Redressability. It is one of the pillars in the World Economic Forum's Digital Trust framework. And it is the one that keeps making me think — because it is the one most companies quietly ignore.
Redressability is simple in principle: when something goes wrong, what happens next? Is there a clear path to fix it? Do the people affected feel heard? Most organisations focus on prevention. That is smart. But redressability is about what happens after prevention fails — and prevention always fails eventually.
The Windsurfing Incident
Many years ago — around the time of the incident. A different lake, a different era.
Many years ago, I hosted client projects on our own servers. One day — while I was windsurfing — something broke. My technical partner was sailing in the Mediterranean. Neither of us could respond. Nobody could log in. Nobody could fix it.
The stress when we finally found out was immense: missed calls piling up, a partner at sea, clients with nothing working. There was no on-call process. No monitoring alert. No communication plan. Just two founders completely unreachable at the worst possible moment.
That taught me something I have never forgotten: you cannot prevent all problems. But you can be prepared for them.
Still at it — January 2022, the Netherlands. The processes are better now.
What Redressability Actually Looks Like
It comes down to three things — and most organisations miss at least one of them:
You know when something breaks — before your clients tell you. Monitoring, alerting, visibility.
You have a clear process and you act fast. Who gets called, when, and what they do first.
You keep people informed throughout — not just when it is fixed. Honesty during the crisis, not after.
Most organisations have partial detection. Fewer have a tested response process. And communication during an incident? That is where almost everyone falls short — because it feels exposing to tell clients something is broken before you know how to fix it. But silence is far more damaging than honesty.
Clarity Beats Speed
At Sourcelab we are actively improving on all three — better monitoring, clearer incident processes, and contracts that set explicit expectations upfront. That last point matters more than most people realise.
If a client knows "we respond to critical issues within four hours during business hours," that is a better foundation than "we jump whenever you call." The first builds trust. The second builds anxiety — because it implies availability without actually guaranteeing it, and it sets an expectation that is impossible to sustain.
Trust is not "nothing ever goes wrong."
Trust is "when something goes wrong, I know what to expect."
That is redressability. And it starts with clarity.
The WEF framework puts redressability alongside accountability, transparency, and security for a reason. It is not a nice-to-have. It is the proof of everything else you claim about your organisation — visible only in the moments you would rather not be tested.
When something breaks in a service you use — what makes you trust the company? I would genuinely like to know.
Want to talk about Digital Trust, resilience, or how to prepare for when things go wrong?
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