Beyond Resilience: Creating Supply Chains for a Changing World
By Professor Richard Wilding OBE
The world we live and work in is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous — the so-called VUCA world. Over the past few years, we’ve all experienced what that really means. Supply chains have been hit by pandemics, port congestion, geopolitical tension, droughts, labour shortages, and energy shocks — often all at once.
The tide went out, the tsunami came in, and we saw just how interconnected — and vulnerable — our systems had become. Yet we also saw something else: those organisations that adapted fastest, learned fastest, and collaborated best didn’t just survive. They emerged stronger.
That’s what this new era is about — moving beyond resilience.
From Fragile to Antifragile
In his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes an important distinction. He says:
“The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
Resilience helps us recover. Antifragility helps us improve.
A fragile system breaks under stress. A resilient one bends and bounces back. But an antifragile system actually grows stronger through the very pressures that test it.
For supply chains, this means we must stop seeing disruption as an exception — and start treating it as the environment we operate in. The question isn’t how to avoid shocks, but how to learn and evolve because of them.
The Foundation of Resilience
Resilience remains the essential foundation for any strong supply chain. My course, “Supply Chain Resilience and Risk”, provides these core building blocks — helping professionals understand how to identify, assess, and manage risks while creating adaptable, transparent, and collaborative networks. These principles form the platform on which organisations can later go beyond resilience — evolving towards truly antifragile supply chains that don’t just recover from disruption, but learn and improve through it.
Beyond Resilience: Four Steps to a New World
To go beyond simply preparing, responding, and recovering, I use what I call the Four R’s:
Risk, Chaos, and Opportunity
In my research on The Supply Chain Complexity Triangle, I explored how uncertainty is often created by the system itself. Three forces work together to generate it:
Put simply, antifragility is about learning and growing through disruption. Rather than fighting complexity, we can use it to discover better ways of working and become more capable after every challenge.
This means building supply chains that sense and adapt in real time — using data, experimentation, and smart design to anticipate and learn from disruption. A single unexpected event can become a valuable feedback loop that strengthens the entire system.
For example, small-scale “safe-to-fail” trials can reveal weaknesses before they become crises. Multi-sourced, modular networks create optional routes when one pathway falters. Each incident becomes a lesson, feeding continuous improvement.
In other words, the goal is not to eliminate chaos, but to learn to dance with it.
Agility: The Bridge Between Resilience and AntifragilityAs supply chains evolve beyond resilience, one capability becomes absolutely critical — agility. Agility is the ability to sense change early, decide quickly, and adapt effectively before disruption becomes disaster. It’s the bridge between being resilient — able to recover — and becoming antifragile — able to grow stronger through change.
In my work at Cranfield and through The 3Ts of Highly Effective Supply Chains framework, I describe how agility rests on three essential enablers: Time, Transparency, and Trust.
Time is about compression — reducing delay, lead time, and decision latency. Agile supply chains move quickly not just in product flow, but in information and decision-making flow. The faster you can sense, decide, and act, the more options you preserve when disruption hits.
Transparency creates visibility across the end-to-end network. You can’t manage what you can’t see, and you can’t be agile if you’re operating blind. Shared data, digital dashboards, and open communication give everyone — from suppliers to logistics partners — a real-time understanding of what’s happening.
Trust underpins both speed and transparency. It’s what allows partners to share information honestly, collaborate openly, and act collectively. Without trust, each node in the chain behaves defensively, slowing response times and reducing overall performance. With trust, supply chains act as a coordinated system rather than isolated silos.
These “3 Ts” interact as a virtuous circle. Transparency builds trust; trust enables collaboration; and collaboration drives speed. Together they create the conditions for true agility — the capacity to flex and reconfigure in response to whatever the world throws at us.
Agility is also about designing for optionality — creating choices before you need them. As highlighted in the DHL Supply Chain Diversification Report, where I served as Academic Advisor, diversification is a proactive expression of agility. By building multiple routes, sourcing options, and transport modes, organisations embed flexibility directly into their networks. Optionality is agility in action — giving you the freedom to pivot, reconfigure, and continue serving customers even when conditions change.
This kind of agility doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of deliberate investment in digital technologies, strong relationships, and adaptive thinking. Digital twins and AI-driven analytics enable scenario planning that lets teams “rehearse” disruptions before they happen. Transparent information sharing across partners makes these responses faster and more coordinated. And a culture of trust empowers teams to act confidently within uncertainty.
Agility, therefore, is the missing link between resilience and antifragility. Resilience allows you to recover; agility allows you to adapt; and antifragility allows you to improve because of change.
The most successful organisations blend all three — resilient enough to absorb shocks, agile enough to adjust rapidly, and antifragile enough to learn and grow stronger with every challenge.
Supply Chain 4.0 – The Digital Era
Technology is now at the heart of this transformation. In what I call Supply Chain 4.0, digital tools enable supply chains to become intelligent, connected, and adaptive. We now have sensors and smart systems — the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, data analytics, digital twins, robotics, and automation — that give us extraordinary visibility and predictive power.
These tools can strengthen both resilience and antifragility. AI can analyse thousands of data points to forecast demand, simulate disruptions, or identify weak links before they break. Digital twins allow us to model “what if” scenarios safely before making real-world changes.
But, as I often remind people, technology can also create new forms of chaos. Poorly designed AI systems can amplify bias, spread misinformation through the network, or make opaque decisions that humans don’t understand. In the same way that deterministic chaos magnifies small triggers, a bad data feed or flawed algorithm can cause widespread instability.
That’s why digital transformation must go hand in hand with human judgement, governance, and ethics. Technology should help people make better decisions — not replace them. The strongest supply chains combine digital intelligence with human wisdom.
Wisdom from ComplexityIn every supply chain, data becomes information, information becomes knowledge — but only reflection turns that knowledge into wisdom. I define wisdom as, “Skill in life comes from mastering life’s complexities.”
The same is true for supply chains. Each shock, delay, or unexpected event contains a lesson if we’re willing to see it.
Those lessons allow us to re-learn, re-engineer, re-launch, and re-invigorate — creating systems that improve because of the very challenges they face by gaining supply chain wisdom.
Competing Through the Supply ChainIn the future, competition won’t be between individual companies, but between the supply chains they belong to. The winners will be those that use disruption to innovate — that see volatility as a source of value, not vulnerability.
So ask yourself:
Further Reading
Supply Chain Diversification: Evolving to Meet a Changing World – DHL Trend Report
Supply Chain Fundamentals: Risk and Resilience – LinkedIn Learning Course
Supply Chain Resilience and Risk – Course by Professor Richard Wilding OBE
The Supply Chain Complexity Triangle: Uncertainty Generation in the Supply Chain – Academic Article (Emerald Insight)
Beyond Resilience – ERA Webinar with Professor Richard Wilding OBE
Linkedin Newsletter Post - Building Supply Chains that Learn and Grow Stronger Through Disruption.
By Professor Richard Wilding OBE
The world we live and work in is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous — the so-called VUCA world. Over the past few years, we’ve all experienced what that really means. Supply chains have been hit by pandemics, port congestion, geopolitical tension, droughts, labour shortages, and energy shocks — often all at once.
The tide went out, the tsunami came in, and we saw just how interconnected — and vulnerable — our systems had become. Yet we also saw something else: those organisations that adapted fastest, learned fastest, and collaborated best didn’t just survive. They emerged stronger.
That’s what this new era is about — moving beyond resilience.
From Fragile to Antifragile
In his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes an important distinction. He says:
“The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
Resilience helps us recover. Antifragility helps us improve.
A fragile system breaks under stress. A resilient one bends and bounces back. But an antifragile system actually grows stronger through the very pressures that test it.
For supply chains, this means we must stop seeing disruption as an exception — and start treating it as the environment we operate in. The question isn’t how to avoid shocks, but how to learn and evolve because of them.
The Foundation of Resilience
Resilience remains the essential foundation for any strong supply chain. My course, “Supply Chain Resilience and Risk”, provides these core building blocks — helping professionals understand how to identify, assess, and manage risks while creating adaptable, transparent, and collaborative networks. These principles form the platform on which organisations can later go beyond resilience — evolving towards truly antifragile supply chains that don’t just recover from disruption, but learn and improve through it.
Beyond Resilience: Four Steps to a New World
To go beyond simply preparing, responding, and recovering, I use what I call the Four R’s:
- Re-learn – challenge old assumptions and embrace new knowledge.
- Re-engineer – redesign networks for flexibility, not just efficiency.
- Re-launch – use disruption as the spark for innovation and renewal.
- Re-invigorate – re-energise people and culture so they can drive change.
Risk, Chaos, and Opportunity
In my research on The Supply Chain Complexity Triangle, I explored how uncertainty is often created by the system itself. Three forces work together to generate it:
- Deterministic chaos, where small changes lead to big, unpredictable effects.
- Demand amplification, or the “bullwhip effect,” where small variations at one end ripple through the network.
- Parallel interactions, where disruptions in one part of a supply chain spill into others.
Put simply, antifragility is about learning and growing through disruption. Rather than fighting complexity, we can use it to discover better ways of working and become more capable after every challenge.
This means building supply chains that sense and adapt in real time — using data, experimentation, and smart design to anticipate and learn from disruption. A single unexpected event can become a valuable feedback loop that strengthens the entire system.
For example, small-scale “safe-to-fail” trials can reveal weaknesses before they become crises. Multi-sourced, modular networks create optional routes when one pathway falters. Each incident becomes a lesson, feeding continuous improvement.
In other words, the goal is not to eliminate chaos, but to learn to dance with it.
Agility: The Bridge Between Resilience and AntifragilityAs supply chains evolve beyond resilience, one capability becomes absolutely critical — agility. Agility is the ability to sense change early, decide quickly, and adapt effectively before disruption becomes disaster. It’s the bridge between being resilient — able to recover — and becoming antifragile — able to grow stronger through change.
In my work at Cranfield and through The 3Ts of Highly Effective Supply Chains framework, I describe how agility rests on three essential enablers: Time, Transparency, and Trust.
Time is about compression — reducing delay, lead time, and decision latency. Agile supply chains move quickly not just in product flow, but in information and decision-making flow. The faster you can sense, decide, and act, the more options you preserve when disruption hits.
Transparency creates visibility across the end-to-end network. You can’t manage what you can’t see, and you can’t be agile if you’re operating blind. Shared data, digital dashboards, and open communication give everyone — from suppliers to logistics partners — a real-time understanding of what’s happening.
Trust underpins both speed and transparency. It’s what allows partners to share information honestly, collaborate openly, and act collectively. Without trust, each node in the chain behaves defensively, slowing response times and reducing overall performance. With trust, supply chains act as a coordinated system rather than isolated silos.
These “3 Ts” interact as a virtuous circle. Transparency builds trust; trust enables collaboration; and collaboration drives speed. Together they create the conditions for true agility — the capacity to flex and reconfigure in response to whatever the world throws at us.
Agility is also about designing for optionality — creating choices before you need them. As highlighted in the DHL Supply Chain Diversification Report, where I served as Academic Advisor, diversification is a proactive expression of agility. By building multiple routes, sourcing options, and transport modes, organisations embed flexibility directly into their networks. Optionality is agility in action — giving you the freedom to pivot, reconfigure, and continue serving customers even when conditions change.
This kind of agility doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of deliberate investment in digital technologies, strong relationships, and adaptive thinking. Digital twins and AI-driven analytics enable scenario planning that lets teams “rehearse” disruptions before they happen. Transparent information sharing across partners makes these responses faster and more coordinated. And a culture of trust empowers teams to act confidently within uncertainty.
Agility, therefore, is the missing link between resilience and antifragility. Resilience allows you to recover; agility allows you to adapt; and antifragility allows you to improve because of change.
The most successful organisations blend all three — resilient enough to absorb shocks, agile enough to adjust rapidly, and antifragile enough to learn and grow stronger with every challenge.
Supply Chain 4.0 – The Digital Era
Technology is now at the heart of this transformation. In what I call Supply Chain 4.0, digital tools enable supply chains to become intelligent, connected, and adaptive. We now have sensors and smart systems — the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, data analytics, digital twins, robotics, and automation — that give us extraordinary visibility and predictive power.
These tools can strengthen both resilience and antifragility. AI can analyse thousands of data points to forecast demand, simulate disruptions, or identify weak links before they break. Digital twins allow us to model “what if” scenarios safely before making real-world changes.
But, as I often remind people, technology can also create new forms of chaos. Poorly designed AI systems can amplify bias, spread misinformation through the network, or make opaque decisions that humans don’t understand. In the same way that deterministic chaos magnifies small triggers, a bad data feed or flawed algorithm can cause widespread instability.
That’s why digital transformation must go hand in hand with human judgement, governance, and ethics. Technology should help people make better decisions — not replace them. The strongest supply chains combine digital intelligence with human wisdom.
Wisdom from ComplexityIn every supply chain, data becomes information, information becomes knowledge — but only reflection turns that knowledge into wisdom. I define wisdom as, “Skill in life comes from mastering life’s complexities.”
The same is true for supply chains. Each shock, delay, or unexpected event contains a lesson if we’re willing to see it.
Those lessons allow us to re-learn, re-engineer, re-launch, and re-invigorate — creating systems that improve because of the very challenges they face by gaining supply chain wisdom.
Competing Through the Supply ChainIn the future, competition won’t be between individual companies, but between the supply chains they belong to. The winners will be those that use disruption to innovate — that see volatility as a source of value, not vulnerability.
So ask yourself:
- What have we learned from recent disruptions?
- How will we redesign our networks to thrive in uncertainty?
- Are we building supply chains that merely recover — or that come back stronger each time?
Further Reading
Supply Chain Diversification: Evolving to Meet a Changing World – DHL Trend Report
Supply Chain Fundamentals: Risk and Resilience – LinkedIn Learning Course
Supply Chain Resilience and Risk – Course by Professor Richard Wilding OBE
The Supply Chain Complexity Triangle: Uncertainty Generation in the Supply Chain – Academic Article (Emerald Insight)
Beyond Resilience – ERA Webinar with Professor Richard Wilding OBE
Linkedin Newsletter Post - Building Supply Chains that Learn and Grow Stronger Through Disruption.
