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When a major incident hits – whether it’s a critical system outage, a data breach or a supply chain breakdown – the way teams respond can determine whether the organization becomes stronger or stays vulnerable to future disruptions. Incident response is no longer just about restoring service as quickly as possible. It’s about embedding lessons learned into the culture, processes and technology stack so that the next event is met with speed, clarity and confidence.
From removing unnecessary approval layers and improving observability to leveraging AI-driven monitoring and cross-functional “war rooms,” the most effective leaders treat incidents as catalysts for lasting change. Below, 20 members of Forbes Technology Council share the most impactful post-incident improvements they’ve observed or implemented – and how these changes have cut response times and strengthened organizational resilience.
1. Use Real-Time Traffic Data To Make Informed Decisions
A Fortune 50 team once faced a dilemma. A permissive firewall rule left in place to meet a launch deadline became too risky to revoke. Watching them shift from fear-driven guesswork to data-informed decisions using real-time traffic insights highlighted a core truth: Resilience in network security comes from visibility, not heroics. – Jody Brazil, FireMon
2. Remove Approval Layers
Removing layers of approval sounds counterintuitive when something breaks. However, every layer of approval from someone who does not truly understand what they are approving disempowers the person making the actual change – when they are ultimately the person who can ensure its success. They must feel responsibility. Only be an approver if you have a contribution. – Steve Tait, Skyhigh Security
3. Clearly Map Task Ownership
After a major outage, we implemented automated runbooks with clear ownership mapping. This cut response times by reducing manual decision-making and improved resilience since teams could act immediately with preapproved recovery steps. – Ajit Sahu, Walmart
4. Build Organizational Muscle Memory
I experienced a 16-hour outage where teams spent more than 10 hours just figuring out who owned what and which dashboard to trust. We realized our problem wasn’t technical – it was organizational muscle memory. Our runbooks were perfect, but nobody had used them under pressure. – Saurabh Saxena, Amazon Web Services
5. Embrace Ultra-Resilience Practices
Don’t let success be the reason for your failure. Both outages and slowdowns will cause you to lose business. Enterprises are embracing ultra-resilience, which encompasses in-region resilience, multi-region disaster recovery, data protection, zero downtimes, and readiness for peak and freak events. Increasingly, they are doing that by adopting distributed database architectures. – Karthik Ranganathan, Yugabyte
6. Record Essential Work As How-To Videos
After the pandemic pushed us all onto Zoom, we realized we could use it not just for meetings, but also as a resilience tool. Now, every staff member can record themselves completing a task or project, creating a library of simple how-to videos. It’s fast, it lives on everyone’s computer, and it’s made our team far more agile and less dependent on any single person. – Joe Manok, Clark University
7. Add Observability At Every Step
After a major incident, the most important thing I learned was that you can only fix what you can see. Hence, adding observability into every step of the process to help make informed decisions is an integral step in SDLC. The more data we have in an easily consumable format, the more quickly we can recover from any incident. – Ameya Ambardekar, Collabrios Health LLC
8. Leverage AI-Driven Monitoring
After a major outage, I implemented AI-driven monitoring that detects anomalies, prioritizes issues and triggers automated containment before teams intervene. This cut response times from hours to minutes and improved resilience. The key lesson: Resilience is proactive design that limits impact before customers notice. – FNU Anupama (Anupama Nataraj)
9. Centralize Communication And Automate Key Workflows
Following a peak-season disruption, we centralized cross-team communication and automated key inventory workflows. This shift not only reduced response times, but also gave retailers real-time visibility, ensuring resilience and faster recovery during peak demand and unexpected supply chain challenges. – Georgia Leybourne, Linnworks
10. Adopt Blameless Post-Mortems
A key change after a major incident is adopting a blameless post-mortem to analyze systemic failure. Instead of blaming an individual, we investigate the environmental and procedural flaws that led to the incident. This approach, rooted in systems theory, builds a more resilient organization by addressing root causes, not just symptoms. It fosters psychological safety and encourages transparency. – Terry Oroszi, Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine.
11. Invest in Automation And Cross-Functional Response Teams
Early in my career, a major system outage at a manufacturing company taught me that we were too dependent on tribal knowledge and manual intervention. We invested in automation, created clear runbooks and built cross-functional response teams. What used to take hours to diagnose and recover from now takes minutes because everyone knows their role and systems are designed for resilience. – Chris “Jay” Hawkinson, Lamb Weston
12. Reintroduce Disciplined Change Control
As ironic as it sounds, several major incidents taught us the value of documentation and the need to go back to basics. In an Agile setup, recovery can be painful without a clear rollback path. Reintroducing disciplined change control created a blueprint for reversing changes when needed. That balance of agility and control has cut response times and strengthened resilience. – Yogesh Malik, Way2Direct
13. Simplify Systems And Empower Small Teams
After a major failure, I learned to do one thing: simplify. Cut the noise, remove layers and empower small teams with full responsibility. When people own the problem end-to-end, decisions are faster, fixes are cleaner and resilience isn’t a process; it’s built into the culture. – Oleg Sadikov, DeviQA
14. Shift To AI-Powered, Adaptive Response Maps
After a major outage, the most transformative change was shifting from static playbooks to self-evolving response maps powered by AI. Instead of relying on fixed steps, the system learns from every incident, dynamically reconfigures escalation paths and predicts weak points before they cascade – turning resilience into a living, adaptive capability rather than a manual routine. – Nicola Sfondrini, PWC
15. Build Cross-Functional Incident War Rooms
After a major outage, we stopped treating incident response as a technical checklist and made it a cross-functional muscle. We built joint war rooms that included business, communications, legal and IT team members from the start. Roles were clear, decision paths were tighter and drills were more realistic. That shift cut response times in half and gave leadership real-time clarity. Resilience is shaped by how you train before it. – Maman Ibrahim, EugeneZonda Cyber Consulting Services
16. Adopt Structured ‘Warm Handovers’
One impactful change after a major incident is adopting structured “warm handovers” during global response. By ensuring context flows seamlessly between teams, organizations reduce duplication, accelerate containment and strengthen resilience, since every team starts with full situational awareness. – Tannu Jiwnani, Microsoft
17. Train Teams To Filter And Prioritize Alerts
We’ve changed our approach to focusing on understanding the severity of an alert. We put alerts on everything, because a smooth business and solid technical infrastructure should have no errors. But nothing is perfect. So we have turned our attention to training each other to filter alerts. We have learned how to determine what is important, what should be addressed later and what is absolutely necessary to not only keep our business open, but also align with our growth initiatives. – WaiJe Coler, InfoTracer
18. Embed Red-Team-Style Simulations In Playbooks
After a critical incident, we embedded red-team-style simulations into our playbooks. Practicing real attack scenarios under pressure built more confidence and prepared us for future scenarios. It helped cut response times and turned resilience into a leadership muscle, not just a technical fix. Holding not just table-top scenarios, but actual dry runs, is a tremendous help in preparing a team for the next event. – Dan Sorensen
19. Implement NIST Resilience Standards
We implemented NIST standards, which cover most of the typical failures. These controls help teams to both better address failures and to create a stronger ecosystem for resilience. – Venkata Thummala, Stanford Health Care
20. Carry Out A Multilevel Root Cause Analysis
Carry out a thorough root cause analysis where you brainstorm and go deeper into why the incident happened. Don’t stop the investigation at the outer layer – continue to dig deep. I introduced a process where the team answers five levels of questions about why a certain incident happened. Based on the answers, the team can plan a resolution. Make sure your engineers are part of that investigation. – Simana Paul, Ocean Orchestra
