Here in Vancouver, we normally have a pretty good thing going. Three ski hills within easy reach of the city. Close enough for a half-day escape when winter does what winter is supposed to do.

This year? Not so much.

It’s been wet – trust me, very wet – but not cold enough. And here we are in early February, with green peeking through ski runs that should be buried. The comparisons to 2010 are already popping up, when snow had to be trucked in from Alberta to keep the Winter Olympics viable.

Standing at the base of a soggy slope, it’s hard not to think about complexity.

Because when leaders talk about operating in complex environments, they usually point to what’s right in front of them:

• customers who keep changing their minds,
• technology stacks that won’t sit still,
• AI initiatives layered onto already tangled products.

All real. All painful. But also… incomplete ways of thinking about the problem.

Complexity doesn’t just show up in week-to-week decisions. It plays out over months and years, across systems we don’t control, and in combinations we can’t predict. Weather patterns. Supply chains. Talent markets. Regulation. Cultural shifts. None of these respond well to tidy plans or single “right” answers.

And yet, when organizations feel the pressure, the instinct is almost always the same: optimize.

• Optimize the roadmap.
• Optimize the team structure.
• Optimize for efficiency, utilization, predictability.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit: optimization reduces resilience.

When we work with organizations on product delivery, we’re frequently asked to make things “leaner” or “more efficient.” Fewer options. Less slack. Tighter coupling. It looks good on a slide. It feels decisive.

But in complex environments, the organizations that survive aren’t the ones that make the perfect decision today. They’re the ones that can adapt when today’s decision turns out to be wrong tomorrow.

Optimization has value. We should continually optimize what we do. But it isn’t enough. We need to build resilience – teams that can deliver quickly and often. This gives an organization more choices, more ways to respond to surprises. Nimble organizations are better able to respond to unexpected shifts rather than being broken by them.  

Back to the ski hills.

I don’t know how this season will finish. Maybe colder weather arrives. Maybe it doesn’t. But one thing feels pretty clear: the hills that rely solely on skiing are far more exposed than those that have diversified year-round activities, multiple revenue streams, different ways of creating value when conditions change.

That’s not a climate lecture. It’s a systems lesson. It’s what happens when a system optimized for one set of conditions is exposed to another.

If your organization only works when conditions are perfect, it’s fragile.

If it can adjust when reality doesn’t cooperate, it’s resilient.

A simple thought exercise to leave you with:

If the assumptions behind your current product strategy stopped being true next quarter, what would still work? What would break immediately?

If that question feels uncomfortable, it’s probably worth exploring.

And if you want to talk about how to build resilience into product delivery – not just optimize for the next decision, but for the next surprise – you know where to find me.