Company Chair-Leg Testing

A manifesto for organizational resilience. What happens if a crucial part of your organization is unavailable tomorrow? Not a server, not the building, but a capability: the ability to restore power, serve a customer, or get a crew to the right place in a storm. Most organizations have a confident answer on paper and no idea in practice. This book is about finding out the other way: on a calm day, on purpose, on your own terms, with the coffee still warm and nobody in the cold.

When a storm hits the utility Meridian Power & Grid, almost all of the technology works exactly as designed. The dashboards are green where they should be green and red where they should be red. Yet homes stay dark into the morning commute, because three quiet dependencies failed at once: a degraded vendor phone line, a runbook no one could open, and the one engineer who "just knew" asleep four provinces away. The chair looked solid. It had simply lost three of its legs, and no one knew.

The mental model at the heart of the book: capabilities are chairs, dependencies are legs, and the Capability Graph is how you finally see what you are standing on. A capability rests on people, tools, channels, permissions, vendors, and knowledge. Combinations of missing legs are exactly what no dashboard measures, so this book teaches you to map them before an incident does it for you.

The practical heart of the book is the Leg Test: deliberately removing a dependency on a calm day to see whether the capability stays standing. The single most important chapter is about doing this without hurting the people the legs are made of. The grin the book wears throughout comes off entirely here, and that is deliberate.

A single test becomes a program: how to measure resilience, build a practice that outlives its founder, and unify the scattered disciplines that have all, separately, been trying to answer the same question. If you finish a chapter thinking "that could not happen here," you have found your first chair. Pull.