Safe-Fail by Design: Resilience in a Changing Geopolitical Landscape

At the Aon Insights Series EMEA 2025 in Copenhagen, Andreas Wieland, associate professor from the Department of Operations Management at CBS, participated in a panel discussion titled "Navigating Trade Risks in a Changing Geopolitical Environment," which was moderated by Clement Kjersgaard. The panelists discussed how shifting trade policies, sanctions regimes, and supply-chain disruptions are reshaping corporate risk. A conclusion emerged: in complex, interdependent systems, resilience isn't something you have; it is something you design.

Wieland argues that trying to engineer away every failure in supply chains, cities, and societies is a losing game. A better question is, when disruption arrives, as it will, can the system absorb the shock, adapt, and transform into a better configuration if needed? This is the essence of safe-fail design. This approach acknowledges that not all failures can be prevented and instead builds structures that localize impacts, keep options open, encourage rapid reconfiguration, and facilitate quick learning. Although fail-safe thinking still matters for critical safeguards, on its own, it freezes organizations around yesterday's assumptions.

An anecdote from the venue illustrated this. While world leaders, including Emmanuel Macron and Viktor Orbán, were staying at the Hotel d'Angleterre, the hotel had to remain fully operational under intense security measures. This required rigorous fail-safe procedures and abundant safe-fail adaptability. This combination of fail-safe and safe-fail measures exemplifies resilience in the real world.

Crucially, this practical stance aligns with contemporary social-ecological resilience thinking. Resilience is not merely "bouncing back," but rather the capacity to persist, adapt, and, when the old logic no longer serves, transform. This approach acknowledges cross-level interdependencies (for example, a supplier's outage can affect an entire sector, and a policy shift can have ripple effects across regions) and views disturbance as an opportunity for innovation rather than just a threat to be avoided.

Geopolitics is no longer the backdrop. "It is part of the operating environment," Wieland argues. Trade regimes, climate and biodiversity crises, and security logics are interacting in ways that create non-linear effects. Designing for safe-fail does not mean embracing chaos; it means building the capacity to guide the necessary transformation, so that when systems bend, they don't break, and when they must change, they change on your terms.

Resilience isn't about eliminating uncertainty; it's about organizing for adaptability and transformability when uncertainty arises.