Without a Safety Net

Prefer to read this in Spanish? You can find the full Spanish version here

2019: I was hired to transform and professionalise the English teaching business of one of the most recognised institutions in the world: the British Council. Presence in dozens of countries, thousands of students of all ages, millions of people reached every year. A huge opportunity.

One of the ideas we developed was to launch a high-quality online English offer for adults, 100% digital, built around the best teachers and the methodology that had defined the British Council for decades.

The need was clear: to offer prestige and excellence to adults who, because of personal or professional commitments, could not—or did not want to—travel several times a week to a physical centre, but still wanted a high-quality learning experience.

I convinced João Marques, a technology entrepreneur I had worked with before and who was looking for a new challenge. He joined, and we built a team.

Months of development. Building a team that combined urgency and innovation with methodological rigour. Creating something new without compromising quality standards.

December 2019. Proud of the progress. Ready to launch a beta test in February 2020 with 30 students. Market launch planned for September 2020. For an organisation of that size and complexity, we were moving at cruising speed.

A solid plan. A strong team. A beautiful project. Nothing could knock us off course.

February 2020. COVID spreads globally.

Worldwide lockdown. Millions of people unable to leave their homes.

We had a platform designed for adults, still in validation.

Within 24 hours we made the decision: we would use it for all students. Especially children and teenagers. There was no safety net. Not all checks had been completed. But there was an urgent need, and our customers needed clarity, support, and solutions.

We launched.

We pivoted at breakneck speed. What would normally have taken months to learn, we learned in hours. Literally. Every hour brought new challenges.

More than 80,000 students from around the world migrated in three weeks.

Servers went down. They were not built for that scale.

Teachers were not prepared for that context. Content was not adapted. Methodology had to change.

Training at speed. Platform innovation for younger learners. Constant methodological adjustments. Using the strongest teachers to train the next wave. Increasing server capacity. Everything at once.

A platform built for adults suddenly had thousands of children and teenagers. We added protection and monitoring tools.

Late-night calls. Errors, limitations, strengths. People stepping up and raising the bar. Crisis mode for weeks.

Beta test? Forgotten.

This was a live product.

The outcome exceeded even the most optimistic expectations: customers impressed by the speed of execution, innovation at a scale no one had imagined, teachers with accelerated learning curves, and very positive feedback from families and students.

There was understanding when things did not work at first, paired with a clear expectation: fix it fast. And we did.

It was one of the most intense, stressful, and at the same time most rewarding professional experiences of my life.

Action. Learn. Act. Correct. Apologise. Commit. Act again.

No quiet days. Not a single day without learning something new.

COVID passed.

Children returned to physical classrooms.

And the project returned to its original concept: high-quality online English for adults. But now with a far more robust platform and an operational maturity impossible to replicate through a hundred beta tests.

I left the British Council years ago.

English Online—as the product eventually became known—is now the British Council’s largest student centre and one of its most successful recent businesses.

I don’t believe that success—or that transformation—would have looked the same without the crisis we lived through.

But here is the important nuance:

The crisis did not create the strategy.
The direction was clear from the start.

What the crisis did was remove fear.
Fear of getting it wrong. Excessive caution.
The need to ask for permission before acting.

Over time, my learning has become more uncomfortable:

But none of that matters without the willingness to act.
If fear of failure outweighs the conviction to move forward.

So here is the question I leave you with:

Do we need a crisis or an external shock to act with conviction?
Or have we learned to hide behind processes, betas, and excuses to avoid getting it wrong?

Courage cannot exist without risk.
Are we willing to play without a safety net when we already have conviction?

Those are my questions.
Your response? I’m listening.