Engineered to outrun: How ABB builds resilience into the core of process industries 

Resilience has long been the industry’s emergency response. ABB argues it should be the blueprint.

Joachim Braun is ready for Germany to win another FIFA World Cup.

He says it with the kind of confidence that has nothing to do with swagger. Germany’s football philosophy has rarely depended on brilliant individuals. It has depended on discipline and a particular faith in the team as a unit of performance. “You put a lot of effort into forming a strong team where one supports the other,” he says. That, in a sentence, is also how he thinks about leadership.

Braun, division president of process industries, has spent close to three decades inside ABB, a global technology leader in electrification and automation, with 110,000 employees and 140 years of history. In Australia, its roots stretch back to the late nineteenth century. The company sits deep inside the systems modern economies depend on, from mines, energy grids and water networks to ports, processing plants and data centres.

For ABB’s Process Industries division – spanning mining, metals, pulp and paper, cement and digital operations – this is not theoretical. These are sectors where operations run continuously, often in remote or extreme environments, and where resilience is measured in uptime, safety and output.

This part of the economy is unforgiving, and resilience, if it is to mean anything, has to be built in before disruption occurs.

That is the logic that aligns with ABB’s tagline, Engineered to Outrun, which lands rather better once Braun starts talking. He is not speaking about speed in the manic, startup sense of the word. He is speaking about something more valuable – how to build organisations and infrastructure that keep running 24/7.

It is a philosophy grounded not in speed for its own sake, but in sustained performance – helping customers outperform by building resilience into the core of their operations.

Braun speaks openly about ABB’s Nordic management inheritance, a culture where hierarchy carries less weight than a leader’s capacity to listen and change their mind.

“As a leader, you need to still convince your people. They just wouldn’t take your word for it because you’re at a certain hierarchical level,” he says. That sounds almost self-evident until you consider how rarely it is practised.

His version of leadership places real strain on judgment. When he has an idea, he presents it to his team before it’s fully formed. “It’s typically earlier than what you think,” he says. Too many leaders ask for input once they are already in love with the answer. Inclusive leadership, in Braun’s telling, is not a communications exercise but a design principle that requires the same thing resilience requires – the ability to trust, test and modify.

This matters enormously in ABB’s world. Process industries cannot afford downtime, which makes them notoriously slow to adopt new technology, not out of stubbornness, but because the cost of getting it wrong is an interrupted operation. ABB’s answer has been to protect the core control and build new digital and automation capabilities on top.

Across ABB’s installed base, supporting some of the world’s most critical industrial operations, the focus is increasingly on enabling customers to modernise without disruption – allowing customers to preserve system integrity while enabling the flexibility, scalability and efficiency needed for the next era of industrial operations.

One of the most telling applications is in knowledge transfer, where an AI-enabled tool called Industrial Knowledge Vault captures what experienced operators know and makes it available to younger operators before that knowledge walks out the door with a retiring workforce. Six months after launch, Braun says, customers were visibly excited and onboarding time had shortened significantly.

At Gold Fields’ Granny Smith mine in Western Australia, ABB replaced manual processes with a digital system that gives managers a live picture of everything moving through a mine processing 1.6 million tonnes of ore a year.

Social licence, Braun argues, belongs in the same frame. Miners have learned, often the hard way, that community acceptance is not a soft consideration but a hard operational one. Get it wrong, and the project might stop, no matter how dire the need. The irony, he points out, is that the technical solutions are often further ahead than public perception allows.

But bridging the gap between what is possible and what communities trust is not primarily a technology problem. It is a leadership one, and it is one Joanne Woo, ABB’s global vice president and division head of marketing and communications, knows from the inside.

Woo believes many organisations are still thinking about resilience the wrong way – treating it as something defensive, something you switch on when disruption hits.

“Resilience has moved from a risk topic to a leadership priority,” she says. “The environment we’re operating in today – geopolitics, energy volatility, workforce shifts, rapid advances in AI – it’s not one disruption at a time. It’s everything, all at once.”

In that context, resilience is no longer about protecting against downside risk. It is becoming a core capability – one that determines whether organisations can continue to perform, adapt and grow in uncertain conditions.

“The most resilient organisations aren’t the ones that react best when something goes wrong,” Woo says. “They’re the ones that are intentionally designed for it – from their operations and systems through to how their people make decisions.”

The football analogy, it turns out, has its limits. But the principle holds.

In both sport and industry, performance over time is rarely the result of individual brilliance. It comes from systems designed to operate under pressure, in uncertainty, and at scale.

For ABB and the industries, it serves, resilience is no longer a contingency plan. It is the blueprint.

Learn more at abb.com/au

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