Many organizations can already access the indicators that could help them get left of bang. The problem is that recognizing an indicator and acting on it are two very different things.

That challenge sits at the center of a question we have been trying to answer for readers and clients for years.

How do we apply the concepts described in Left of Bang to the broader range of threats, hazards, disruptions, and opportunities our organizations face?

The concepts described in the book are relatively straightforward when applied at the individual level. A person develops a baseline, recognizes an anomaly, and decides what action they will take. The process is often compressed into seconds or minutes and is carried out by a single individual.

But organizations are different.

The person who first recognizes a potential issue may not be the person responsible for assessing it. The person conducting the assessment may not have the authority to decide what should be done. And the people responsible for implementing a decision may not have participated in any of the previous steps.

What occurs naturally within an individual must be deliberately designed within an organization.

If organizations are going to consistently get left of bang, information must move from recognition to action. That requires a process that can be understood, delegated, managed, and repeated across different teams, functions, threats, hazards, and situations.

Over the last several years, through client engagements, our own research and application, and observing how organizations succeed or fail to act on pre-event indicators, we have been working to answer that question.

What emerged is the foundation of the Operational Level of our Left of Bang Framework.

What follows is an initial introduction to that approach.

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Most discussions about getting left of bang focus on improving our ability to recognize pre-event indicators, assess what they mean, decide what to do, and act before events occur.

Few, however, consider what happens when someone deliberately tries to degrade the ability to do that.

Today, the ability to get left of bang—your ability to get left of bang—is under attack.

Unfortunately, that isn’t hyperbole or exaggeration. It is the stated objective of a military capability known as cognitive warfare.

At its core, cognitive warfare seeks to influence what people pay attention to, how they interpret information, how they feel about it, and ultimately what actions they take as a result.

While cognitive warfare emerged in a military context, many of the same techniques now appear in the information environment most people navigate every day—in inboxes, social media feeds, news articles, podcasts, and other sources relied upon to understand current events.

The question for leaders, analysts, and anyone trying to get left of bang is simple: if cognitive warfare seeks to influence what we notice, how we interpret information, and what actions we take, how does it affect our ability to recognize meaningful change before everyone else?

Cognitive Warfare | Defined

Cognitive warfare1 is no longer a theoretical concept.

Over the last several years, NATO, the U.S. Department of Defense, and allied research organizations have increasingly examined cognitive warfare as an emerging military capability designed to influence how populations understand situations, make decisions, and act.

Consider a few recent examples:

• On February 10, 2026, the Finnish Defense Research Agency released a Research Bulletin on NATO’s Concept of Cognitive Warfare.

• On March 26, 2026, it was announced that the Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office is developing a new project to advance the U.S. military’s cognitive warfare capabilities in response to adversaries like Russia and China employing cognitive warfare against U.S. interests.

• NATO has its own webpage dedicated to protecting the alliance against the threat of cognitive warfare, with articles going back to 2023, and with NATO research beginning in 2022.

The premise behind cognitive warfare is relatively straightforward: if you can influence how people think, then you can influence how they behave.

The goal is not necessarily to convince a population of a specific fact, but to shape how people process information and interpret events. This includes influencing:

• Attention — what people notice

• Perception — how people interpret what they notice

• Memory — what they remember afterward

• Emotion — how they feel about the information

• Decision-making — what they ultimately choose to do

Unlike misinformation, which is often focused on the accuracy of a specific claim, cognitive warfare focuses on the process through which information is interpreted.

And to be clear, allied and adversarial nations are investing in this capability because influencing how people interpret reality creates a strategic competitive advantage.

The goal is to create division, fragmentation, and a reduced collective ability to respond effectively to emerging situations, because if you can shape how a population understands reality, you can shape how it reacts to that reality.

But cognitive warfare is relevant beyond military conflicts.

Because this is ultimately a competition to shape attention, interpretation, emotion, and decision-making, many of the same techniques are used by marketers, journalists, content creators, and analysts in political messages, advocacy efforts, articles, and reports.

For people working to get left of bang, the takeaway from this section is this: most indicators require interpretation before they become actionable, and cognitive warfare seeks to influence that process.

Cognitive Warfare & the Interpretation Problem

People can observe the same fact and arrive at completely different decisions.

• Emergency managers see the same weather forecast and make different decisions about issuing alerts and warnings.

• Investors see the same earnings report and make different decisions about whether a company’s stock is worth buying.

• Security leaders see the same suspicious interaction and make different decisions about whether intervention is necessary.

The information may be the same, but the interpretation often is not.

That process of interpretation sits at the center of getting left of bang. We recognize indicators, assess what they mean, decide what to do, and act before events occur. While each step is important, assessment is where observations are transformed into understanding.

That is where the left-of-bang advantage comes from: the ability to assess the same facts that others see and convert them into meaning more quickly and more effectively than others.

Yet this is also where cognitive warfare seeks to exert influence.

When cognitive warfare is successful, people become increasingly dependent on someone else’s framing of an issue, interpretation of events, or understanding of reality. Rather than developing their own assessment, they adopt one that has already been prepared for them.

For individuals and organizations trying to get left of bang, dependency on someone else’s interpretation creates an incredible risk. We are outsourcing our assessment without consciously choosing to do it.

No one else shares the exact same goals, priorities, opportunities, constraints, and risks that you do. Effective decisions require the ability to evaluate information in the context of your own situation and determine what it means for you.

But what makes cognitive warfare particularly challenging is that it is usually not operating in the foreground.

Most readers of an article focus on the topic being discussed—the political issue, the business trend, the security concern, the disaster, or the current event. Cognitive warfare operates one layer deeper. Its influence is often directed toward the process used to interpret the topic rather than the topic itself.

It is one thing to simply believe something that turns out to be wrong. But it is significantly worse to become dependent on someone else’s interpretation of reality and losing the ability to independently assess what you’re seeing.

For people trying to get left of bang, maintaining ownership of the assessment process is essential.

9 Ways Interpretation Gets Shaped

The challenge for leaders trying to get left of bang is recognizing when their attention, assessment, emotion, or decision-making is being subtly shaped before a conclusion is reached.

The following techniques are not inherently malicious, and many are common communication, marketing, teaching, and leadership tools. The issue is whether you recognize when they are influencing how you interpret what you are seeing.

Think of these as indicators. The more of them you observe at once, the more carefully you should evaluate the assessment being presented and the messenger using them.

1. There is a process to capture attention

One of the easiest patterns to recognize is a structure used to guide a reader to perceive and personalize a threat, priming them to act before they’ve considered alternatives.

You’ll see articles:

• Establish or highlight a threat

• Explain why it affects you personally

• Create a sense of urgency

• Imply that action is required immediately

This sequence works because fear naturally narrows attention. As attention narrows, people become less likely to consider alternative explanations and more likely to accept guidance.

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

• Am I evaluating evidence, or reacting to a threat frame?

• If I accept this interpretation, what am I being encouraged to do next?

2. The writer becomes the prophet

Another common indicator is the suggestion that the author possesses unique insight into where events are heading.

You’ll see statements such as:

• Everyone else is asleep

• Most people are missing this

• The warning signs are already here

• This is only the beginning

• Here’s what happens next

Forecasting is not inherently wrong. In fact, getting left of bang requires making judgments about the future based on incomplete information. The indicator to watch for is when confidence in a prediction begins to substitute for transparency about how that prediction was reached.

Readers can become dependent on the author’s interpretation of events instead of developing their own assessment of what the future may hold.

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

• What facts, assumptions, and reasoning were used to arrive at this conclusion?

• Could someone looking at the same information reasonably arrive at a different forecast?

3. Hidden Sources and Unverifiable Information

A third indicator is reliance on information that cannot be independently assessed.

You’ll see statements such as:

• “I have sources.”

• “I’ve been told.”

• “People in the know.”

• “What I can’t say publicly.”

Sometimes the information may genuinely be sensitive or unavailable for public release. Other times, the underlying facts are simply not cited, sourced, or made available for review.

In either case, the reader is unable to evaluate the evidence supporting the conclusion.

This creates information asymmetry. Readers begin relying on the author’s assessment because they believe the author has access to information they do not, or because they lack the ability to independently verify the claims being made.

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

• Which parts of this argument rely on information and sources I cannot verify on my own?

4. Credential Signaling

Before readers evaluate arguments, they evaluate the messenger. Watch for credentials appearing immediately before major conclusions:

• “As a former…”

• “Having worked across…”

• “After spending years in…”

Credentials can be relevant and valuable. They can also influence how information is interpreted before evidence is considered. Once credibility is transferred from the messenger to the conclusion, readers may accept an assessment before evaluating the evidence supporting it.

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

• Are the credentials relevant to the specific claim being made?

5. Identity Formation

This might be one of the strongest techniques in modern media: once people adopt an identity, information is no longer evaluated solely on facts (if at all).

Watch for language that encourages readers to think in terms of:

• People like us

• Our side

• Our community

• What we believe

Once identity becomes attached to an issue, information is often filtered through loyalty before it is filtered through analysis. When articles consistently align with a reader’s preexisting beliefs, assumptions, or values, they eventually lead to a reader’s certainty about the analysis.

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

• Would I evaluate this information differently if it came from someone outside my group?

• What evidence would cause me to change my mind?

6. Anchored Against an Enemy

This is a classic attention tool: state who the enemy is.

This could be the:

• Government

• Media

• Experts

• Corporations

• The Left

• The Right

• Political opponents

What makes this hard is that the enemy may be real. But once an adversary is established, contradictory information often becomes easier to dismiss and alternative viewpoints become easier to reject.

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

• Is this actually an adversary, or am I being told it is?

• What information becomes easier to dismiss once this adversary has been identified?

7. Urgency and the Compression of Time

Many influence efforts attempt to reduce the amount of time available for assessment.

Watch for phrases such as:

• Act now

• Before it’s too late

• The next 30 days

• Available until Wednesday

Urgency is not always artificial. Sometimes, immediate action is genuinely required.

But the indicator is whether urgency is being used to discourage deliberation. The less time people feel they have, the more likely they are to rely on emotion, intuition, or someone else’s interpretation instead of conducting their own assessment.

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

• Is immediate action genuinely required, or is urgency being used to discourage deliberation?

• What would I do differently if I had another week to assess this situation?

8. Blending Fact with Speculation

This is one of the more sophisticated techniques and one of the most difficult to identify.

An article may begin with verified facts, documented incidents, and legitimate evidence before transitioning into projections, forecasts, scenarios, or predictions.

The transition is often seamless and readers may finish an article unable to distinguish between:

• Established facts

• Reasonable assumptions

• Speculative forecasts

The end result is a reader who remembers an assumption, projection, or speculation as if it were an established fact.

Providing interpretation is not inherently wrong. Most readers rely on experts, analysts, and writers to help make sense of complex issues.

The risk emerges when readers lose track of where the evidence ends and the interpretation begins. Once that distinction becomes blurred, assumptions can be mistaken for facts and forecasts can be mistaken for certainty.

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

• Which parts of this argument are established facts, and which parts are interpretation or speculation?

• Where does the evidence end and the forecast begin?

9. The Community as Validation

Humans naturally look to others for cues about what deserves attention.

Writers often reinforce credibility through social proof:

• Subscriber counts

• Revenue figures

• Comment volume

• Audience growth

• Endorsements

Large audiences can be evidence that a source is worth paying attention to. They are not evidence that a conclusion is correct.

The more social validation replaces independent evaluation, the easier it becomes to adopt an assessment simply because others already have.

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

• Am I accepting this conclusion because of the evidence, or because many other people already have?

• If this same argument came from an unknown source, would I evaluate it differently?

In Closing

Whether you are observing the behavior of a single person or assessing a wide range of threats, hazards, and opportunities that could affect your organization, your ability to understand the environment is a critical skill.

Military organizations are investing in cognitive warfare because influencing how people interpret reality creates an advantage. Political organizations, advocacy groups, companies, journalists, marketers, and content creators all understand versions of the same principle.

People act based on how they understand a situation, so if you can influence that interpretation, you can guide the outcome. The challenge is that their goals, incentives, priorities, and motivations might not be aligned with yours. That uncertainty is exactly why maintaining ownership of the assessment process is so important.

That doesn’t mean that every attempt to persuade, teach, market, or communicate is malicious, nor does it mean that you should reject every interpretation offered by someone else.

But you should seek to maintain ownership over the assessment.

When you recognize the techniques discussed in this article, you gain the ability to pause and ask better questions. You can separate evidence from interpretation, and you can evaluate forecasts. You can decide whether the conclusions being presented are relevant to your own situation, goals, constraints, and risks.

More importantly, you get to choose.

If there is a single message I hope readers take away from this article, it is that before you can get left of bang operationally, you have to avoid becoming dependent on someone else’s framing of reality.

In an environment where cognitive warfare is a recognized capability, protecting the assessment process is itself a step to getting left of bang.

Before You Go

Organizations get left of bang when leaders begin asking different questions. Share this with someone responsible for preparing their organization for an uncertain future.

If you want to go deeper, a paid subscription gives you access to advanced courses, playbooks, and exclusive leadership writing.

Most organizations improve their readiness after a disruption occurs. Moving left of bang requires intentionally building the capabilities needed before the next disruption arrives. We help organizations lead that transition.

Public safety leaders are often asked to prepare their organizations and communities for events that have not happened yet.

That creates a difficult challenge.

It is one thing to personally recognize a potential problem. But it is something else to organize a project that helps others understand it well enough to invest time, attention, and resources into addressing it.

Running a workshop, for example, sounds simple until the project starts competing with everything else on the calendar. The facilitation plan needs to be built. Slides need to be developed. Stakeholders need to be invited. Executives need to be briefed. Small-group facilitators need guidance. Reports need to be written afterward.

And because the work usually gets layered on top of existing responsibilities, the same patterns tend to appear:

• Planning gets compressed into the final week

• Outreach happens later than it should

• Slides are being edited the night before

• The event finishes without a clear path forward

• The report never gets completed

Good preparedness projects fail all the time because there was never enough time or structure or support to execute them properly.

This is a problem that we exist to address.

So this week, we added a new resource to The CP Journal Academy.

The Prolonged Power Outage Readiness Workshop and Workspace

The Prolonged Power Outage Readiness Workshop is a facilitated discussion-based workshop designed to help organizations explore how a long-duration power outage could affect operations, services, decision-making, and community resilience over time.

Organizations can engage us to facilitate the workshop directly, or they can run it internally using the Workshop Workspace and implementation tools now available inside The CP Journal Academy.

The Workspace is a 30-day implementation package designed to help emergency managers and public safety leaders organize, facilitate, and close out this workshop in their own jurisdiction.

Inside the Workspace are the same materials, project tools, and facilitation resources we use ourselves:

• Facilitation guide and speaking notes

• Workshop slides

• Participant placemats

• Project management plan

• Email outreach templates and calendar invitations

• Small-group facilitator briefing materials

• Post-workshop report template

• Short daily implementation videos to guide preparation and project closeout

Our goal for developing the Workspace was straightforward. We wanted to reduce the amount of time, friction, and uncertainty involved in organizing a workshop like this while still allowing leaders to tailor the event to their own community, risks, stakeholders, and priorities.

This was built for professionals who do not have the luxury of spending months developing a workshop from scratch, but still want to run something thoughtful, organized, and operationally useful.

The Workspace breaks the project into manageable daily tasks supported by short videos, templates, facilitation tools, and planning guidance. Most tasks can be completed in one to two hours a day without taking over everything else on your schedule.

Accessing the Workspace

Like all Academy resources, the Workspace is included as part of a paid subscription to The CP Journal. There is no separate purchase required. A subscription provides access to the full Academy library, including workshops, playbooks, courses, webinars, and future releases.

If you are looking for a practical way to move conversations about prolonged power outages from awareness into action, this workshop was built to help.

Learn more about the Workspace here:

Looking Ahead

While a prolonged power outage is just one of many risks organizations may choose to prepare for, the broader idea behind this project is something we’re thinking about a lot at The CP Journal.

Preparedness conversations are important, but eventually they have to become projects, decisions, exercises, workshops, and capabilities inside an organization.

That is one of the reasons we are continuing to expand The CP Journal Academy.

Our goal is not simply to help leaders identify preparedness challenges. It is to provide practical tools that help them organize, execute, and sustain the work required to address them.

This workshop and workspace are the latest step in that direction.

Yesterday, we posted a new resource in The CP Journal Academy.

We will announce and introduce the Prolonged Power Outage Workshop and Workspace this weekend, but if you want an advanced look, you can find it here.

One of the challenges in writing about preparedness—and how it connects to getting left of bang—is that people often assume the concepts only apply during disasters, military operations, crises, or high-consequence events.

Those are certainly some of the moments when an organization’s readiness becomes the most visible, but preparedness is about how people and teams build capabilities before they are needed.

And once you start thinking that way, you begin to notice the same patterns in surprisingly ordinary places. For me, one of those places is in the kitchen.

Cooking doesn’t carry the same stakes as disasters, war, or acts of violence, but there are parallels between a person pursuing mastery in the kitchen and an organization preparing itself for an uncertain future.

That might sound a little ridiculous at first, but when you apply the idea of capability building to something as ordinary as cooking dinner, some of the traditional arguments surrounding preparation begin to look a little ridiculous too.

In both cases, improvement rarely comes from isolated moments of preparation. It comes from systems that allow people to learn, refine, and improve while they are operating. Over time, those small adjustments compound into capability.

There are at least three patterns that exist in both places:

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About This Workspace

This workspace provides the resources, templates, instructional videos, and implementation tools needed for public safety and emergency management leaders to plan and facilitate a prolonged power outage readiness workshop within your jurisdiction.

The materials included throughout this workspace are available to paid subscribers of The CP Journal and are designed to support agencies facilitating the workshop independently using The CP Journal’s step-by-step implementation process.

Activities are organized into a structured sequence that guides participants through workshop preparation, facilitation, and post-workshop reporting over a 30-day period.

If your organization is interested in having The CP Journal facilitate this workshop directly for your jurisdiction, view the workshop overview page here.

To learn more about why we built this Workspace, we recommend starting with our announcement article.

Workspace Table of Contents

Questions or Support

If you have questions about the workshop, implementation process, or facilitation approach, please contact The CP Journal by email: training@cp-journal.com

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

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This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more

This page is part of The CP Journal’s Prolonged Power Outage | Readiness Workshop.

Read more