October, 14, 2026 | Adam Garfunkel | Blueprint for Resilience | Leadership | Sustainability

Beyond the Walls: How Leaders are Rethinking Organizational Resilience

Insights from a UK leadership dialogue on climate disruption, adaptive organizations, and the communities that make resilience possible.

Adam Garfunkel
Adam is Partner and Chief Impact Officer at Junxion and has been working in sustainability as a campaigner, communicator, and consultant for over 30 years.

You cannot build resilient organizations on brittle foundations. Organizational resilience has limits when the systems organizations depend upon have cracks.

This is the first of a pair of posts emerging from leadership roundtables hosted by Junxion in Canada and the UK, where leaders came together to explore a question at the heart of our Blueprint for Resilience: what does it take to build resilience at every level?

Resilience is not an abstract exercise in preparing for an uncertain future. It is about protecting the conditions that allow people, organizations, and societies to flourish amid disruption that is already here.

That is a central premise of Junxion’s Blueprint for Resilience. Resilience is not accidental. It is a purposeful practice: strengthening organizational foundations, expanding the capacity of people and teams, and extending influence beyond the walls of the enterprise.

At a recent dinner dialogue hosted by Junxion in London, leaders from across sectors explored what that premise means in practice. Across a conversation that moved from climate and economics to leadership, community, and personal wellbeing, one conclusion kept resurfacing: resilience depends on the ecological, social, institutional, and relational systems that hold people up.

Context is King

Climate adaptation, food and energy security, functioning public infrastructure, social equity, and ecological health are often treated as externalities – someone else’s concern.
But for organizational resilience, they are preconditions. Organizations cannot simply strategize their way out of a wider environment in which public systems cannot provide basic necessities, ecosystems are failing, or climate shocks compound existing inequality.

This summer brought yet another warning that climate disruption is immediate rather than distant. Multiple heatwaves and exceptionally high temperatures affected Europe, and estimates of excess deaths caused by the heat had reached 35,000 before August’s figures had been consolidated. And the summer heat is expected to knock 1% of the EU’s total GDP for 2026. The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has promised a European Heatwave Plan, saying 2026 was ‘the summer of truth’.

Climate risks are already becoming social and economic risks.

Food security offers one example. The UK imports roughly 80% of its fruit and 47% of its vegetables, creating significant dependence on climate-vulnerable food-producing regions. A small number of ecosystems support a significant share of the food on which the country depends. When those systems are exposed to heat, drought, water stress, or extreme weather, the result can affect prices, availability, livelihoods, health, and social stability.

Climate change is going to make it harder for governments to ensure people can meet their basic needs, like access to food.

This raises a deeper question about how we define a system that is functioning well in the first place. What we measure and financially reward is not necessarily what makes society capable of flourishing. This is a familiar critique, but it carries renewed urgency in an age of tipping points. Participants reflected on how mainstream economic thinking has largely rejected Kate Raworth’s analysis of its failings in her work Doughnut Economics.

Economics is still largely taught according to ideas that have not been refreshed for a century, despite what that thinking has caused and the current context we find ourselves in.

A system that does not question its assumptions cannot adapt.

If our wider economic model rewards short-term extraction while degrading the resilience of workers, communities, ecosystems, and institutions, it may be generating financial returns while reducing the capacity to create value in the future. With this perspective, the conversation repeatedly returned to another form of resilience that leaders can shape much more directly: the capacity of their own organizations to adapt.

Adaptability Requires Permission

Resilient organizations are not organizations that have anticipated every disruption. They are organizations where people have permission and capacity to respond when something unexpected happens. One leader described actively encouraging colleagues to take risks, identify processes that do not work, and to think around perceived barriers.

Generative leadership involves creating the conditions in which people can experiment, innovate, and think differently about problems.

In this context, experimentation is a resilience capability. Organizations cannot know exactly what the next disruption will be. The ability to test, learn, challenge perceived barriers and respond with agility may therefore matter more than having a perfect plan. People need to believe they can take sensible risks and bring uncomfortable information upward.

Adaptability, however, does not mean changing direction with every shift in the external environment. Purpose and values become most important under pressure. The conversation distinguished organizations that talk about sustainability from those in which it genuinely shapes investment, strategy, product, procurement, and operating decisions. The event recalled a dictum of The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart: “If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not values: they’re hobbies.”

In this sense, resilience requires both flexibility and constancy: the ability to change how an organization responds without losing sight of what it stands for. Ultimately, that capacity depends on people.

If you abandon your values when things become difficult, they were never really values.

Resilience is Relational

On an individual level, resilience goes beyond building endurance, or becoming tougher and able to withstand more stress.

Instead, resilience was described as something replenished through presence and connection. One leader mentioned improv and another cold-water swimming, and the participants noted a common theme: both force participants to be truly in the moment. When the scale of the challenges ahead becomes overwhelming, focusing on being present builds resilience.

Another mentioned that finding kindred spirits—a “coalition of the willing”—helped restore their energy.

And all the leaders acknowledged the value of spending time with others wrestling with the same problems. Comparing experiences, challenging one another, and testing ideas not only identifies actions to take, it prompts the realization that they are not pushing alone. Social connection is itself restorative.

Relationships help replenish people’s capacity to keep engaging with difficult problems before a crisis happens.

Building Resilience Together

Taken together, the conversation brought three together levels of challenges—systemic, organizational, and personal—that showed how resilience is an interconnected practice.

The organizations best placed to navigate volatility will be the ones that strengthen their foundations now: creating conditions for people to learn and speak honestly, building coalitions beyond their own boundaries, and treating purpose as a guide for difficult decisions rather than a story for easier times.

When leaders create room for experimentation, build relationships of trust, use their influence beyond the enterprise, and defend the social and ecological foundations on which value depends, they do more than prepare their organizations for disruption; they help make resilience possible for everyone.

For 25 years, Junxion has been supporting leaders and their organizations to maintain resilience in challenging times, so they’re ready to thrive when things get easier. Get in touch to learn about our integrated approach.