Beyond Resilience: Why Endurance Is the New Leadership Imperative

Resilience has become a popular leadership term, and for good reason. Organizations must be able to absorb disruption, adapt, and recover.

But resilience alone is no longer sufficient. Endurance Is the New Leadership Imperative.

In today’s operating environment, disruption is not episodic. It is continuous. Cyber threats evolve monthly. Regulatory expectations shift annually. Technology dependencies deepen every quarter. Workforce dynamics change constantly.

In this reality, the goal is not just to bounce back.
The goal is to endure.

From Resilience to Endurance

Resilience focuses on response and recovery. It asks:

• How do we adapt after disruption?
• How do we recover stronger than before?

Endurance goes further. It asks:

• How do we sustain performance over repeated disruption?
• How do we improve continuously, not episodically?
• How do leaders and teams get better before the next event occurs?

Enduring organizations are not just resilient in moments of crisis — they are consistently prepared, disciplined, and improving across time.

Endurance is resilience operationalized and institutionalized.

Why Leaders Must Think in Terms of Endurance

Many organizations demonstrate resilience once, during a major incident, then slowly revert to old habits.

Plans go stale.
Training fades.
Lessons learned are documented but not embedded.

Endurance solves this by shifting preparedness from a project mindset to one of a continuous capability.

For leaders, endurance means:

• Preparedness is reinforced regularly, not annually
• Skills are practiced, not just taught
• Assumptions are challenged before they fail
• Improvement is expected at every level of the organization

This is where many continuity and resilience programs stall. Not because they lack intent, but because they lack a structured improvement engine.

LPIC™: Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge™

At Erwood Group, we use the LPIC™ framework — Learn, Practice, Implement, Challenge ™– to help organizations move beyond static preparedness and into sustained endurance.

LPIC™ is often compared to “crawl, walk, run,” but it is fundamentally different.

Crawl–walk–run assumes a linear journey.

LPIC™ recognizes that business maturity is uneven, contextual, and constantly changing.

LPIC™ is mappable to where the business actually is today, not where leadership hopes it is.

Learn

Learning builds awareness and shared understanding. This includes:

• Executive education
• Role-based training
• Scenario insights
• Risk and impact awareness

Learning ensures leaders and teams know what to do, but knowledge alone is not readiness. This learning is also a continuous process. Learning and teaching others are important distinctions within this methodology and framework.

It is as simple as key employees learning there is a plan, how to access it, how and where it is stored, through to executives learning how to communicate and utilize the plans effectively.

Another key aspect is how employees learn to handoff their responsibilities in plan ownership as they leave their roles. This is one of the most overlooked areas when it comes to the institutionalization of plans and programs.

Practice

Practice turns knowledge into behavior.

• Tabletop exercises
• Scenario walkthroughs
• Decision simulations
• Role clarity validation

It is important to note that in Practice we include simulated and functional exercises of plans and plan components.

Practice reveals gaps that training alone cannot. It answers: Can we execute under pressure?

Implement

Implementation embeds preparedness into daily operations.

• Documented procedures
• Defined ownership
• Integrated decision frameworks
• Technology and process alignment

This is where preparedness becomes operational, not theoretical. Moving beyond the practice stage, implementation is achieved at every level. It is institutionalized across the business, not because it is a box that is checked or because it must be done, but because it is recognized as good for the organization. Plans are tested and executed at least semiannually.

Challenge

Challenge is the most often skipped, and yet, the most valuable stage.

• Stress-testing assumptions
• Introducing realistic failure scenarios
• Rotating leadership roles
• Testing beyond comfort zones

Challenge ensures complacency does not creep in and that the organization continues to mature.

LPIC™ as a Leadership Development Engine

LPIC™ is not just an operational framework; it is a leadership maturity model.

As leaders progress through LPIC™ cycles:

• Decision-making improves under pressure
• Confidence increases without overconfidence
• Accountability becomes clearer
• Organizational trust strengthens

Because LPIC™ is repeatable, it allows leaders to:

• Revisit preparedness as the business evolves
• Adapt to new risks without restarting from zero
• Scale endurance across teams, departments, and functions

Endurance is built through iteration, not declaration.

Endurance Is Not About Perfection

Enduring organizations are not perfect.
They are prepared, honest, and adaptive.

They accept that:

• Disruption will occur
• Plans will need adjustment
• People will rotate
• Technology will change

What differentiates them is their commitment to continuous improvement, reinforced through disciplined cycles like LPIC™.

A Leadership Perspective to Consider

Resilience helps you recover from disruption.
Endurance ensures disruption doesn’t erode your organization over time.

Preparedness is no longer about passing a test or completing a plan.
It is about building an organization that learns, practices, implements, and challenges itself continuously, especially at the leadership level.

That is how businesses move from surviving disruption to enduring it.

Reflection

Ask yourself:

• Are we resilient once or improving always?
• Do we train, or do we practice?
• When was the last time we truly challenged our assumptions?

Endurance begins when those questions are answered honestly.