California’s Insurance Commissioner, Ricardo Lara, accepted the Climate Finance Week Ireland (CFWI) Leadership Award in Dublin on 16 September recognition given each year to individuals who’ve shown exceptional leadership advancing the global sustainable finance agenda. He received it during Climate Finance Week Ireland, alongside the UN Global Sustainable Insurance Summit.
The theme of his speech: Resilience is not something you build after a disaster.
It is something you invest in before one arrives.” That sounds obvious, but most organisations still behave as if resilience is primarily about recovery. Something goes wrong, the crisis team assembles, insurance kicks in, consultants arrive, and everyone starts talking about lessons learned. By then, much of the damage has already been done.
From measuring risk to reducing it
One of the most important shifts described in his speech was the move from measuring climate risk to reducing climate risk. That distinction applies far beyond climate. Businesses have become extraordinarily good at measuring things. Risk registers, dashboards, scenario models, AI forecasts, cybersecurity scores, climate models, and employee surveys all create greater visibility. But measurement does not automatically create resilience. Knowing that a storm is coming is very different from having strengthened the roof. The strategic question, therefore, changes. Instead of asking only, “What risks are coming?”, leadership teams should be asking, “What are we doing now that makes us stronger when they arrive?”
Resilience is infrastructure
Climate change makes this painfully visible. Lara describes the reality after wildfires in California, when families are standing in front of what used to be their homes, business owners are wondering whether a lifetime of work has disappeared, and people are looking for confidence that rebuilding is possible. The bigger opportunity, however, is upstream. Resilience should be designed into infrastructure, finance, insurance, technology, communities, and public policy before the shock happens.
The same principle applies inside companies
AI disruption, supply-chain shocks, cyberattacks, skills shortages, regulatory change, geopolitical instability and climate risk are all different manifestations of the same leadership problem. You cannot know precisely which disruption will hit, when it will happen, or what form it will take. You can, however, build the capacity to respond.
The future belongs to connectors
Resilience cannot be created by one institution. Regulators cannot do it alone. Neither can insurers, governments, or scientists. Increasingly, the advantage sits between disciplines. Climate science needs to connect with finance. Finance needs to connect with technology. Technology needs to connect with policy. Policy needs to connect with communities. The future belongs to leaders capable of bringing those pieces together. That may become one of the defining leadership capabilities of the next decade. The strongest leaders will not necessarily be those who know the most about one domain. They will be the ones capable of seeing the system, connecting different forms of expertise, and turning those connections into action.
Stop predicting. Start preparing.
This connects directly with the central argument of STOP PREDICTING. You cannot predict the future with any real certainty, but you can build the fitness to respond to it. Resilience, viewed this way, is not defensive. It creates options, speed, and confidence. It allows organisations to act while competitors are still trying to understand what has happened. It means investing in capabilities before the business case becomes painfully obvious. The leadership question is therefore not simply what you believe the future will look like. It is whether you are building an organisation capable of responding when your assumptions turn out to be wrong.
Build before the storm
The organisations that prosper through disruption will probably not be those that predicted the storm most accurately. They will be the ones that had already built the capabilities, partnerships, flexibility, and confidence required to respond. That is the real lesson of resilience. The work starts before the crisis, not after it. Build before the storm arrives.
