Resilience Isn't a Slide in a Strategy Deck. For a Lot of Leaders Right Now, It's 3 A.M.

There's a specific kind of tired that has nothing to do with hours worked. It's the tired of lying awake doing the math on a decision you don't have enough information to make well, knowing people are depending on you to make it anyway. A shipment you can't confirm is safe. A route you assumed was stable. A team asking questions you don't have honest answers to yet.
A lot of leaders across this region are living some version of that right now. I'm not writing this as commentary on anything happening geopolitically. I'm writing it because I recognize the feeling, and I think it's worth naming honestly instead of talking around it.
Twenty-Seven Days, Not a Slide
In 2004, I deployed to Burundi as part of a UN peacekeeping mission, serving as an Ammunition Technical Officer alongside my logistics role. I led a multinational team of seven inspectors across three sites, clearing sixty-five tons of mixed munitions, some of it dangerous and unserviceable, over twenty-seven days. We confiscated 430 weapons along the way. The country was declared safe by the United Nations once the operation closed.
I don't lead with that story often, because it can sound like something it wasn't. It wasn't heroic in the way it reads on paper. Most of it was seven people, myself included, making careful, unglamorous decisions with incomplete information, over and over, for almost a month, knowing that a wrong call didn't just cost time. There was no dashboard telling us what was safe. There was training, a process we trusted, and each other.
That's the part strategy decks leave out. Resilience isn't the plan you write in a calm room with good information. It's what's actually left once the room stops being calm and the information stops being good, and you still have to decide something.
What Held, and Why
Three things carried that operation, and I've watched the same three things carry every hard decision I've made since, in a much quieter world.
First, a process trusted more than any single person's judgment in the moment, including mine. Under pressure, individual judgment narrows and misses things. A process built in advance, when things were calm, doesn't. That's the entire logic behind every governance system I've built since: not because I distrust the people running it, but because I know what pressure does to anyone's judgment, including my own.
Second, clear ownership. Seven people knew exactly what their piece of the work was, and exactly who was accountable for it. Ambiguity is what turns a hard situation into a chaotic one. It's rarely the danger itself that breaks a team. It's not knowing who's supposed to decide what.
Third, and this is the one I think about most now: the willingness to act on the best available information, not the complete information. Waiting for certainty in a genuinely uncertain situation isn't caution. It's its own kind of failure, just a quieter one, and it costs just as much.
To Anyone Making Hard Calls Right Now
I'm not going to pretend a warehouse accuracy problem and a live operational crisis carry the same weight. They don't. But the underlying skill, deciding well without full information, staying honest with your team about what you don't know, trusting a process you built before the pressure arrived, is the same skill regardless of the stakes attached to it.
If you're a leader navigating real uncertainty right now, whatever shape that takes for you, the thing I'd actually want you to hear isn't a framework. It's this: the fact that you don't have complete information doesn't mean you're deciding badly. It means you're deciding honestly, in a situation that doesn't offer certainty to anyone. That's not a failure of leadership. It's what leadership actually is, most of the time, once you strip away the parts that only show up in retrospect.
Build the process before you need it. Make ownership unambiguous before the pressure arrives. And when the moment comes anyway, decide with what you have, not with what you wish you had.
That's what got seven of us through twenty-seven days in Burundi. It's the same thing that gets any team through the version of that they're facing now, at whatever scale.
Take care of your people. Trust the process you built. Decide anyway.