Anton Guinea
Founder, The Guinea Group of Companies"Anton is an international keynote speaker, performance coach, and best-selling author. Combining degrees in business and psychology with his lived experience, he partners with heavy industry global leaders to help management teams lead under pressure, elevate team performance, and cultivate conscious, empathetic workplace cultures."
Why the most resilient executive structures are built long before a crisis strikes
Organisational crises are rarely defined solely by the triggering event. More often, they are defined by a firm’s capacity to interpret ambiguous information, coordinate cross-functional action, and allocate scarce resources to address the crisis event that has occurred or is unfolding. From this perspective, executive resilience is not an improvised response, but an emergent property of governance, roles, routines, and decision systems established well in advance.
During periods of business as usual, leadership teams typically rely on informal communication (think water cooler chats), influence skills, group problem solving, and a steady flow of information. During crises, the opposite occurs: communication flows become formal and structured. Personal influence diminishes, groups struggle to work together, and accurate and relevant information becomes scarce and slow-moving.
The most resilient leaders have either been trained in crisis management or have experienced crises and have developed a resilient mindset. They also tend to develop resolute execution teams and structures. The leaders who are most effective during crises know and practice rules like the 10-10-10 Rule. This rule was developed by Suzy Welch, a business writer and former editor of the Harvard Business Review. Welch created this decision-making framework to help leaders and team members make clearer, more confident decisions by considering how they feel about the decision over three time horizons – ‘what impact will this decision have in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years?’ This approach helps counteract the tendency to overvalue immediate emotional reactions and align decisions with long-term organisational values and goals.
The central implication is structural: under pressure, organisations tend to regress to their systems rather than rise to their aspirations. Crises, therefore, function less as a test of individual composure and more as a stress test of executive design.
Accordingly, leadership teams seeking resilience should treat crisis readiness as an ongoing organisational capability, not an episodic initiative. The strategic objective is not merely faster reaction, but more reliable decision quality and coordination integrity when conditions are most volatile.
