A recap, the data behind it, and a question worth asking your own business.
On Wednesday 22 July we hosted the first Perigon One: Stable Ground breakfast.
It was an invite-only morning, built for a specific segment of business leaders working through similar operational pressures. Our guest list was curated on purpose, attracting thirty-nine people from across the manufacturing and industrial logistics value chain.
The morning was built around one question: How stable is your business, really?
Most operators think they already know the answer, when we dove deeper into what stability requires the room told a different story.
The morning opened with a short presentation from Jason Willison, CEO of Perigon One, framing the central question of the event.
How much of a typical business’s stability depends on undocumented workarounds and single points of failure, rather than deliberate planning?
That set up the panel discussion, featuring Jason Willison, Simon Peirce (CTO of Perigon Labs), Jame Wilson (Director of Delmont Insurance Group), and Flavio Bruni (General Manager of Weld East Fabricators), who worked through the practical realities of building resilience, from IT infrastructure and continuity planning, through cyber insurance, to where AI genuinely fits once the fundamentals are in order.
The discussion ran as a mix of prepared questions and live audience input, with new questions coming in from the floor throughout.
Partway through, we polled the room live on where they felt their own business actually sits.
Read that again.
In a room of experienced operators, most people are closer to firefighting than planning.
The panel discussion explained why that number is so high.
Someone hits a problem. They find a workaround. They don’t raise it, because it’s easier not to.
That workaround becomes the way things are done.
The documented process, and whatever disaster recovery plan sits on top of it, is now describing something that no longer happens. It’s the same pattern we’ve written about before in the hidden cost of reactive IT, just showing up at the operations level instead of the help-desk.
One thread ran through the entire session. Get the fundamentals right before spending a dollar on anything else, including AI.
Strong systems and clean data make new technology valuable. Firefighting and undocumented workarounds just get automated faster.
There’s a newer risk hiding in that gap too. Staff are already using free AI tools to move faster, without any policy governing what information goes into them. If someone’s pasting client data or tener documents into a personal account, that’s IP leaving the business with no way to track it, which is exactly why it’s worth taking the time to govern your teams’ AI use properly, that than banning tools nobody will actually stop using.
Stable Ground wasn’t open to the public. We built the guest list deliberately, for a specific segment of businesses, and invited them into one room for a morning of insights and collaborative conversations.
What struck us wasn’t how different everyone’s businesses were. It was how similar their problems turned out to be.
Nobody in the room knew what anyone else had answered in the poll until we shared it. The numbers landed exactly like you’d expect a mix of relief and recognition. It’s something we see constantly in our industry specific IT work: the technology looks different from the outside, but the underlying gaps are often identical.
That’s really the value of a curated room like this. Not another supplier pitching a fix, but a group of peers who, it turns out, have already worked through pieces of the same puzzles.
The Q&A ran long. People kept building on each other’s questions instead of waiting for their own turn. A few conversations that started at the coffee station are still going now, over calls and follow-up catch-ups.
We had 39 guests in the room, for a first event that’s a strong sign the invitation landed with the right people. It also confirms something we already suspected. Businesses want to talk about this. They just don’t often get the chance.
We’d like to thank Delmont Insurance Group and Perigon Labs for thier support in bringing the morning together, and our panel, Jason Willison, Simon Peirce, James Wilson, and Flavio Bruni, for a conversation that clearly resonate with the room.
If anything from the panel struck a chord, all four are worth following for more on where they’re taking these ideas next:
If you weren’t in the room, you can still answer the question we asked. Here it is again, broken into three parts.
Are you fixing problems after they occur, with no real visibility into what’s likely to break next?
Ask yourself:
If most of your week is spent responding rather than planning, this is where you sit.
Do you have a clear, documented plan for where your operations are heading, or is that still mostly in someone’s head?
Ask yourself:
This is precisely the gap a virtual Chief Information Officer is built to close, someone accountable for the roadmap existing at all.
If a critical piece of infrastructure failed tomorrow, would your business keep operating, or would it stop?
Ask yourself:
It’s the same gap we explored in why incident response plans rarely match reality, a plan that only exists on paper isn’t much of a plan at all.
In a room, 44% put themselves in the first category. Only 9% were confident enough to claim the third.
If either of those numbers made you uncomfortable, that’s useful information, not a criticism. It is the reason the room existed in the first place.
If you’d like a clear, no-cost read on where your business actually sits against these three categories, we’re offering a short assessment built directly from what came up in the room.
Or, if you’d simply like to be in the room next time these conversations happen, let us know and we’ll keep you in mind for the next Stable Ground once a date is confirmed.
Either way, the question doesn’t go away by not answering it.
