Brazilian Resilience – It's Not Just About Football

What's the penalty for not being prepared? The Brazilian football team learned the hard way in the FIFA World Cup semi-final last week. For faced with the loss of their most valuable talent, and then a competitor that made the most of every opportunity, the team was totally unable to change its game to recover.

As a business leader, chances are that you can sympathise somewhat with the Brazilian team managers, right? Talent shortages, inability to adapt, competitive surprises, lack of agility in a fast-paced game... these are challenges we all deal with daily. So what can we learn from Brazil's downturn in football fortunes? Make sure you're resilient enough to handle the risks of a totally changed game.

Nation deflated

Commenting on the defeat, the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff urged Brazilians to "Get up, shake off the dust and come out on top". In other words, she was calling on their resilience. Resilience includes the ability of an organisation (a business, a nation, or a sports team) to be ready for crises, so that they can recover speedily and come out ahead. Nobody had expected the team to find itself in the situation it faced going in to the semi-final. So when the German side rapidly took the lead, the Brazilians were unable to bounce back. The team, and consequently the nation, was left in shock, deflated. How will they pick themselves up from this?

Unready for risks

Crises and the resulting disruption come in many forms. They can hit at home or away. They can be expected risks or totally unforeseen. And they are often followed by aftershocks. For Brazil's national football team, the "catastrophe" as their coach Luiz Felipe Scolari put it, started when one of their key players was injured in the quarter-finals. Next came the suspension of the team captain in the same match. Suddenly, valuable resources were no longer available. It happens in the business world too - strategies risk stalling because of a shortage of key skills. Indeed, in PwC's 17th Annual Global CEO Survey, 63% of CEOs say they are somewhat or extremely concerned about the availability of key skills.

Football fans around the world, soccer for the American fans, wondered how the Brazilian team managers would react. Would they stick to plan A, and address the gap with a "stock replenishment"? Or were they ready to re-assess the new reality, adapt their strategy with agility to capitalise on their remaining strengths, and switch to an alternative, but rehearsed...