How the Qantas Cyber Attack Teaches Us to Lead Through Uncertainty
When disruption hits, how will you learn and adapt through it?
By Suzie Thoraval
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
When news broke that hackers had accessed up to six million Qantas customer records through a third-party call-centre platform, it caught my attention — not just the fact of the data breach itself, but because of my interest in how leaders handle such disruptions.
As someone who sits on audit and risk committees, I know that cyber attack is not a matter of if but when. In a world of AI-enabled scams and complex supply chains, disruption isn’t a remote risk — it’s part of how we operate. Cyber specialists now say that the scale and speed of attacks are escalating. The Australian Cyber Security Centre reports a cybercrime every six minutes.
For Qantas, this was a crisis. But for me, the bigger question is how ready leaders are to respond when the unexpected happens. These moments test not only systems and processes, but also the steadiness and adaptability of the people leading them.
Evolved strength: growing wiser and stronger through disruption
To recover well from a data breach, an organisation needs to do more than restore operations. That’s the baseline. The real work is in learning from disruption and emerging stronger next time.
Cyber specialists are clear that technology alone won’t solve the security challenge. The difference between a company that grows through disruption and one that stays exposed lies in its culture and leadership — how it plans, questions, and brings diverse perspectives to the table.
Qantas’ early response — engaging forensic experts, notifying regulators, and speaking openly with customers — showed a willingness to act quickly and learn. That kind of honesty tends to build a foundation for trust. The opportunity now is in what follows: strengthening vendor oversight, clarifying accountability, and embedding new habits of foresight.
The Oxford Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre reinforces the idea that resilience grows through exposure and adaptation. Analysing incidents, sharing lessons, and refining systems after each shock is what builds strength. Avoiding disruption doesn’t make us safer — engaging with it thoughtfully does.
That’s how leaders build what I call evolved strength — the capacity to grow wiser and stronger through challenge, using disruption as a teacher.
Adaptive stability creates evolved strength
Evolved strength is an outcome of adaptive stability — the capability that helps leaders stay calm, confident, and effective in the face of uncertainty, complexity, and change.
It’s what grows when leaders practise the elements of adaptive stability consistently: mindset, flexibility, and resilience.
At the intersection of mindset and flexibility, lies agile performance, that ability to respond with strategic agility to happens. There is a leadership rhythm that supports growth — Pause, Process, Progress.
Pause to stabilise your thoughts and emotions before reacting.
Process by listening, reflecting, and exploring with curiosity.
Progress by integrating what you’ve learned into deliberate, confident action.
This rhythm helps leaders hold their footing while everything around them shifts. It’s how evolved strength takes root — steady at the core, ready for change.
Learning from the shock
The idea of evolved strength is the capacity to use shocks as lessons: to practise and build systems, teams and self so that you’re stronger on the other side.
It harnesses the concept of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s anti-fragility — systems that improve because of stress rather than resisting it. Taleb argues that shielding systems from every disturbance leads to brittleness and bigger shocks later.
In nature muscles grow through strain and rest, forests regenerate after fire. Organisations can mirror this if they respond intentionally. Small experiments, real feedback loops, open debate — these are the training ground.
Evolved strength also connects with Jennifer Garvey Berger’s concept of complexity fitness, the ability to stay open and curious when the answer isn’t clear, and Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety, showing that teams who speak honestly about mistakes adapt faster and perform better.
Combining these perspectives gives us a simple truth that is at the core of evolved strength: when we face uncertainty with curiosity and reflection on the learning, we build the capacity to navigate whatever comes next.
Why this matters for you now
Whether you’re heading up a team, a function or a board — if you face a disruption, it’s vital that you use it well. The rising wave of AI-driven threats, supply-chain shocks, regulatory surprises means you and your organisation need resilience as a baseline, but evolved strength will help you to continue to perform.
Ask yourself:
Have we paused to understand the last disruption rather than just work on the optics of the fallout?
Does our team or board have the habit of processing events with curiosity and diverse opinions rather than smoothing out discomfort?
Are we acting on what we learned — embedding change in culture, systems and behaviours — rather than returning to business as usual?
Leaders can practise evolved strength
Like building muscle, you can work towards evolved strength over time. Try these ideas:
Run small experiments: Test assumptions before reality does — through scenario planning, pilot projects, or tabletop exercises.
Normalise reflection: After challenges, pause as a team to ask: What did we learn? What strengthened us here?
Balance safety and stretch: Create the trust that allows honest debate and thoughtful risk-taking.
Protect renewal: Reflection and recovery are where insight takes hold and growth occurs.
When these habits become part of everyday leadership, uncertainty turns into an engine for progress rather than a barrier to it.
Reflection
Evolved strength is the natural next layer of resilience — you are not just bouncing back to your previous state but strengthening and growing wisdom from the learning. It’s how leaders remain calm in the face of uncertainty, complexity, and change while continuing to learn, adapt, and lead forward.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, “wind extinguishes a candle and energises fire”. Fragile systems falter under stress; adaptive ones use it as fuel. Adaptive stability is that inner fire — steady enough to stay alight, strong enough to grow brighter in the storm.
The world will keep testing our systems and our steadiness. What matters most is how we use those tests.
What recent disruption or challenge could become your best teacher if you paused to learn from it?
