Why Adaptable Organizations Need Resilient Leaders

Caleb Gardner
August 26, 2025
Newsletter Article

Disruption is now the norm in ag and food industries, demanding faster adaptation. Resilient leadership—marked by steady decision-making, experimentation, and system-wide thinking—builds cultures that thrive through uncertainty. Small habits like pausing before action, testing ideas, and mapping ripple effects lead to fewer reversals and safer execution. Resilience isn’t just survival—it’s a strategy for sustainable, adaptable growth.

Disruption isn’t a phase—it’s the environment leaders in agriculture and food are operating in from now on. From erratic weather and freight detours, to labor churn and AI demand shifts, the question isn’t how to dodge uncertainty but how to adapt faster because of it.

As I mentioned in my keynote on “Resilient Leadership” at the AgCareers HR Roundtable Conference, the jump from survival to adaptability starts with leadership behavior. When leaders steady themselves before acting, turn either/or decisions into options, and widen their view to catch second order effects, those habits spread.

Over time, those habits harden into routines, which turns into culture—and suddenly, your organization can bend without breaking.

What does that look like in practice? It starts with leaders modeling a brief reset before high stakes moments: clarifying the decision, surfacing assumptions, and naming one risk the team might be missing. Ninety seconds of steadiness saves hours of rework later.

It also means making learning an important unit of progress. Swap big bang rollouts for small, well-defined experiments with clear stop-or-scale criteria; reward teams that try things even when they fail, not just those that land a win.

Finally, make ripple effects explicitly visible. Many people problems are system problems in disguise, so bring multiple departments around the same table to map how a proposed change will echo across farms, plants, and partners.

These kinds of leadership behaviors pay off across functions:

In strategic decision-making, pausing for a “pre-mortem” and reframing into two or three small, time-boxed options prevents brittle 12-month rollouts.
In communications, a deliberate pause becomes a two-beat verification rule—no all-staff update goes out until a second source confirms—and a quick “who else is touched by this?” check keeps messages from lighting new fires.
In HR, reframing turns hiring from gatekeeping to experimentation: run two-week, skills-based screening pilots with clear stop/scale criteria to cut time-to-fill and early attrition without lowering the bar.
And in operations, a protected stop-work authority is a literal pause that prevents expensive rework and injuries—and signals that steadiness is cultural, not just personal.

The result: fewer reversals, faster cycles, and safer execution—the practical texture of adaptability.

My firm, 18 Coffees, has been in the business of helping leadership teams turn resilient behaviors into operating models for more than 10 years—and we especially love working with mission-driven organizations like those in ag/food. The AdaptOS workbook I provided at the end of my keynote is just one way we’ve modeled for our clients how to build resiliency into their organizational culture, and move at the speed of change.

In ag and food, what’s at stake isn’t just efficiency—it’s supply, safety, and public trust. Millions of mealtimes depend on it. As I mentioned in the keynote, one place to start is asking yourself, what is your organization resisting right now? Name it, take a breath, and pick one concrete move this month that will make your teams quicker to adapt when the next disruption hits.