The Value of Eruptions

Mount Etna has been erupting again.

The images are, as ever, spectacular. Rivers of lava. Columns of ash. Headlines that suggest disorder.

Yet to volcanologists, an eruption is not necessarily a sign that something has gone wrong. Quite the opposite. It is often evidence that the mountain is behaving exactly as it should.

Pressure builds beneath the surface. Eventually, it finds a way out.

There is something unexpectedly reassuring about that.

We have a habit of treating institutions rather differently.

A university revises its strategy. A school rethinks its curriculum. A company restructures. Long-held assumptions are challenged. New ideas unsettle familiar routines.

The immediate reaction is often the same.

Has something broken?

History offers a different interpretation.

The institutions we admire for their longevity have rarely been the most static. They have endured because they have absorbed successive waves of change without surrendering the principles that defined them in the first place.

Consider the University of Bologna. Founded in 1088, it has remained in continuous operation for more than nine centuries.

Or University of Oxford, where teaching can be traced back to 1096. Across almost a millennium, it has navigated religious upheaval, scientific revolutions, industrialisation, world wars and the digital age.

Their identity endured not because they resisted change, but because they distinguished between what was fundamental and what was merely customary.

That is a far more demanding form of resilience.

Too often, organisations confuse continuity with permanence.

They are not the same thing.

Continuity is a commitment to purpose.

Permanence is a refusal to evolve.

One sustains institutions.

The other slowly weakens them.

The pace of change only reinforces the point. Around 264 million students are now enrolled in higher education worldwide, a figure that has grown dramatically over the past few decades as universities have expanded their missions, their audiences and their global reach.

Growth on that scale does not reward institutions that stand still. It rewards those that adapt without losing their identity.

Mount Etna offers another quiet lesson.

The fertile vineyards and orchards surrounding the volcano exist because of centuries of eruptions. The landscape owes its richness not despite the disruption, but because of it.

The parallel is difficult to ignore.

Few institutions are transformed during periods of complete stability. More often, they emerge stronger from moments that once appeared uncertain: an uncomfortable conversation, an ambitious reform, a difficult strategic decision whose value only becomes obvious in hindsight.

Seen through that lens, disruption begins to look rather different.

Not every eruption is a crisis.

Sometimes it is simply the visible expression of renewal already underway.

Perhaps that is why watching Mount Etna this week felt strangely reassuring.

The strongest institutions are seldom those that remain untouched.

They are those that understand the difference between preserving their purpose and preserving their habits.

There is wisdom in that distinction.