Icebergs: The Risk You Don't See

Icebergs look simple from a distance. Solid, bright, easy to understand. Just a big chunk of ice floating in the sea.

But most of an iceberg sits below the surface — the part you don’t see, the part that causes the trouble.

Organisations are no different.

Above the waterline:

the documented processes, the visible capability, the confident presentations, the tidy diagrams, the reassuring dashboards.

Below the waterline:

the assumptions, the workarounds, the dependencies, the “only Sarah knows how to do that” (every organisation has a Sarah), the supplier nobody realised was single‑sourced, the fragilities that never make it into a report.

The visible part is comforting.

The hidden part is dangerous.

Resilience isn’t about polishing what’s already obvious. It’s about exploring what sits underneath — the things people rely on without noticing, the relationships that hold everything together, the gaps that only appear when something shifts.

Most organisations don’t fail because of what they know.

They fail because of what they never looked for.

Icebergs aren’t frightening because of their size.

They’re frightening because of their shape.

And organisational risk behaves exactly the same way.