Practicing Resilience: What Seven CEOs Shared Over Dinner
Last week, Junxion gathered seven Canadian CEOs around a dinner table in Vancouver for a candid conversation about resilience: what is testing their organizations, what Canada needs to do to maintain its resilience, and what helps leaders themselves to stay steady.
Partner and CEO of Junxion, Mike has spent more than 20 years working to catalyse social responsibility and sustainability.
They described relentless waves of pressure: trade disruption, political polarization, affordability and housing pressures, strained talent pipelines, volatile funding, AI-driven job redesign, and a growing sense that leaders are expected to offer certainty when certainty simply is not available.
That last point became one of the evening’s most useful refrains: “Certainty isn’t a thing.” The question for leaders is not how to restore it. It is how to build the capability to act wisely without it. ‘Normal’ isn’t coming back.
In fact, that’s a central premise of Junxion’s new guide, 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.
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?
Start with Strong Foundations
The CEOs, whose organizations span professional services, finance, nonprofits, and more, shared experiences that reinforced the Blueprint’s first three imperatives: purpose, inclusive governance, and agile strategy.
Purpose is not a branding exercise; it’s a practical compass. When businesses face market turbulence, workforce anxiety, and difficult trade-offs, a clear ‘North Star’ helps leaders hold attention on clients’ best interests, people’s wellbeing, and the organization’s longer-term contribution.
One participant captured the discipline well: “Markets don’t feel emotions! But leaders do.” Purpose helps them make decisions that are grounded in values and evidence, rather than fear, anger, or the daily news cycle.
The conversation also reinforced the need for inclusive governance. Employees do not necessarily expect their CEO to have all the answers. But they do want a meaningful role in decision-making and transparency into the final calculus for decisions that affect them. As one leader noted after meeting with a team facing staff reductions, people were less focused on compensation than on whether the organization would continue to stand up for its mission and invite their perspectives into the dialogue.
That is resilience in practice: alignment to purpose and shared sense-making, rather than command-and-control hierarchy.
Build Capacity in People
The dinner dialogue made clear that organizational resilience is inseparable from the lived experience of the people in the organization.
Affordable housing, employment readiness, childcare, fair pay, flexible work, career opportunity, and psychological safety may be treated as separate ‘people issues.’ But the gathered CEOs described them as the conditions that determine whether organizations can retain talent, develop emerging leaders, sustain culture, and respond to disruption.
This was particularly vivid in discussions of remote work and the impacts of AI. Remote work has created flexibility, but it can also reduce the informal encounters through which people learn, build trust, and find mentors. Remote work also specifically reduces the opportunities younger colleagues have to interact with senior leaders on a day-to-day basis: “The younger population is who we worry about. Where is their opportunity to bump into the CIO, the CEO, and learn?”
Several leaders spoke about deliberately creating connection through huddles, town halls, and required and rotating ‘coffee buddy’ conversations. Our experience has been that the organizations that successfully connect people across their organizations monitor the interactions, establish consistent rhythms to increase them, and also adjust their approach on a consistent rhythm. So random, online coffee connections one quarter might switch to playful meetups of trios the next, then gamified team competitions the next.
Not surprisingly, AI raised a host of related concerns. The opportunity for productivity is real, but so is the risk of eliminating entry-level work without preserving the learning, experience, and capacity for discernment those roles provide. Resilient organizations will use technology to augment human capability—not inadvertently erode their future leadership bench.
Speaking of learning and development, the rapid development and integration of AI can suggest that developmental pathways can be automated, implying that early career staff won’t make mistakes. But mistakes are exactly how we learn. As one CEO said, resilience comes from allowing people to make mistakes—but managing the scope and scale of the consequences. “They can fall on one step; they cannot fall from the top of the stairs!”
As the group wrapped up this part of the discussion, one participant succinctly observed, “COVID was practice.” Organizations that learned to adapt through intentional work design, communicate across functions, and move quickly under pressure are flexing those muscles now.
Extend Influence Beyond The Enterprise
Perhaps the strongest consensus was that no organization can build resilience alone. Or put another way, the resilience of our community and economy affects the resilience of our organizations.
CEOs spoke about the value of industry associations, peer groups, coalitions, and advocacy, not only as routes to influence, but as ways to overcome isolation and retain (or regain) agency.
When policy winds, trade conditions, or social challenges feel too large for one organization to address, collective action changes the question from “What can I do?” to “What can we move together?”
That matters for Canada, too. Participants worried about the drift toward orthodox partisanship; from recognized fundamentals to polarizing narratives; from dialogue across difference to echo chambers of reinforcing voices, reinforced by media channels that amplify the echoes. They called for a positive, values-grounded national story—one that recognizes Canada’s strengths, maintains global engagement, and addresses affordability, infrastructure, immigration, and economic participation as interconnected challenges.
Alongside this need for a narrative (which Junxion is hearing in many circles, gatherings, and communities) is an urgent need for collective action advocating for aspects of a more resilient national economy. Support for health community institutions, including our democracy; prioritizing climate-ready infrastructure; diversifying trade relationships; and breaking down interprovincial trade barriers and siloes, replacing them with sector-specific problem-solving.
All of this points to a pressing need for collaboration beyond the boundaries of our individual organizations. Resilience does not mean retreating into a smaller circle. It means building stronger relationships across sectors, communities, provinces, and perspectives.
Lead Like a Human
Finally, the group acknowledged the personal cost of leadership: It’s getting lonelier at the top. Overwhelm and burnout are not private weaknesses. They’re risks to organizational judgment, capacity to adapt, and success.
The practical remedies were modest but meaningful: time in nature, movement, journaling, routine, play with children, nights in the wilderness, random conversations, and perhaps most simply singing loudly in the car!
These practices can be understood as small, repeatable ways of regulating the nervous system and restoring a sense of agency when life feels demanding or uncertain. Nature, movement, play, and time away from constant stimulation can create psychological space; journaling and routine can help people notice, name, and organize their experience rather than carrying stress as an undifferentiated burden. Random conversation and shared activities counter isolation, while singing—even alone in the car—can offer a safe, embodied outlet for emotion, breath, pleasure, and self-expression.
The heart of the matter for many around the table is the power of relationships. More conversation, more storytelling, more humour will drive relationships across political, regional, generational, and cultural differences. And when we encounter a plurality of ideas, engaging them critically and respectfully, we arrive at better solutions together than any of us might define working alone. Or as one CEO said, “You can only do what you can control. And you can have a louder voice with the right people.”
The work of resilience is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to meet uncertainty with purpose, connection, learning, and action.
That is the invitation in Junxion’s Blueprint for Resilience: strengthen the fundamentals, build capacity throughout the organization, and extend your influence to help shape the conditions in which your organization—and our communities—can thrive.
For 25 years, Junxion has been supporting leaders and their organizations to maintain resilience in challenging times, so they thrive when things get easier. Get in touch to learn about our integrated approach to agile strategy, generative leadership, and community impact.
