Recover from What You Can't Stop: Director of Operations Leon Israel on Embedding Operational Resilience

Leon Israel is Director of Operations at iluminr, the microsimulation platform built for enterprise teams. He joined in 2018 from Risk Logic, came up through customer success, and now keeps the company itself running.

Eight years in, he has a clear thesis about where traditional operational resilience falls short: organizations can analyze, plan, and exercise, but embedding that change across everyone is the part plans alone never reach. In this interview he talks about the personal resilience the job demands, why a multicolored dashboard beats an all-green one, and how he decides what earns a place in the workflow.

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The road in

You joined iluminr from Risk Logic. What made you make the leap?

Leon: The predecessor to iluminr, CQ Command, was built and maintained by what we called the Risk Logic tech team, which was two people back then. In late 2017 we started bringing more developers in-house, and Risk Logic began getting direct inquiries just for the software, not for consulting. Josh and I were having a coffee and he said, I need a customer-facing person, interested? Want to build a unicorn? I said, yes, let's do that.

The longer version is that I learned a huge amount in the consulting team, from a lot of amazing people and a wildly diverse customer base, but I was looking for more immediacy in affecting change. Software is one way to do that.

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What did you understand about resilience in 2018 that turned out to be only half the picture?

Leon: The true challenge of embedding. If you look at any framework, analyze, plan, test, exercise, there's always this ring around the edge that says embed this across your organization. Think about information security or building evacuations. Everyone knows that if you click a dodgy link you call someone and follow a process, and if the alarm goes off you listen to the instructions and go out the door.

Resilience is more vague for the average person in a medium or large organization. They know there are risk people and resilience people who do things, but they don't know what they're supposed to do with it until the system goes down and they're the one answering calls from customers. When I was running exercises and building continuity and resilience plans, the analysis and the plans and the great ideas were all there. What was missing, through nobody's fault, was how you actually embed that change across the whole organization. Software is a better vehicle for that, and the democratized simulation work of the last two years is showing real promise.

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The personal side of resilience

What's your one piece of advice for teams on the journey to democratized resilience?

Leon: Perseverance, number one. Anyone who puts their hand up to help organizations stay resilient already has something unique. It's the people who volunteer for emergency services or the defence forces when they're young. There's nothing wrong with people who don't do it, but there's definitely something unique, in the people who want to. The work is often thankless.

Years ago, before I was a consultant, I was a senior salesperson at an e-commerce company when someone cut the fiber cable to the building and killed the call center. It was mayhem, and through a few short conversations we got things back up and running. There were no big thank yous or parties, but we recovered. I explain it this way: risk management tries to stop bad things from happening, and resilience and crisis management is about recovering from the things you can't stop as fast as possible.

When I hear that a team or a customer I've worked with had something happen and they were back up and running in hours or days without a big financial hit, that's a victory. So it's partly thankless, and the personal resilience required to be a resilience professional is right up there.

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Building something that lasts

What did iluminr do instinctively as a small team that you've worked to keep as it's grown?

Leon: This is more about startup mentality than resilience, but there's an assumed understanding in the small business world that you'll work yourself to the bone to build the thing, and there's truth to that. When we were small, even during the COVID days of funky hours and just you and your monitor, we protected dedicated time that wasn't meetings and wasn't necessarily going out, just social time. A pause. We did that really well as a team of six who'd spun out of Risk Logic, and we've kept doing it. That's something I never want to lose. We've doubled in size three or four times over the last five years, and keeping that has mattered.

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Over eight years you've seen people come and go. What do the ones who thrive share that never that wouldn't be on a resume?

Leon: The real thread is not taking no for an answer, which is an art form. In software, saying no is also an important skill, so it's this strange balance: there has to be an answer, we are going to solve this, while not biting off more than you can chew. Also passions. Everyone on the team who's really gelled and gone on to do amazing things has one, two, or three passions outside work. Some overlap with the job. Part of why I said yes to Josh was that I used to build programs for fun and had missed it.

I'm not a developer, but I like tinkering, and that comes back to a desire to solve puzzles. Outside work I'm a Formula One nutcase and a science fiction nutcase. In F1 they treat each year as a project, the 26th project, the 27th, a fresh car and often a fresh team, one goal inside 12 months and every option on the table. That overlaps with how we work without being about work. Across the team it's sporting passions, art, hiking. One person turned out to be competing in Hyrox events, which none of us knew.

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What the work teaches

What's a lesson you learned the hard way that made you better at serving customers?

Leon: Not over-committing personal or emotional equity. My first years here were customer success focused, and I prided myself on building personal relationships with my customers. That still pays dividends today. But no relationship is perfect, especially a work one, and if something outside your control trips over and upsets someone, that can send you into a spiral if you've over-committed emotionally. I went through two or three experiences like that, and they helped me see that the personal connection and the work are two separate things. They intertwine and complement each other, but they stay separate. Holding that line made me better at the work and at the relationships.

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When something breaks, what tells you whether the culture is working?

Leon: There's no single tell, but it's about knowing the people in your overlapping spheres and watching for changes in behavior. If someone is usually very vocal and goes quiet, that's worth a check-in. If someone is usually quiet and gets more reactive, same thing. Plenty of people operate very well quietly, so it isn't about the quiet itself, it's the change, the delta. And on what good looks like: if you look at a dashboard and everything is green, you're missing something. A multicolored dashboard means you know your gaps and what needs work. There's always a prioritization game, you can't do everything at once, but if you know about it, you're in a good position.

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What's the least glamorous thing you do that earns more customer trust than anything flashy?

Leon: Back in my customer success days it was data sanitization. Helping resilience champions who weren't data experts clean their data so they could use their tools and processes properly. That is not glamorous, it's literally data entry, though the tooling for it is changing week by week right now. Beyond that, it's putting in the time to really understand an organization. When you get on the next call and use their terminology and their words, it feels like you're part of their team, but that takes a lot of reading and background on a client-by-client basis, and a lot of mental gear shifting across a portfolio. I remember a very large client where you'd talk to one team, then a second, then a third, and each needed a different gear. I applied the same client-by-client method inside that one account, and the main champion said, I didn't know what these teams did, how do you? More recently it's staying on top of an ever-growing compliance and governance world, capturing the less exciting details about controls and permissions and standards, and having them on hand for current and new customers. People see that as a stage gate, but it builds trust.

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What have you learned about trust from being on both sides, customer success and now operations?

Leon: Transparency. You'd rather tell someone it's not going to happen than say let me get back to you and never do. In a subscription world there's no finish line, no moment where you're done and everyone says good job. You're doing it week in, week out, year on year, so transparency matters even more. The other piece is understanding dependencies. Early in the business continuity world I learned to map business impact and dependencies. When you're living inside an organization with customers, internal teams, and vendors, that map sets your expectations. If we change this to solve a problem, well, yes, but that thing is used by customers, supported by a vendor, and owned by an internal team, and this one has a contract and that one doesn't. Understanding the interdependencies helps you see what you can achieve quickly versus what needs more people involved from the start.

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AI and tooling

You run our AI tools evaluation. How do you tell what will make an impact from what just sounds good?

Leon: About 60 percent of our team are builders. They build, design, and test, so new capability always hits their radar and they want to play with it, and we have to be careful not to expose ourselves. So part one is, what does it do and why. Part two is, is it really unique, or does something we already have do this? Anyone in procurement would say obviously, but look at how many note-taking apps or meeting tools or project management tools most people accumulate. Then it's the point of difference, and the harder questions: is it using our data to train things, where does it live, and what controls does the organization have? The last few years decentralized how applications get built. Almost anyone can do it now, and the time and education cost has collapsed. So the real test is who has actually gone from proof of concept to operating something properly. Are they hosting it, do they have security controls, and is the point of difference real? My time in operations quietly turned me into a procurement person, which I wasn't expecting, but it's been interesting.

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What's next

What do you want to be true of how iluminr runs a year from now?

Leon: We'll always be a people-first organization, which sounds odd for a software company to say, but from leadership down we're people people. On growth, I'd like our existing customers to be able to do more without needing us, to grow their use across their organization quickly, and to reach parts of the world where we don't have a presence yet. In customer success I always said, you aren't paying us for Leon to drive your use of iluminr, you're the one driving it. I see customer success and account teams as the coaches and personal trainers who check in, bring best practice and good news, and feed back areas we could enhance. So a bigger, complementary self-service capability alongside that.

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What do you do outside of work?

What don't I do outside work. Time with my partner Janine. I like building things with my hands, Lego and science fiction models. Formula One has been a massive passion for a very long time, and thanks to Netflix it became something Janine and I share. I listen to how the team principals approach leadership, how they run a business and treat each race and each season, and I'm slowly pulling a concept out of that to apply elsewhere. Science fiction is about reaching for the stars. There's a telescope behind me I like to stare through now and then, out to what's beyond the skies we haven't understood yet. And family, which matters a lot. And food.

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