OSI Network

LEADERSHIP FORESIGHT

When the Backup Plan Becomes the Next Vulnerability

Redundancy, Strategic Margin, and the Leadership Responsibility to Preserve Options

September 12, 2026
Applied Leadership Brief

There is an important difference between having a backup and having genuine redundancy.

The distinction has become unusually visible in the Middle East. Pressure on the Strait of Hormuz led Saudi Arabia to make greater use of its East-West Pipeline, which carries crude across the Arabian Peninsula toward the Red Sea. That route reduced dependence upon Hormuz and provided the type of geographic diversity that resilient systems require. The U.S. Energy Information Administration documented the increased rerouting earlier this summer. (U.S. Energy Information Administration)

This week, the operating environment changed again. Houthi forces advanced to Perim Island inside Bab el-Mandeb, increasing their geographic leverage near the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline was then attacked by drones launched from Iraqi territory and shut as a precaution. Reuters reports that the pipeline had recently been carrying four to five million barrels per day. (Investing.com South Africa)

The system has not failed. That is important.

The leadership lesson lies in the fact that several alternatives are experiencing pressure at the same time.

Redundancy Has to Be Independent

Organizations sometimes convince themselves that they have resilience because they can point to a backup supplier, additional server, alternate employee, emergency plan, secondary transportation route, or contingency location. The harder question is whether the supposed backup depends upon the same assumptions that can disable the primary system.

Two suppliers located in the same vulnerable region may appear diversified in a spreadsheet while sharing the same geopolitical exposure. Two data centers connected through the same critical infrastructure may provide less resilience than executives assume. A succession plan built around one deputy who already carries several essential responsibilities can create the appearance of leadership depth without actually providing it.

The Saudi case illustrates the principle on a much larger scale. The East-West Pipeline was valuable precisely because it reduced reliance upon Hormuz, yet its western destination ultimately feeds into a maritime system whose southern access point is now under greater pressure. The attack on the pipeline adds another vulnerability to the same broader resilience network.

The practical distinction is therefore between additional capacity and independent capacity.

Leaders responsible for continuity should know which one they actually possess.

Strategic Margin Is What Remains After the Plan Works

Efficiency measures how effectively an organization uses its current resources. Strategic margin asks a different question: how much usable capacity remains after the organization has met today’s demands.

That margin may consist of additional inventory, trained personnel, cash reserves, alternative vendors, spare equipment, trusted partnerships, institutional knowledge, cyber recovery capability, or simply enough time to think before the next decision must be made.

Organizations often consume those reserves slowly. A dependable employee takes on another responsibility. Inventory is reduced because the previous disruption ended safely. A second supplier is dropped because the primary supplier has performed well. Training is postponed to preserve the operating budget. Preventive maintenance is delayed because every asset is needed in production.

None of those decisions necessarily produces an immediate failure. In fact, the organization may appear more efficient afterward.

The cost becomes visible when another disruption arrives before the first reserve has been restored.

That is the operational meaning of strategic margin.

Prioritization Is Not Automatically Failure

The U.S. maritime response provides another useful lesson. The Financial Times reports that CENTCOM has concentrated air-defense protection for commercial tankers into specific daily transit periods rather than providing the broader coverage previously available. (Financial Times)

It would be easy to turn that fact into a dramatic story about American weakness. The available evidence does not justify that conclusion.

Prioritization is often what competent leadership looks like under sustained demand. No organization has unlimited people, money, equipment, attention, or time. Mature leaders distinguish essential functions from desirable ones and allocate scarce resources accordingly.

The real question is whether leaders are making those choices deliberately or being forced into them because earlier decisions consumed too much margin.

That distinction is critical in business and public service. A chief executive who narrows priorities early may be exercising foresight. A chief executive who discovers during a crisis that nothing can be reduced because every system is already operating at its limit has a different problem entirely.

The observable decision may look similar. The underlying organizational health is not.

Resilience Requires Honest Information

There is another human dimension that deserves attention. Contingency plans are frequently stronger on paper than they are in practice because people inside the organization know things that senior leaders do not.

The warehouse supervisor knows the secondary vendor has missed delivery windows. The technician knows the backup generator hasn’t been tested under full load. The deputy knows three cross-trained employees still depend on one experienced person for complex problems. The cybersecurity team knows the recovery plan assumes access to infrastructure that may be unavailable during an incident.

Listening is therefore part of resilience.

A leader cannot preserve strategic margin that the organization is unwilling or unable to describe accurately.

This is one reason Servant Leadership belongs naturally in continuity and resilience planning. Spears’s treatment of the servant-leadership tradition places listening, awareness, conceptualization, foresight, and stewardship alongside one another. Foresight connects knowledge of past and present conditions to future decisions, while stewardship directs that understanding toward the health and growth of those entrusted to the leader.

The point is not philosophical ornamentation. These behaviors affect whether weak signals reach decision-makers before the contingency plan is needed.

The Leadership Application

The events surrounding Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Saudi pipeline suggest a useful exercise for leaders in almost any organization.

Examine your most important mission and identify the contingency that supposedly protects it. Then determine whether that alternative is genuinely independent. Look for common suppliers, shared infrastructure, common personnel, similar geography, identical technology, single points of institutional knowledge, and other dependencies that could cause the primary and secondary systems to fail together.

The examination should also include people. In many organizations, experienced employees quietly become the backup plan. Their competence masks structural weakness because they repeatedly solve problems the formal system cannot. That may sustain performance for years, but it is not durable redundancy. It is borrowed human capacity.

Servant Leadership makes the stewardship question difficult to avoid. Leaders are entrusted not only with accomplishing the mission, but with preserving the people and capabilities that allow the mission to continue.

Daniel Kim’s work on foresight emphasizes the need to understand organizational complexity and make foundational choices before the future becomes constrained by earlier decisions. That is precisely the leadership opportunity presented by the current case.

The useful question is not, “Do we have a backup?”

It is whether the organization has enough genuinely independent capacity to preserve meaningful choices after the first plan stops working.

That is where resilience begins to become foresight, and foresight becomes stewardship.

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Insight today for a more resilient tomorrow.

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Source record: Saudi Press Agency; U.S. Energy Information Administration; Reuters; Associated Press; Financial Times; and the Servant Leadership materials of Daniel H. Kim and Larry C. Spears.