Disruption is the new normal. Is your business built for it?
Ask any operations leader what the last two years have felt like and the answer tends to be some version of the same thing: just when you think you've stabilised, something else shifts.
A geopolitical development rewrites the assumptions your planning was built on. A cyber incident somewhere in your supply chain sends a ripple through yours. A supplier goes quiet. Shipping costs spike.
This isn't a temporary state of affairs. Forterro's European Industrial Midmarket Research, which surveyed more than 1,250 senior decision-makers across Europe, found that supply chain disruption was the most pressing challenge cited by industrial businesses, with US tariff exposure, global economic uncertainty and outdated technology all close behind. The conditions that industrial businesses are operating in right now aren't going to resolve themselves neatly - and most business leaders know it.
As Benoît Wambergue, Vice President at Forterro, puts it: "It's virtually impossible to predict what direction the world will take, so the industrial midmarket needs to protect itself as best as it can. Companies must be scalable, flexible and future-proof."
For many businesses, the question is no longer how to get back to stability. It's how to build operations that can keep moving forward regardless of what changes around them.
The difference between surviving disruption and absorbing it
There's an important distinction between businesses that survive disruption and businesses that are built for it. Surviving disruption tends to mean reacting - scrambling to find alternatives, making decisions with incomplete information, losing time and margin in the process. Being built for it means something different. It means having the visibility, the connections and the flexibility to absorb a shock without losing momentum.
That distinction shows up in practical ways:
- When a key supplier fails, a resilient business can see the impact immediately, identify alternatives and adjust without a week of manual investigation.
- When costs shift overnight, teams have the real-time visibility to make fast decisions rather than waiting for a report that arrives too late to act on.
- When a cyber threat emerges - and the research found that cybersecurity is now the number one strategic priority for industrial businesses, cited by 31% of respondents - resilient operations have the infrastructure to keep moving rather than grinding to a halt.
Where fragility hides
Most businesses don't think of themselves as fragile. And in normal conditions, they aren't. The fragility tends to live in the gaps - between systems that don't talk to each other, processes that depend on a specific person knowing the right thing at the right time, or supplier relationships that have no documented alternative if something goes wrong.
When conditions are stable, these gaps are manageable. When conditions change quickly, and right now, they change quickly often, those same gaps become serious vulnerabilities. It's telling that despite widespread awareness of the challenges ahead, more than 60% of industrial businesses in the research rated their digital transformation progress over the past three years as just adequate or poor.
In a stable world that's a gradual disadvantage. In the environment businesses are operating in today, it's a gap with real consequences - showing up in slower decisions, missed opportunities and operations that struggle to absorb pressure without losing ground.
Resilience as a competitive advantage
There's something else worth saying. In an environment where disruption is constant, resilience isn't just about protecting what you have - it's increasingly a competitive differentiator. Businesses that can respond faster, fulfil more reliably and adapt without losing customer experience are pulling ahead of those that can't, not because they're luckier, but because they're better set up.
The businesses navigating the current climate well aren't the ones waiting for things to settle down. They're the ones investing in the connected, flexible operational foundations that allow them to keep moving regardless of what happens next.
Where to start
Building resilience doesn't mean overhauling everything at once. It means understanding clearly where your operations are connected and where they aren't, where information flows freely and where it gets stuck, and which gaps carry the most risk given what the market is doing right now.
That honest picture - across resilience and the other dimensions that drive digital maturity - is what gives businesses a structured place to start and a clear sense of what progress actually looks like.