How to make your company more flexible
How to make your company more flexible
By Cesar Cernuda | Published: 2025-10-20 10:58:00 | Source: Fast Company – leadership-2
Over the past few years, business leaders have experienced great volatility. The global pandemic, supply chain collapse, increasing cyber attacks, economic shock, and now the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, have reshaped markets in unpredictable ways.
For many executives, resilience meant little more than planning for business continuity: additional servers, backup systems, and insurance policies. But the world we lead today requires more.
Resilience is no longer just about defense. It’s about growth. Organizations that thrive in turmoil are not those with the strongest walls, but those with the most resilient foundations. They are able to absorb shocks, pivot quickly, and find opportunities where others see only risk.
In a landscape of constant change, flexibility has become the ultimate competitive advantage.
From recovery to renewal
When the pandemic forced millions of people to work remotely overnight, some companies faltered, scrambling to quickly revamp systems and processes. Other companies have adapted seamlessly, scaling their infrastructure, protecting data, and even uncovering new business opportunities. The difference wasn’t insight, it was flexibility.
Resilient companies don’t wait for crises to test their systems. They build resilience from the beginning. This means modern digital infrastructure that can flex with demand, decision-making processes that prioritize speed and clarity over bureaucracy, and leadership cultures that enable teams to act quickly.
Importantly, this also means a shift in mindset: the goal is not to return to a “normal” that no longer exists. It’s reinventing faster than your competitors.
Flexibility across three dimensions
Leaders often ask where to start. My experience suggests three dimensions that define organizational agility today: infrastructure, decision-making, and culture.
1. Infrastructure that bends but does not break
Digital infrastructure is the invisible backbone of every modern business. If it is fragile, the work is fragile. Legacy systems that cannot scale or integrate force organizations to spend more time solving problems than creating value. In contrast, companies with modern, cloud-based infrastructure can adapt quickly – whether to redirect supply chains, scale to meet significant increases in customer demand, or protect data against emerging cyber threats.
For example, when ransomware attacks spiked during the pandemic, companies with strong cyber resilience strategies—combining secure storage, rapid recovery, and intelligent automation—were able to restore operations in hours, not weeks. Not only did they avoid losses; They have maintained the trust of customers. As AI applications came on the scene, those with flexible, well-managed data environments were able to test and deploy faster than competitors who were still grappling with fragmented systems.
2. Decision making at the speed of change
In uncertain environments, resilience depends as much on how decisions are made as on the data they inform. Traditional hierarchies slow response times, as ideas remain stuck in silos and approvals are delayed by bureaucracy.
Resilient organizations create clarity about who decides what and empower the people closest to the action to act. It ensures data flows across departments so that leaders at all levels have a common picture of reality. This approach combines speed and accountability.
In my conversations with executives, I often hear stories about how empowerment on the front lines has made a difference in moments of disruption – as retail managers adjust inventory strategies in real time, or manufacturing supervisors quickly reconfigure production. These transformations did not happen because the CEO dictated every step; Rather, they happened because the organization trusted its employees to act on data-driven insights quickly, ensuring that the data they relied on was accessible, reliable, and available where and when it was needed.
3. Culture as a driver of resilience
Infrastructure and operations are important, but ultimately resilience is a human thing. It is determined by how people respond under pressure and whether they feel able to adapt and innovate.
Resilient cultures are built on trust and psychological safety. Employees who feel confident are more willing to experiment. Teams that feel supported are more likely to take ownership. Leaders who model resilience create a ripple effect that normalizes resilience across the organization.
This human dimension is often overlooked, but it is what allows flexibility to scale. Without it, even the most advanced systems and strategies will falter. Through it, organizations can turn volatility into a testing ground for growth.
Why flexibility now means growth
It may seem counterintuitive to equate flexibility with offense, not just defense. But the connection is real. When uncertainty is constant, the ability to adapt faster than competitors is in itself a growth strategy.
Consider how cloud transformation, once viewed as an expensive process, is enabling new digital business models. Or how investments in cyber resilience not only prevent losses, but also unleash customer trust – a critical differentiator in trust-sensitive industries. Or how adopting AI, underpinned by agile data strategies, is enabling companies to innovate while others struggle with integration challenges.
In each case, flexibility not only protects the organization, but expands its capabilities. It shifts the narrative from “How do we recover?” to “How do we reinvent?”
The inevitability of leadership
The challenge for leaders is to stop treating resilience as an insurance policy and start treating it as a core strategy.
This requires moving beyond siled initiatives – one group working on cybersecurity, another on supply chains, another on culture – and instead weaving agility into every layer of the business.
The most effective leaders I’ve seen treat agility as a flywheel: modern infrastructure supports faster decisions; Faster decisions empower people; Empowered people innovate in ways that further enhance the system. Over time, flexibility becomes a sustainable advantage.
Resilience meant survival. Today, it is the strategy that separates those who stumble from those who rise. For leaders, the priority is no longer defending against disruption; It works to build resilience as an engine for growth.
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(Tags for translation) Leadership
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