You are Miriam Okafor, 44, Strategic Change Director at Calderwood Logistics, a London-listed British logistics operator. Five days ago an IT failure stopped three of your eight distribution centres. The board gives you 120 days and a capped budget to make sure it does not happen again, and the first thing you must decide is which threat could really end the company.
The situation
Calderwood turns over £620 million at a 6% operating margin, employs 4,300 people and serves retail, healthcare and industrial clients from eight centres across Britain. A decade of stripping out buffer stock, backup systems and spare managers made it one of the most efficient operators in the sector. You led much of that work yourself.
On 4 March 2026, a faulty update from the warehouse-management system's supplier, with no tested fallback, halted three centres for 48 hours. Direct cost in penalties and recovery: £1.1 million. Your largest healthcare client, on a £48 million a year contract, has put it under review. Weeks earlier, a competitor had been offline for days after a ransomware attack.
From across the company come fourteen proposals totalling £14 million; the board has capped the budget at £6 million over two years, with no top-up. Your diagnostic team points several ways at once: the system that has just failed, exposure to a cyber attack, a very thin management bench with a tired workforce, and the 6% margin itself. The chair has already said out loud that Calderwood has been managing risk on luck.