Resilience, skills and leadership

Boards are starting to sense a problem they really struggle to name.

 

The systems are still running. The dashboards look healthy. Transformation programmes are well-funded and confidently branded. And yet progress somehow feels slower than it should, risk feels harder to quantify, and resilience feels more fragile than anyone expected.

 

This is usually explained away as a technology issue, but it really isn’t.

 

It’s a skills and leadership problem hiding in plain sight.

 

 

Stability has a knack for hiding fragility

Many of the systems that underpin modern business still run on mature platforms. They process payments, clear transactions, manage supply chains, and keep critical services moving. They rarely feature in innovation decks precisely because they work.

 

Over time, these systems become the responsibility of a small group of experienced engineers. People who know not just how the system is meant to work, but how it actually behaves. That knowledge lives in judgement, instinct, and lived experience, not documentation.

 

One senior leader put it to me recently like this: their most experienced people were permanently tied up keeping the lights on. Their younger teams were focused on new platforms, new tools, and new transformation programmes. Both groups were busy. Neither had the space to work together.

 

The result was stagnation. The organisation knew it was against the clock, but couldn’t slow down enough to transfer what really mattered.

 

And this isn’t an isolated story. Across Europe, 28% of mainframe customers now openly admit they lack the in-house skills required to modernise these platforms safely, according to recent industry research. That’s not a technology failure. That’s an organisational one.

 

It means many enterprises are attempting change without sufficient understanding of the systems they depend on most. Modernisation becomes an act of faith rather than a controlled engineering decision.

 

 

Experience is valued, but structurally trapped

Most organisations recognise that their older, more experienced engineers are critical assets. The problem is how those assets are deployed.

 

They are rewarded for reliability, not knowledge transfer, pulled into incidents, upgrades, and urgent fixes. Meanwhile, transformation initiatives move ahead with teams who are enthusiastic, capable, and well-intentioned, but missing the deep context that makes change safe.

 

This creates a quiet but very dangerous divide. The people who understand the system best are too busy maintaining it to help evolve it. The people tasked with evolving it don’t yet understand where the real risk lives.

 

That gap is where resilience quietly leaks away.

 

 

The industry has been engineering this risk

For years, the technology industry has reinforced a simple message: old is bad, new is safer, and change equals progress. Experience with stable systems is subtly devalued. Engineers are encouraged to move on or reskill before their knowledge has been passed on.

 

Then external pressure arrives. End of support dates. Regulatory deadlines. Security advisories. Decisions are rushed under the banner of risk reduction.

 

What gets lost is context. Why things were designed a certain way. Which parts of the system are sensitive. Which changes look safe on paper but carry hidden consequences.

 

Ironically, the very people best placed to modernise safely are often unavailable or already gone by the time modernisation begins.

 

 

Cyber-risk increases with change, not age

There’s another uncomfortable truth boards rarely hear.

 

Newly commissioned systems are generally at their most secure. They are hardened, reviewed and carefully configured. Over time, that security posture erodes, not because the software is old, but because it is constantly changed.

 

Upgrades, configuration tweaks, integrations and emergency fixes, often applied under time pressure, gradually introduce weakness. Many of these changes are driven by external timelines rather than internal readiness.

 

Organisations believe they are reducing risk, when in reality they are compounding it. Every change increases the probability of misconfiguration, unexpected interactions and outages.

 

If there is one thing that remains consistently true, it is this: change increases the risk of failure. Treating constant change as inherently safer is a dangerous illusion.

 

 

Skills are the thinnest layer of resilience

Resilience is still discussed in terms of platforms, architectures, and tooling. What receives far less attention is the skills layer that makes any of this viable.

 

Mature systems are not fragile by default. Many continue to deliver enormous value when they are understood, maintained deliberately, and evolved incrementally. That requires legacy literacy: people who understand behaviour, dependencies, and failure modes, and who can guide change rather than react to it.

 

As that literacy thins out, even well-intentioned transformation becomes riskier. Not because the technology cannot handle it, but because the organisation no longer can.

 

 

This is where leadership matters

This is not an HR problem. It’s not even an IT operations issue. It is a board-level responsibility.

 

Leadership is required to see through the noise, the fear, and the fashionable narratives. To recognise that resilience depends as much on people and knowledge as it does on platforms and vendors.

 

That means creating the space for experienced engineers to mentor, not just maintain. Pairing generations by design, not by accident. Questioning externally imposed urgency. Putting governance around change itself, not just around technology.

 

Organisations that get this right don’t just protect themselves. They unlock progress. They modernise with confidence rather than fear. They fuel growth without destabilising the foundations they rely on.

 

Your last experienced engineer is not a strategy.

 

Leadership that recognises software heritage and human expertise as continuity assets is.

 

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Rowan O’Donoghue is Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder at Origina 

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and M.photostock