Crisis Resilience

Britain Doesn’t Need Better Leaders. It Needs a Resilient Population.

Lord Hague, writing in The Times on February 16, 2o26, identified four key qualities he believes Keir Starmer lacks: a clear political direction; the stamina and willpower to make Whitehall respond to that direction; the ability to weave events into a convincing national story; and the authority to show who is in charge when it matters. His diagnosis arrived alongside the remarkable observation that if Starmer is replaced this summer, Britain will have burned through seven Prime Ministers in a single decade — a rate of leadership turnover not seen in nearly two hundred years.

Hague’s analysis is characteristically sharp. But I want to suggest that he is treating a symptom rather than the disease. The revolving door at Downing Street is not simply a problem of individual leaders failing to meet the demands of the office. It is a symptom of a country that has become structurally incapable of absorbing crisis — a country that has invested in systems, processes and compliance frameworks while neglecting the human capabilities on which crisis performance actually depends.

Even a Prime Minister who possessed all four of Hague’s qualities in abundance would struggle to lead a nation through sustained disruption if the population, the institutions and the organisations around them had no resilience to draw upon. Direction is useless without a country capable of following it. Stamina at the top means little if the civil service collapses under pressure further down. A convincing national story rings hollow if citizens have no experience of navigating adversity. And authority is hardest to project precisely when it is most needed — when events are moving faster than any individual, however commanding, can control.

The human factor

My own research what actually determines whether organisations survive crises or are broken by them. The answer, drawn from interviews with senior crisis management professionals averaging over twenty years’ experience each, was unambiguous: crisis resilience is fundamentally a human problem. Twelve critical human factors were identified; personal resilience, communication, decision-making, sensemaking, leadership, self-efficacy, flexibility, motivation, perseverance, optimism, risk vigilance and perception — and every one of them is trainable, measurable and developable.

Yet almost nobody develops them systematically. Most organisations invest in technical systems, compliance frameworks and business continuity plans. Far fewer invest in developing the psychological and behavioural capabilities of the people who will actually have to make decisions under extreme pressure. When a crisis hits, it is not the risk register that determines the outcome. It is whether the people in the room can think clearly, communicate effectively, perceive threats early, make sound decisions under stress and maintain emotional control while the situation deteriorates around them.

The evidence that these capabilities can be trained is compelling. The U.S. Army’s Master Resilience Training programme, developed with the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Centre, has demonstrated that resilience, optimism and self-efficacy can be systematically built through structured programmes. The Penn Resilience Programme has shown similar results in civilian populations, including children. In Britain, we do almost nothing of the sort. Not in schools. Not in industry. Not in government. We wait for the crisis to arrive and then ask why nobody was ready.

Start in the classroom

If we are serious about building a crisis-resilient nation, the place to start is obvious: schools. Children who learn to manage stress, communicate under pressure, think critically about risk and recover from setbacks do not merely become more resilient individuals. They become the workforce, the leaders and the citizens of a society that is structurally better prepared for disruption. Finland integrates resilience and preparedness into its national curriculum. Israel’s education system is built around a culture of readiness. Britain offers nothing comparable.

This is not soft thinking. It is hard-headed national security policy. A population trained to be vigilant, adaptive and psychologically robust is a population that is harder to destabilise — whether by pandemics, cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns or economic shocks. It is also a population that places less strain on the state when things go wrong, because individuals and communities are able to respond before central government has finished convening its COBR meeting.

Industry and the TTMS framework

The picture in the private sector is equally bleak. Most organisations treat crisis management as a box-ticking exercise: an annual tabletop, a dusty business continuity plan and a vague assumption that the senior team will cope. My research proposes a different model: the Train, Test, Measure and Sustain framework. The logic is straightforward. Train people in the human factors that contribute to crisis resilience — not just procedures, but psychological capabilities. Test those capabilities through realistic simulations that apply genuine pressure. Measure performance, so organisations know where their human capabilities are strongest and weakest. And sustain the development over time, because resilience is not a state you achieve once. It is a muscle that atrophies without use. Adopting this would require organisations to treat human crisis capability as seriously as they treat cybersecurity or financial controls. It would mean that boards of directors are held accountable not merely for having a plan but for having a workforce that can execute it under extreme conditions.

A new profession for a new era

Here is a proposal that will strike some as radical but is merely logical. Britain needs a new profession: Crisis Resilience Professionals. Not crisis managers — we have those and they tend to be activated only after things have gone wrong. Crisis Resilience Professionals would work upstream: in schools, designing curricula that build the cognitive and emotional capabilities children need. In organisations, developing the human factors that determine whether a workforce can absorb disruption. In government, advising on how to build societal resilience as a strategic national asset rather than an afterthought. The security profession has evolved considerably. We now have Chartered Security Professionals, Chartered Cyber Security Professionals and a recognised career pathway from apprenticeship to fellowship. Crisis resilience deserves the same treatment. A professional body, a competency framework, an accredited development pathway and a recognised place at the table when decisions are made about how to prepare for the future.

The leadership question, revisited

Lord Hague’s four qualities — direction, stamina, storytelling, authority — are not unique to Prime Ministers. They map directly onto the human factors that research identifies as critical to crisis resilience at every level of society. Direction is sensemaking and decision-making under uncertainty. Stamina is personal resilience and perseverance. Storytelling is communication — the ability to create coherence when information is fragmented and events are moving fast. Authority is leadership combined with self-efficacy: the confidence to act decisively when others are frozen.

These are not innate gifts bestowed upon the occasional gifted statesman. They are capabilities that can be identified, trained and sustained across an entire population. The fixation on whether the person at Number 10 has the right stuff is a comfortable national pastime, but it is also a dangerous distraction. Seven Prime Ministers in a decade is not evidence that we keep choosing the wrong individuals. It is evidence that we have built a system — and a society — that chews leaders up because it has no resilience of its own.

The crises are coming. They always are. The only question is whether we will have prepared our people to meet them. At the moment, we have not even begun. It is time we started — not at Downing Street, but in every classroom, every boardroom and every community in the country.

Dr Paul Wood is Chief Executive Officer of Emerging Risks Global.