adherence to the plan.
Resilience is not rigidity. Its responsiveness is anchored in purpose.
And resilience isn’t just about strategy. It’s about self-leadership—choosing to hold steady when your circumstances shift, so your identity isn’t tied to a brittle plan.
Resilience is not a plan. It’s a posture.
I Know What You’re Thinking
“I barely have bandwidth for my current strategy, and now you want me to rebuild it?”
I get it. You’re already stretched thin, fighting fires, managing through uncertainty. The last thing you need is another project.
But here’s the paradox: a resilient strategy requires less energy to maintain because it doesn’t break every time reality shifts. Monument strategies demand constant repair. Resilient strategies bend and keep moving.
You’re not rebuilding from scratch—you’re retrofitting what you already have.
From Monument to Movement: Three Immediate Shifts
Replace Strategic Reviews with Strategy Stress Tests
Instead of quarterly reviews that celebrate adherence to the plan, run monthly sessions that ask: “What would break our strategy?” Test assumptions. Spot weak points before they become failure points.
Build Decision Trees, Not Single-Path Plans
For your top 3 priorities, map out “if this, then that” scenarios. What’s Plan B if funding gets cut? If a competitor pivots? If regulation changes? Multiple paths reduce panic when you need to pivot.
Create Pivot Protocols Before You Need Them
Define your “circuit breakers”—the indicators that signal it’s time to change course. Revenue threshold? Market shift? Team feedback? When you know your exit criteria in advance, pivoting becomes choice, not desperation.
The Brittleness Audit: A 5-Minute Diagnostic
Rate each of your major initiatives on this scale:
1-3 (Brittle): Success depends on everything going according to plan
4-6 (Flexible): Can adapt to some changes while maintaining direction
7-10 (Resilient): Designed to leverage disruption as an opportunity
If most of your scores are below 5, you’re building monuments, not movements.
The Grief of Letting Go
Here’s what nobody tells you about building resilience: it requires grieving your monuments.
That beautiful five-year plan you spent months crafting? You might need to abandon it. That career path you’ve been following for years? It might be a dead end.
This isn’t failure. It’s wisdom.
But it can still hurt to let go of the certainty those rigid plans provided, even if that certainty was always an illusion. Allow yourself to feel that loss. Then choose resilience anyway.
The Test Is Already Here
The chaos isn’t coming. It’s here.
The market downturn.
The unexpected health diagnosis.
The role you thought you’d have for years, gone in months.
Every disruption—personal or professional—is already testing whether your strategy is brittle or resilient.
If you’ve built a monument, it will eventually crack.
If you’ve built for pressure, it will stand.
How You’ll Know It’s Working
You’ll know resilience is working when disruptions become course corrections, not emergencies. When your team stops panicking at the first sign of change because they trust you’ve already thought through scenarios.
When you sleep better, your success isn’t dependent on everything going exactly right.
I wish I had run a Brittleness Audit before that layoff. I would have seen where my foundation was fragile. Now I don’t wait for a crisis to test my plans.
Your Next Move
Your next disruption is coming whether you’re ready or not. The question isn’t whether to build resilience—it’s whether to start today or wait for the next crisis to force your hand.
The age of brittle strategy is over. The leaders who thrive—at work and in life—will be the ones who bend without breaking.
Resilient leaders aren’t the ones with perfect plans. They’re the ones ready for imperfect reality.
Start with the Brittleness Audit. Pick one monument strategy and retrofit it with resilience. Test it. Refine it.
Because the world won’t pause for your plan, but you can build a strategy that moves with the world.