Unbreakable

What happens when everything goes wrong—the plan unravels, the team fractures, the pressure mounts—and it feels like there’s no way out? In Unbreakable: Building and Leading Resilient Teams, Bradley L. Kirkman and Adam C. Stoverink pose this urgent question to anyone who leads people in today’s uncertain world. Drawing from decades of research, consulting, and teaching, they argue that the most successful teams aren’t just high-performing—they’re unbreakable in the face of adversity.

The authors contend that true resilience requires more than raw talent or rigorous systems. It’s about cultivating four powerful team resources—confidence, teamwork roadmaps, capacity to improvise, and psychological safety. These resources enable teams to bounce back from setbacks stronger than before. Whether you’re managing software developers, first responders, or remote collaborators scattered across continents, Kirkman and Stoverink offer a blueprint for thriving under pressure.

The Fire That Changed Everything

The book begins with a gripping retelling of the 1949 Mann Gulch tragedy—a wildfire that killed thirteen smokejumpers in Montana. Team foreman R. Wagner Dodge tried to lead his crew to safety by igniting an “escape fire,” a desperate, innovative maneuver that could have saved their lives. But the team, confused and fearful, splintered instead of uniting. Only Dodge and two others survived. This real-world disaster sets the stage for the book’s core argument: resilience is not about rugged individualism, but about collective coherence under pressure.

Kirkman and Stoverink analyze the smokejumpers’ failures through lenses like psychologist Karl Weick’s concept of sensemaking—the process of interpreting and responding to chaotic situations. The Mann Gulch crew lost their ability to make sense, coalesce, and persist, revealing timeless lessons for teams in any industry.

Defining Team Resilience

Resilience, the authors explain, is a team’s capacity to bounce back from setbacks. It’s not just enduring hardships or preventing failures—it’s recovering rapidly and positively when the inevitable happens. Kirkman and Stoverink define it as the ability to regain performance after critical team processes such as coordination, monitoring, or backing up behavior have broken down. In their words, “teams can’t demonstrate resilience if nothing tries to break them.”

Resilient teams make sense of adversity, unite as one, and persist through challenges. These three actions—sensemaking, coalescing, and persisting—differentiate resilient teams from those that perform well only in calm waters. As Stoverink and Kirkman put it, “high performance is not resilience.” Many teams thrive when conditions are optimal, yet crumble in crisis. Resilience is about movement and recovery, not static excellence.

Why It Matters in the VUCA Era

Modern organizations face environments that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—often abbreviated as VUCA. COVID-19 underscored how rapidly teams can be thrown into chaos and how few are prepared for it. In these landscapes, adaptability matters more than precision. Kirkman and Stoverink’s research from hundreds of organizations—from biotechnology firms to government agencies—shows that teams equipped for resilience can recover faster and even outperform their previous benchmarks.

The book invites you, as a leader, to view resilience not as a personality trait but as a collective team capacity. You’ll learn how to build it intentionally by strengthening the four resources that help teams perform those resilient actions. These resources act as reservoirs from which teams draw when adversity strikes. The authors emphasize that “resilience isn’t luck—it’s engineered.”

A Blueprint for Unbreakable Teams

The book’s eight chapters unfold like a manual for constructing resilient teams. After analyzing the Mann Gulch disaster and its four team pitfalls—overconfidence or underconfidence, missing teamwork roadmaps, lack of improvisation, and absence of psychological safety—the authors dedicate individual chapters to mastering each of these areas.

You’ll encounter vivid stories of teams across industries: software developers debugging catastrophic crashes, medical professionals making split-second triage decisions during Hurricane Katrina, and airline crews saving lives with wordless coordination during the Miracle on the Hudson. Each case illustrates resilience in action—or its devastating absence. Kirkman and Stoverink weave these narratives into actionable frameworks leaders can apply immediately.

Their message is clear: resilient teams don’t happen by accident. They are built through deliberate leadership choices—empowering autonomy, promoting trust, cultivating psychological safety, and rehearsing adversity before it strikes. These practices are even more vital in remote and hybrid work, where miscommunication and isolation pose new threats to cohesion.

From Crisis to Continuity

By the book’s end, Kirkman and Stoverink guide leaders through resilience cycles: minimizing adversity through preparation, managing adversity through action, and mending afterward through reflection and learning. Their blueprint encourages leaders to conduct team “roses and thorns” debriefs—celebrating successes and learning from mistakes—to transform past hardships into future strength.

Ultimately, Unbreakable isn’t just a book about surviving crisis—it’s about thriving because of it. Kirkman and Stoverink’s research-driven, story-rich insights remind you that adversity isn’t an obstacle to avoid; it’s the ultimate test of leadership and teamwork. In cultivating resilience, you build teams that can withstand any storm—teams that bend but never break.

Kirkman and Stoverink dissect four common pitfalls that cripple teams under stress—each drawn directly from the Mann Gulch smokejumpers’ fatal mistakes. These pitfalls serve as diagnostic tools to help you understand what breaks teams when things go haywire: too little or too much confidence, inadequate teamwork roadmaps, inability to improvise, and lack of psychological safety.

1. The Confidence Paradox

Too little confidence leads to paralysis; too much turns into arrogance. The smokejumpers at Mann Gulch had plenty of personal confidence but lacked collective team confidence. They trusted themselves—yet not their leader or each other. The result was chaos. The lesson? Individual competence does not equal team resilience. Leaders must calibrate confidence carefully by promoting shared belief without feeding hubris. (Note: Enron’s corporate downfall exemplifies extreme overconfidence—leaders so sure of success they ignored ethical reality.)

2. Missing the Map

A team without a roadmap is like a crew without a compass. At Mann Gulch, Dodge’s men lacked clear role definitions and shared mental models. When conditions changed, confusion erupted. The same happens in workplaces when roles blur. The authors use the 1996 Mount Everest climbing disaster as another example—where vague turnaround times and unclear responsibilities cost lives. Successful teams know who does what before crisis hits.

3. When Routines Collapse

Improvisation is a team’s creative lifeline in unfamiliar territory. When disaster renders standard procedures useless, resilient teams pivot fast. Dodge’s escape fire maneuver was improvisation personified—but his crew couldn’t make sense of it. Unlike Dodge, the team at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina tried to improvise too far—making unethical decisions to euthanize patients instead of continuing evacuation. Improvisation demands both creativity and ethical foresight.

4. No Safety, No Voice

Psychological safety—the freedom to speak up without fear—was missing in Mann Gulch. The men were terrified, and Dodge’s unconventional idea went unheard. When fear silences voices, teams lose their greatest resource: diverse thinking. From NASA’s Challenger explosion to Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal, leaders ignored dissent because psychological safety was absent. As Amy Edmondson’s research later showed, teams with high safety outperform precisely because members can question authority.

Core Message

Each pitfall represents an absence of one of the four resilience resources. If one fails—confidence, roadmap, improvisation, or safety—the team’s entire capacity to bounce back collapses. Recognizing these weaknesses allows leaders to engineer resilience before disaster strikes.

Confidence, Kirkman and Stoverink argue, is the lifeblood of resilient teams. It turns uncertainty into action. But team confidence differs from individual bravado—it’s a collective belief that “we can do this together.” Without it, teams fragment under stress. With too much of it, they grow complacent. The authors use compelling examples—like the U.S. hockey team’s “Miracle on Ice”—to show how balanced confidence sparks resilience.

Confidence Without Complacency

NASA astronauts often say, “Complacency is the enemy of resilience.” Kirkman and Stoverink echo this wisdom: overconfidence blinds teams to real risks. A healthy level of confidence keeps members alert yet optimistic. The hockey team at the 1980 Winter Olympics embodied this balance—young, inexperienced, yet united under coach Herb Brooks’s mantra of belief without arrogance. Their preparation and trust in one another turned impossible odds into triumph.

Five Ways Leaders Build Confidence

The authors outline five techniques leaders can use to cultivate team confidence:

• Clarify Goals and Processes: Teams thrive when they know exactly what success looks like (as with the Black Mambas antipoaching team targeting rhino poachers in South Africa).
• Empower Teams: Autonomy builds confidence. Virgin Group’s Richard Branson empowers employees by putting them first, trusting them with decisions before pleasing customers.
• Model Resilience: Smart Design leaders modeled stress-management during the pandemic, showing midday breaks and self-care as examples of strength.
• Coach and Celebrate Wins: Jim Valvano, N.C. State basketball coach, had his team practice cutting down nets before their season—instilling belief through visualization.
• Ethical Leadership: Ethical leaders like those studied at West Point preserve confidence even after failure, proving character outlasts performance dips.

The authors end by reminding leaders that confidence isn’t built overnight—it’s earned through shared struggle and ethical consistency. When teams learn they can rely on each other, confidence becomes contagious, spreading from individual courage to collective conviction.

Imagine facing chaos where everyone freezes because no one knows what to do next. Kirkman and Stoverink call the antidote a teamwork roadmap—a clear, shared understanding of roles, responsibilities, and interaction patterns. Roadmaps help teams coordinate seamlessly under stress, turning confusion into clarity.

From Hospitals to Cockpits

Using gripping examples from healthcare and aviation, the authors illustrate the power of good team mapping. Behavioral response teams in hospitals handle violent patients because they rehearse protocols until instinctive. Similarly, Captain Sully Sullenberger’s crew during the Miracle on the Hudson executed their emergency roles wordlessly thanks to shared mental models developed through training.

Five Ways Leaders Create Clear Roadmaps

• Regular Team Meetings: Frequent briefings keep everyone aligned and ready for surprises.
• Team Interaction Training: Leaders like those at Vanderbilt University Medical Center use after-action reviews to refine teamwork.
• Cross-Training: Sharing skills builds flexibility—Tim Brown of IDEO calls these “T-shaped” employees who combine depth with collaborative breadth.
• Shared Leadership: Companies like W. L. Gore rotate leadership naturally so the most knowledgeable person leads at any time.
• Growth Mindset: Leaders like those studied by Rice University’s Danielle King emphasize learning over perfection, creating teams eager to adapt.

When your team builds and practices its roadmap, crisis doesn’t derail coordination—it activates it. Every member knows not only their job but their peers’ roles, making teamwork fluid, fast, and fearless.

Improvisation—the capacity to create novel solutions from existing knowledge—is the heartbeat of adaptability. Kirkman and Stoverink show that resilient teams improvise not recklessly, but intelligently. Their stories—from corporate product recalls to miraculous rescues—illustrate how improvisation transforms failure into innovation.

Turning Panic into Performance

In one vivid case, a product team discovered its eco-friendly disinfectant was toxic for pets. Instead of spiraling into blame, members pooled expertise and improvised a safe new formula through creative collaboration. Their improvised adaptation saved millions. Similarly, Thai Navy SEALs combined global expertise to rescue the Wild Boars soccer team trapped in a flooded cave, crafting an unprecedented extraction strategy. These examples highlight collaborative ingenuity at its finest.

Two Levers of Improvisation

• Transactive Memory: Teams improvise better when members know who knows what. Like jazz quartets, they trust each other’s expertise to riff in harmony. Leaders build this by training teams together and mapping competencies.
• Team Creativity: Diversity plus psychological safety equals innovation. Encouraging perspective taking and applying IDEO’s brainstorming rules (“defer judgment, encourage wild ideas, build on others’ thoughts”) fuels fast, ethical improvisation.

Balanced Reflexivity

Sometimes persistence, not innovation, is the right call. Kirkman and Stoverink’s own research found that confident teams bounce back fastest when they consider both improvising and staying the course—choosing wisely when to pivot and when to endure.

The secret of team improvisation is simple: embrace chaos as creative raw material. When structured preparation meets spontaneous innovation, adversity becomes opportunity.

If resilience is the body, psychological safety is its soul. It’s the shared belief that you can speak up, take risks, and make mistakes without fear. Kirkman and Stoverink call it the most essential resource for unbreakable teams, influencing every resilient action—sensemaking, coalescing, and persisting.

Why Safety Builds Strength

The authors cite Amy Edmondson’s pioneering studies showing that psychologically safe teams learn faster and perform better. In the book’s consulting team story, a junior analyst’s courage to speak up during a client meltdown saved the project because the leader had cultivated safety beforehand.

Six Behaviors That Create Safety

• Inclusivity: Encourage every voice and actively involve quieter members.
• Accessibility: Be reachable and appreciative—ZipRecruiter’s Ian Siegel trains himself to say “yes, and” instead of “no.”
• Model Vulnerability: SEB executive Per Hugander inspired openness by sharing his failures first.
• Transformational Leadership: Leaders who challenge norms while showing care foster trust.
• Perspective Taking: Seeing through another’s eyes, as climbers failed to do on Everest, melts judgment and fear.
• Trust: HubSpot’s Katie Burke argues trust must precede creativity—leaders prove it by asking “how are you feeling?” and meaning it.

Structural tools like team charters further reinforce psychological safety by formalizing norms for speaking up, sharing information, and resolving conflicts respectfully. Pixar’s Braintrust meeting model crystallizes this culture: frank yet empathetic feedback that nurtures innovation without intimidation.

In short, safety doesn’t make teams soft—it makes them fearless. When people feel free to contribute authentically, the team’s resilience becomes collective, courageous, and unstoppable.

How should you lead when crisis hits? In Chapter 7, the authors turn their theory into a playbook, showing you how to guide your team through adversity from start to finish. They divide this resilience cycle into three phases: minimizing adversity, managing it, and mending afterward.

Phase 1: Minimizing

Preparation is prevention. The fictional marketing-team leader who loses her project manager practices resilience long before the crisis by running hypothetical “sick teammate” simulations. When the real adversity strikes, the team already knows what to do. Leaders detect early warning signs, host open discussions, and foster proactive problem-solving before chaos escalates.

Phase 2: Managing

During crisis, morale and coordination become priorities. The authors recommend milestone celebrations, public appreciation, and buddy systems to maintain motivation. The leader schedules daily 15-minute huddles to monitor progress, reallocate tasks, and encourage backing-up behavior. Conflict management is treated not as punishment but as a moment for empathy—giving burnt-out teammates space to recover. Leaders rebuild energy and confidence through praise and support, preserving psychological safety throughout the storm.

Phase 3: Mending

Once the crisis passes, reflection transforms pain into progress. The “roses and thorns” debrief—listing both successes and struggles—helps the team learn and grow stronger together. Leaders encourage openness about mistakes (like Jeremy’s short temper in the story) and identify changes for future resilience. Research shows that such debriefs can boost performance by up to 25 percent. Mending is about healing and reintegrating lessons—an emotional reset that builds readiness for the next adversity.

Action Compass

Through minimizing, managing, and mending, leaders create a continual learning loop. Teams become stronger, faster, and wiser each time they bounce back. Resilience ceases to be reactive—it becomes part of a team’s DNA.

Kirkman and Stoverink’s crisis framework shows that great leadership is emotional as well as tactical. Guiding people through hardship isn’t about control—it’s about compassion, clarity, and courage.

If COVID-19 proved anything, it’s that resilience must extend beyond office walls. Kirkman and Stoverink’s final chapters adapt their resilience model for the new world of remote and hybrid teamwork—where distance magnifies confusion, isolation, and miscommunication.

Challenges and Opportunities

When face-to-face interaction fades, teams must convert virtual limitations into creative fuel. The authors use an ad agency forced into remote work to reveal how leaders can rebuild the four resilience resources digitally. The team succeeds by maintaining confidence through regular “camera-on” check-ins, teamwork roadmaps through backups for every role, improvisation through virtual brainstorming tools, and psychological safety through chat visibility that lets quieter voices be heard.

Adapting the Four Resources

• Confidence: Alternate camera-on and camera-off meetings to curb fatigue, keep communication inclusive, and reinforce clarity about goals.
• Teamwork Roadmaps: Craft team charters collaboratively so remote members see shared values and coordination rules in writing.
• Improvisation: Use rich communication media and online knowledge repositories to strengthen transactive memory; virtual tools can enhance creativity instead of limiting it.
• Psychological Safety: Foster personal connection virtually—leaders must help members feel seen through authentic check-ins and respect flexible boundaries to avoid burnout.

Remote and hybrid teams demand intentionality. What happens organically in offices—spontaneous chats, informal learning—must now be designed deliberately. When distance is handled thoughtfully, teams gain clarity, inclusivity, and resilience unmatched by old models.

Ultimately, Unbreakable concludes optimistically: resilience isn’t hindered by distance—it’s redefined by it. Virtual collaboration can make teams even stronger, provided leaders replace proximity with purpose and build connection on trust instead of location.