Some Teams Fall Apart. Others Get Stronger.
The past few years have been a masterclass in uncertainty. Pandemic reshaped how we work. AI went from niche to everywhere in eighteen months. Hiring booms, then layoffs. Interest rates reshuffling everything. The only constant has been change, and it’s not slowing down.
And I’ve noticed something: some teams break under this. Others thrive. The difference isn’t luck or raw talent. It’s design. Resilient teams are built, not born.
What I mean by “thriving”
Not surviving — holding on, grinding through. I mean actually performing well when the environment is chaotic. Teams that make good decisions quickly with incomplete info. Adapt their plans without drama when things change. Keep morale up even during turbulent periods. Do their best work not despite the pressure but in response to it.
Those teams share some characteristics. Worth being specific about them.
The trust paradox
This seems backwards, but the most resilient teams I’ve seen have relatively little formal process. They don’t need elaborate planning rituals or multi-level approval chains because they’ve invested in trust instead.
When trust is high, coordination is cheap. A quick Slack message instead of a formal meeting. A verbal agreement instead of a written spec. The overhead drops and you free up cognitive energy for actual work. (This doesn’t happen by accident — high trust comes from consistent behavior over time. Following through, being transparent about challenges, giving honest feedback. Takes months to build. Can be destroyed in a single act.)
So if your team needs heavy process to function, that’s a symptom. The process is compensating for a trust deficit. Fix the deficit and the process can lighten.
Priorities versus plans
Resilient teams know what matters most. The two or three things that would make the quarter a success. But they hold the specific plan loosely. When circumstances change, they adjust the plan. The priorities stay.
This requires leaders who can tell goals from plans. The goal is stable: reduce inference latency to under 100ms for 95th percentile. The plan is flexible — maybe you start with model optimization, but if better hardware shows up, you pivot. Teams that confuse the two become fragile. They cling to the plan when it’s no longer the best path, or worse, abandon the goal because the original plan became impossible.
Why T-shaped people matter more now
The resilient teams have people with deep expertise in one area and working knowledge of several others. When someone’s out, others can cover. When a new challenge doesn’t fit existing roles, someone stretches.
That’s the opposite of hyper-specialization, where each person is a single point of failure. Hyper-specialized teams are efficient when things are stable and brittle when they’re not. T-shaped teams sacrifice some efficiency for resilience. Building that takes intentional cross-training — rotating on-call, pairing across specialties, making it safe to be a beginner in a new area.
Psychological safety when the stakes are high
Psychological safety matters always. Under pressure it becomes critical. When the environment is uncertain and stakes are high, the natural response is to hide bad news, avoid risk, blame others. Individually rational, organizationally catastrophic.
The teams that thrive are the ones where people can say “I don’t know,” “I was wrong,” “I need help” without fear. Where bad news travels fast because people know they won’t be punished for it. Where post-mortems are genuinely blameless.
Building this requires leaders who model vulnerability. When I don’t know the answer, I say so. When I make a mistake, I own it publicly. When someone brings me bad news, I thank them. Small acts, outsized effects.
Getting comfortable with ambiguity
Most people and orgs want clear answers and clear plans. That discomfort is natural. It’s also a liability in a world that doesn’t provide clarity on demand.
The teams that thrive have developed comfort with ambiguity. They can start working on a problem before fully understanding it. Make decisions at 60% confidence instead of waiting for 90%. Hold multiple possible futures in their heads and make plans that work across scenarios.
It’s not recklessness. It’s disciplined adaptation. Move forward with the best available info, establish checkpoints, adjust as new info arrives. Organizational OODA loop — observe, orient, decide, act — applied continuously.
The orgs that develop this won’t just survive. They’ll outperform precisely because uncertainty is where the opportunities are. While others are paralyzed, they’re moving.