Some operations spend every Monday recovering from the weekend. Backlogs are cleared. Customers are contacted. Complaints are resolved. Colleagues work harder to get the operation back on track.

The recovery process becomes so familiar that it starts to feel normal. The problem is that recovery addresses the symptom, but not the cause.

I've seen organisations repeatedly accept understaffed weekends, inadequate resilience, broken rotas and predictable operational pressures, whilst tolerating sub-standard customer service as an inevitable consequence The weekend wasn't unpredictable. The outcome wasn't unexpected. The recovery had simply become part of the operating model.

The most resilient organisations don't become experts at recovering from recurring problems. They identify why those problems occur and fix them at source.