Last chance to register: We’re hosting a webinar on leading left of bang and preparing for an uncertain future on Tuesday. If you’ve been meaning to sign up, this is your reminder.

An Introduction to Event Assessments

A fundamental element of getting left of bang is using the time before incidents occur to get ready for them. But preparing is an act of discernment. It requires choosing which incidents we’re going to prepare for, and which ones won’t receive a meaningful level of attention.

The choice is not trivial either.

Since no organization has the time or resources to prepare for everything, the question becomes whether the resulting prioritization of events is deliberate or looks and feels a bit more aimless, reactive, or unexamined. To be clear, there are implications and downstream effects on this process.

When organizations and individuals struggle to decide which threats, hazards, and opportunities are important to them, they often end up with a mix of over-preparation in some areas, blind spots in others, and a level of confidence that isn’t always earned. This is something you often see in organizations that are very busy, but not necessarily getting closer to the state of readiness they are pursuing.

This article is written as a primer on that decision and will be expanded upon with additional articles in the coming weeks.

In both the public and private sectors, organizations define success through their goals, strategies, mission statements, and values. But those aspirations are always influenced by the events they face and the environment they operate in. Deciding what to prepare for, therefore, is central to whether those strategies and visions can be achieved.

First, How This Is Described

This process goes by many names. It is often referred to as a risk assessment, threat assessment, or hazard assessment, and some other combination of those terms.

In this article, I will refer to it as an event assessment.

One reason for that shift is that when the process title relates to risk, it typically limits the application to negative events. But the same assessment process can be applied more broadly. Organizations are not only exposed to threats and hazards, but also to opportunities—events or conditions that, if recognized and acted upon, can create advantage.

So the event assessment can be applied to:

• Threats: Events or actions by an actor with intent that could cause harm to your organization, people, or mission (e.g., cyber attacks, violence, fraud, competitive actions).

• Hazards: Events that occur without intent, typically driven by natural, environmental, or systemic conditions (e.g., hurricanes, wildfires, infrastructure failures, pandemics).

• Opportunities: Events or conditions that could create a positive outcome or advantage for your organization, if recognized and acted upon (e.g., market shifts, leadership changes, emerging technologies).

You can call it anything you’d like, but at the end of the day, this process is about deciding what you’re preparing for. Since an executive is accountable for both the risks their organization faces and the opportunities it pursues, framing it this way increases the chances that those decisions are made together, instead of being separated across different processes, teams, and priorities.

The Three Components

An event assessment is built on three elements:

• The probability (or likelihood) of the event occurring

• The consequences (or impact) if it does

• The readiness of the organization to change the outcome

Most assessment processes focus on the first two. Looking at the likelihood and impact allows events to be categorized and compared—high probability and high impact, low probability and high impact, and so on. From there, organizations can determine the strategy that best fits each event—whether to reduce its likelihood, limit its impact, build the capability to perform through it, or a combination of those options—and then prioritize where to focus time, attention, and resources.

But many assessments stop here. They identify what could happen and how bad it would be, but not what the organization needs to be ready to perform when it does, and its current ability to perform at that level.

That gap is important for executives making budgeting and resource allocation decisions across the portfolio of risk they are responsible for.

Two events with the same likelihood and impact are not the same problem if the organization is well prepared for one but unprepared for the other. Without accounting for readiness, prioritization can be misleading—directing attention toward events that are already well-managed, while overlooking those where performance could break down.

That is why readiness is a critical second part of the assessment.

If a wildfire or flood is near the top of your list, the question becomes: are you ready to detect when they start? Are you prepared to issue alerts and warnings? Conduct evacuations? Surge mutual aid and partner resources to meet the demands of the incident?

If the loss of a key staff member or executive is on your list, readiness might mean your ability to launch a recruiting process, temporarily fill critical roles, maintain continuity in client delivery, and avoid single points of failure.

Those are capabilities—and as we discuss in our white paper on “Preparing the Organization You Will Need”—each with an expected level of performance.

I’ll just note that I didn’t always think about these elements this way. In the past, I treated likelihood and impact as the core of the assessment and considered readiness as something separate—first identifying the risks, then determining what to do about them at some later point.

But in practice, that separation between “what is happening outside the organization” and “what we are doing about it internally” is problematic. The decisions leaders make in relation to threats, hazards, and opportunities are often about what their organization will do to prepare for them. So when they aren’t connected in a single process, we create artificial barriers that limits an executive’s ability to choose the path forward.

However, when these decisions are made together, leaders are able to consider what could happen, what it would mean, and whether the organization is ready for it at the same time.

A Left of Bang Perspective

The way these three elements are applied matters just as much as the elements themselves. Conducting this assessment through a left of bang lens requires recognizing that the threats, hazards, and opportunities we are preparing for exist in the future, not the past.

In practice, the assessment process often relies on analyzing historical data—identifying rates of occurrence and the impacts of similar incidents. That is certainly a component of the process, but likelihood and impact are not static.

They change over time as the environment, the organization, and the broader context evolve. Historical data can inform that understanding, but it is not sufficient on its own.

Preparing for the future often requires making decisions about events that have not happened before, or have not happened recently enough to rely on data alone. In those cases, trends can provide direction—but they do not eliminate the need for judgment.

This is why getting left of bang is a function of leadership. Leaders still have to decide: even without a clear precedent, is this something we are going to prepare for?

As a result, a forward-looking assessment incorporates not only objective data, but also the subjective perception of the senior and elected leaders responsible and accountable for the organization’s performance when the event occurs.

Without that alignment, even well-supported risks can struggle to gain traction, while others receive attention based on how they are perceived.

In Closing

This process produces more than a list of threats, hazards, and opportunities. It creates the strategic clarity necessary for people across the organization to understand what matters, why it matters, and where time, attention, and resources should be focused.

That clarity is what enables action, and action is the reason we go through the process.

Once the events you care about are identified and assessed, the next step is to determine what needs to be done about them. In some cases, that means reducing the likelihood of the event. In others, it means limiting the impact. And in many, it means building the capability to perform effectively when the event occurs. These decisions translate into projects, which are the efforts to close gaps, improve performance, and align the organization with what it says is important.

But the goal of this process is not to produce a perfect list of events or perfectly precise data to describe them. It is possible to spend significant time and effort pursuing that level of certainty, but often at the expense of making actual progress. Analysis is necessary, but it is not the end state we are pursuing. The outcome we are seeking is direction for the organization’s preparations.

This is ultimately a leadership responsibility. Executives are accountable for both the risks an organization faces, and the opportunities it pursues, often within the constraint of limited resources and competing priorities. When likelihood, impact, and readiness are not clearly understood, those decisions are still being made—but without the context required for them to be made deliberately.

At its core, this process is about deciding what your organization is preparing for—and ensuring that decision is made clearly, and acted on.

Before You Go

Found this useful? Share it. If this sparked an idea, pass it along to someone responsible for getting left of bang. That’s how this work spreads.

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

And if you’re asking the question many leaders eventually face—are we actually becoming more prepared, or just busier?—the first step is a Strategic Briefing, where we map how your organization is preparing today, identify where gaps exist, and what that means for your ability to perform when it matters.

Welcome back to The CP Journal, where we break down what it takes to get left of bang.

Take a moment to think about how preparedness often improves in public safety.

After Columbine, active shooter response changed.

After Hurricane Katrina, emergency management doctrine changed.

After the Boston Marathon Bombing, mass casualty coordination improved drastically.

Following the January 2025 fires in Los Angeles, how communities prepare for wind-driven wildfires, issue alerts and warnings, and evacuate entire neighborhoods is changing.

There are countless more we could add, especially when you look at major incidents from corporate security, business, cybersecurity, and any other field.

The pattern is hard to ignore. Many organizations only improve after something goes wrong.

But in an increasingly complex and fast-changing environment, that reactive approach is no longer enough.

On May 5th, we are hosting a webinar on how leaders can shift their organizations left of bang by treating preparedness as a capability, not just a collection of plans, purchases, training sessions, and projects.

The session builds off our recently published white paper, Preparing the Organization You Will Need: A Strategic Doctrine for Getting Left of Bang, and draws from major incidents and interviews with leaders across public safety, emergency management, and the private sector.

We’ll focus on three responsibilities for leaders who want to build the organization they will need before the next disruption occurs.

To learn more and to reserve your spot, click the button below.

Reserve Your Spot

Inside The CP Journal

This week, we unlocked a Left of Bang Leadership Essay—typically reserved for paying subscribers—for everyone to read.

• This articles focuses on why organizations don’t naturally move left of bang—and what consistently pulls them back to a reactive posture, and the role leaders must play in creating and sustaining focus on problems that haven’t forced themselves into the room yet

• If you’ve been thinking about what it actually takes to shift an organization—not just talk about it—this is the place to start.

Before You Go

Found this useful? Share it. If this sparked an idea, pass it along to someone responsible for getting left of bang. That’s how this work spreads.

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

And if you’re asking the question many leaders eventually face—are we actually becoming more prepared, or just busier?—the first step is a Strategic Briefing, where we map how your organization is preparing today, identify where gaps exist, and what that means for your ability to perform when it matters.

Many of the serious conversations about getting left of bang don’t happen until something has already gone wrong.

Even in organizations that value proactiveness and see themselves as forward-looking, it’s difficult to sustain focus on problems that haven’t forced themselves into the room yet. Especially in dynamic environments, the work of getting ahead of problems is easily crowded out by the urgency of responding to the ones that have already happened.

That pattern frustrated me for much of my career. It took working in and with organizations trying to make this shift to understand what actually makes it difficult. Leading an organization left of bang means making decisions that aren’t always obvious to others—often before there’s enough shared context to support them.

And that creates risk. Because when a leader pushes for something others don’t yet see, they’re not just proposing an idea. They’re putting their credibility on the line. They have to explain the problem, justify the investment, and carry the uncertainty of whether it will pay off. And if it doesn’t land, it can erode their credibility and make the next effort harder to pursue.

Over time, that’s what keeps organizations operating right of bang.

The Leadership Divide

I don’t believe that most organizations make a conscious decision to operate right of bang. I think they just get there over time. The risk associated with pushing for proactive decisions, combined with the constant pull of immediate problems and a lack of a common terminology to describe the challenges they are facing, makes it easier and politically safer to focus on what’s already happened instead of what could happen next.

What I’ve learned working with our clients is that, on the surface, the difference between left and right of bang organizations isn’t always obvious either. Organizations on both sides of this divide have plans, training programs, and invest time and resources into readying themselves.

But the way those efforts are approached—and the role that leadership plays in shaping them—looks very different.

• Right of bang organizations tend to let experience drive their focus. What happened last time becomes the basis for what gets attention next.

• Left of bang organizations, on the other hand, approach it differently. They make deliberate decisions about which challenges to prepare for, what capabilities and skills they need to build, and know what “ready” actually means for their organization.

But this is why moving left of bang requires leadership. Organizations don’t get there on their own.

To operate differently—especially when an organization has drifted right of bang by following the path of least resistance—someone has to be willing to challenge it and to push for a different approach before there’s enough shared context to support it. First, organizations need someone to take on the risk that comes with being early, before the next event forces the issue, and then second, see the shift through until it becomes the way the organization operates.

That’s the role of the leader.

The Leaders Who Get Left of Bang

The leaders who consistently move their organizations left of bang operate with the same constraints, competing priorities, resource limitations, and pressure to respond to what’s already happening in front of them as those operating right of bang.

Across our work with clients and interviews, we’ve found seven behaviors and patterns that consistently show up in how these leaders operate. Most leaders will recognize some of them in their work, though far fewer are doing them consistently.

1. They are clear on where they are and where they are trying to go. They understand where their organization sits on the timeline today, and they have a vision for where it needs to be. That clarity allows them to make informed decisions about how to move further left of bang.

2. They pay close attention to what’s happening around them. Situational awareness—of the people around them, the operating environment, and the trends shaping both—guides how they orient themselves and informs the path forward.

3. They don’t wait for events to clarify what matters. They make deliberate decisions about what their organization needs to be able to do, and then work backward from that to develop the capabilities.

4. They don’t confuse activity with progress. They look for ways to understand whether their efforts are actually improving the organization’s ability to perform, or just keeping them busy.

5. They don’t accept that certain outcomes are just the cost of doing business. The threats to life, the organization, or the community aren’t abstract risks, but are problems to be solved. And that drives a relentless focus on building the capabilities required to address them.

6. They don’t build those capabilities for themselves alone. They work to institutionalize them so the organization can continue to operate and prepare left of bang, regardless of who is in the role.

7. They understand that awareness, by itself, isn’t enough. The ability to make decisions and act decisively is what ultimately determines whether any of it matters.

This isn’t to imply it is easy. There’s no triggering event to validate the decisions, and there are no guarantees they’ll be correct. Which means the responsibility falls on the leader to create that clarity—to define the priorities, how progress will be measured, and move forward without waiting for either to emerge on their own.

The Way Forward

Left-of-bang leadership behaviors aren’t limited to one role or one part of an organization. The responsibility to operate left of bang doesn’t sit only with people on the front lines or those sitting in boardrooms. It applies to anyone who has a hand in shaping how the organization operates and prepares for what comes next.

Because the reality is, while many organizations take the path of least resistance, the environment is not waiting for them. Events will continue to test them, whether they’re ready or not. And when they do, the difference shows up quickly.

Organizations and leaders that have invested in building and institutionalizing their capabilities are able to respond with clarity and purpose. Those who haven’t are left trying to figure it out in the moment.

Whether that difference shows up as a competitive advantage, an operational one, or simply in doing right by the people and communities they serve, the outcome is the same—the advantage lies with those who have moved left of bang.

The leadership essays we share with our paid subscribers are where I work through these challenges in more depth. They are grounded in the work we’re doing with clients, the patterns emerging from interviews, and the decisions we’re making as we apply these ideas in our own business.

If you see the role you play in moving your organization left of bang, these essays are built to help you do it.

Before You Go

Found this useful? Share it. If this sparked an idea, pass it along to someone responsible for getting left of bang. That’s how this work spreads.

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

And if you’re asking the question many leaders eventually face—are we actually becoming more prepared, or just busier?—the first step is a Strategic Briefing, where we map how your organization is preparing today, identify where gaps exist, and what that means for your ability to perform when it matters.

On May 5th, Patrick Van Horne, co-founder of The CP Journal, will walk through a practical framework for shifting “left of bang” by treating preparedness as a capability—not just a collection of plans, training, and exercises.

In this session, you will:

• Learn how leading organizations are approaching preparedness in an uncertain environment

• Define the capabilities your organization actually needs—and what “ready” looks like

• Understand how to build a system that turns strategy into sustained readiness

Webinar Details

• When: May 5, 2026 | 1:00 p.m. ET / 10:00 a.m. PT

• Who: This session is designed for public safety leaders, emergency managers, and organizational leaders responsible for preparedness and operational readiness.

• Format: ~45 minute presentation + ~15 minutes live Q&A

• Seats: Limited to 500 live attendees

Registration

Reserve your spot to learn how to build the organization you’ll need before the next disruption.

Reserve Your Spot

Welcome back to The CP Journal, where we break down what it takes to get left of bang.

I was a guest on the Resilient Mental State podcast this week with Kyle Shepard.

We spent most of the conversation on how the left-of-bang concept has evolved—how organizations prepare for the future and build the systems they need to adapt and grow amid difficult conditions.

But after the conversation ended, I kept coming back to something that has been sitting underneath this work for a long time: organizational systems either set individuals up for success or they undermine them.

In a dynamic and uncertain environment, the need for strong, capable people is obvious. I don’t think that is a contentious statement. But even highly capable individuals can’t overcome a system that isn’t designed to support them.

Most of the gaps that I see come from systems that were never built to consistently develop and sustain the capabilities the organization actually needs. Instead, they rely on the assumption that the right people will overcome any hurdles put in their path.

Sometimes they do. But that also isn’t a strategy.

The push-and-pull tension between the people you have and the systems that support them determines whether organizations propel their teams forward or hold themselves back from becoming the organization they want and need to be.

We get into that in more detail in this conversation. Give it a listen.

Inside The CP Journal

Expanding on this concept, we published an article for Academy subscribers on how leaders who choose to position their organization right of bang create the conditions for their best people to leave.

Before You Go

Found this useful? Share it. If this sparked an idea, pass it along to someone responsible for getting left of bang. That’s how this work spreads.

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

And if you’re asking the question many leaders eventually face—are we actually becoming more prepared, or just busier?—the first step is a Strategic Briefing, where we map how your organization is preparing today, identify where gaps exist, and what that means for your ability to perform when it matters.

Welcome back to The CP Journal, where we break down what it takes to get left of bang.

At the end of this article, I’m going to recommend The Infernal Tower, a book just published by retired Navy SEAL Adam Karaoguz.

I don’t often recommend specific fiction books. It’s usually easier—and safer—to point to something directly tied to a professional application. A framework. A case study. Something you can take and use immediately.

But this one stuck with me, and it connects more directly to how we think about preparedness than it might seem at first glance. If you want to skip ahead, you can read my review on Amazon.

One of the most interesting conclusions from the 9/11 Commission was that the failure to prevent the September 11th terrorist attacks was, in part, a failure of imagination.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe imagining that specific scenario more clearly would have made a difference. Maybe it wouldn’t have. I have no idea.

But when you try to operationalize that idea—when you try to turn it into something an organization can actually act on—the problem looks a little different. In practice, the constraint isn’t usually imagination, but a product of resources and priorities.

Every organization operates with limits on time, money, and attention. No one, regardless of their agency’s size, gets to prepare for everything. Which means, at some point, every organization has to answer the same question: If we can’t prepare for everything, what are we going to prioritize?

That question drives a familiar and natural selection process. Risks are identified, and threats and hazards are assessed according to the likelihood/probability they could occur and the consequences/impact of their happening. It is through this process that priority lists are built, and decisions are made about what to invest in.

Organizations go through this process because determining how severe a particular threat or hazard is only the first step to deciding what can actually be addressed. Once everything is laid out, organizations also have to consider whether people and partners are willing to help address it.

Preparedness is almost never a solo effort. It requires coordination across departments, partners, and stakeholders, each with their own priorities and constraints. Leaders know who will show up without hesitation, who will resist, and who will participate—but only up to a point. And even if organizations choose not to talk about this dynamic, it certainly shapes what gets selected.

High-probability, high-consequence risks are easy to pitch to partners. There’s usually alignment across agencies, departments, and teams, and the case for investment makes itself.

High-probability, low-consequence issues get addressed too, as long as the effort is contained and the ask is reasonable.

But low-probability, high-consequence risks are different.

They are harder to explain, harder to justify, and harder to get people to commit to. People are already committed to other things, and if something hasn’t happened before, or hasn’t happened here, the bar for attention shifts higher.

At a certain point, it doesn’t matter how severe the potential consequences are. If it feels too far removed from reality, it gets pushed aside. There is always something more immediate, more visible, more defensible to focus on instead.

This is how many organizations are built to operate. It isn’t because they “lack imagination,” but because they are forced to prioritize within constraints. That isn’t an underhanded critique of bureaucracy or process, but just the reality professionals operate within. Which means the scenarios that require the most imagination are often the least likely to be addressed.

Except in one case.

The Role of Imaginative Individuals

If organizations are structurally biased toward what is visible, proven, and already understood, then the ability to prepare for what isn’t has to come from somewhere else.

In every case I’ve seen where an organization did take low-probability, high-consequence risks seriously, there was always a person behind it. There was someone who was willing to take an idea that didn’t yet have proof behind it and push it forward anyway. Someone who could see a future that others weren’t spending time on—and wasn’t constrained by the fact that it hadn’t happened before.

But seeing a potential future wasn’t enough either. They also understood how to operate inside the organization, knew who needed to be involved, what objections would come up, and how to make the case in a way that didn’t feel abstract or speculative. They could take something that sounded unlikely and translate it into something that felt real enough to act on.

But it raises a practical question: where does that initial insight come from?

For some people, it’s natural. They have always thought that way.

But for others, it has to be developed. And that’s where something like fiction starts to matter more than some people give it credit for.

Why Fiction Matters More Than It Seems

A lot of professional development stays inside what has already happened. Case studies, after-action reports, and lessons learned are all grounded in reality, which is useful, but is also limiting. Those tools reinforce the boundary present in organizations that routinely only get better at what has already been experienced.

Fiction, on the other hand, operates differently.

Fiction expands the set of scenarios we’re willing to take seriously. It introduces environments, decisions, and consequences that force a reader to think through ambiguity, tradeoffs, and second and third-order effects without the benefit of hindsight.

And just as important, fiction develops how you think about people. The best fiction isn’t driven just by plot, but by the characters inside the story. How individuals make decisions under pressure, interpret incomplete information, influence others, and justify those choices to themselves and others.

That’s the same terrain that leaders operate in.

Reading fiction expands what feels possible, which changes what you’re willing to take seriously. Before you can convince anyone else to prepare for a specific threat or hazard, to develop new capabilities, or to shift the way an organization operates, you have to see it clearly enough yourself.

Recommendation | The Infernal Tower

That’s why I’m recommending The Infernal Tower, by Adam Karaoguz.

It’s a fast-moving, high-consequence story built around a selection process to lead a foundation developing world-changing technology. When that process is compromised, the environment shifts quickly—forcing the characters to navigate uncertainty, pressure, and competing priorities in ways that feel grounded, rather than exaggerated.

What stood out to me wasn’t just the pace of the story, but the way the characters operate inside of it. They aren’t caricatures that get dismissed as unrelatable. They make decisions with incomplete information, they misread situations and adjust. They influence each other in ways that feel familiar if you’ve spent time inside organizations.

Beyond the entertainment, that is what makes the book so engaging. It is exposure to how people think and act when conditions change faster than expected.

One of the reasons why I recommend this book is because this kind of thinking didn’t happen by accident. Adam has a level of intentionality behind how those characters are built, which is incredibly impressive.

In an article he shared last fall, he described the “Character Rose”, which is a framework he uses to develop different personality types and archetypes. It is a structured way of thinking about how people behave, how they differ, and how those differences play out under pressure.

This level of detail is the result of someone paying close attention to human behavior—and then building a way to make sense of it. This is the same thing we’re always working towards when it comes to getting left of bang.

I think you should give it a read.

In Closing

If imagination is required to prepare for what hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t develop on its own. It has to be built.

Fiction is one way to do that. Certainly not the only way, but in my experience, an incredibly useful way.

And if you’re in a position where you’re trying to get others to take something seriously before it becomes obvious, it’s worth paying attention to anything that sharpens how you see those possibilities.

Before You Go

If this article helped you see your organization more clearly, share it. If this sparked an idea, pass it along to someone responsible for getting left of bang. That’s how this work spreads.

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

And if you’re asking the question many leaders eventually face—are we actually becoming more prepared, or just busier?—the first step is a Left of Bang Strategic Briefing, where we help you identify where your organization is today, where gaps exist, and what that means for your ability to perform when it matters.

This essay is for paying subscribers to The CP Journal.

Here is the claim: When leaders choose to position their organizations right of bang, they lose the people most capable of making the organization better.

Said another way: The most capable people are the least likely to stay in a reactive system.

When a high-performing person “leaves” a reactive organization, it usually looks like one of three things:

• They leave the organization and get a new job somewhere else. This is often abrupt and catches leadership off guard.

• They stay, but become frustrated and negative. They are tolerated for their past performance, but are increasingly difficult to work with.

• They stay, but disengage. They become indifferent operators and supervisors who have accepted that nothing is going to change.

None of these outcomes improve the organization’s ability to perform or meet the needs and expectations of their customers or community.

Organizations spend an enormous amount of time and effort recruiting, hiring, and onboarding the right people. But it is the system they place them into that determines whether those people help move the organization forward—or slowly disengage from it.

Read more

One of my favorite parts of my job is interviewing executives about how they are getting their organizations left of bang and preparing them for an uncertain future. I learn something in every conversation because each organization and leader approaches this pursuit in slightly different ways.

And yet, even with those differences, there are clear patterns that emerge.

These patterns show up in how organizations think about preparedness—whether they believe it’s even possible, how they pursue it, what they prioritize, and what tradeoffs they’re willing to make along the way. Over time, those decisions shape how the organization actually operates.

Which means that when the question comes up—how do we move left of bang?—the answer depends heavily on where the organization is starting from, and whether they can see it clearly or not.

The challenge is that most teams don’t have a shared way to describe that starting point.

People use different language to describe their organization’s level of readiness and how they build it. They’re drawing from different incidents, different experiences, and different goals. As a result, people often talk past each other—not necessarily because they disagree, but because they’re operating from different models of what preparedness actually is.

Most organizations are doing a lot of work in preparedness. Far fewer can clearly describe what that work is actually building. This is a challenge we explore in more detail in our white paper, Preparing the Organization You Will Need.

What we’ve found is that once teams can name and see those patterns clearly in their own organization, they can begin to establish a baseline for where they are, and from there, make deliberate decisions about how to move forward.

To help with this, we use a simple diagnostic built around four common organizational personas.

These personas aren’t labels—they reflect patterns of behavior we’ve seen repeatedly across organizations. Once a team can recognize which pattern they are operating in, it becomes much easier to understand what’s actually driving their preparedness decisions and what they should do to move further left of bang.

Here are the four personas:

Persona #1 | The Activity-Driven Organization

This organization is consistently busy with preparedness work. Plans are being written and updated, training is being conducted, exercises are being run, and new resources are being acquired. When gaps are identified, they are usually acted on quickly.

This organization sits just to the right of bang on the timeline because preparedness work is selected based on visible needs, emerging issues, or recent problems. Over time, this creates a steady flow of activity across many areas, though not necessarily progress towards defined outcomes.

What defines this organization is not a lack of effort but a lack of direction. There is strong agency: when something needs to be done, the organization moves. But that work is not consistently guided by a defined set of capabilities or performance expectations.

As a result, it is difficult to determine whether all of this effort is improving readiness in a meaningful way. Activity accumulates, but progress is hard to measure, and often assumed rather than demonstrated.

You’ll hear this:

• “We do a lot of training and exercises and coordination.”

• “We’ve been working on that.”

• “We identified that gap and addressed it.”

• “We’re busy—we’re doing a lot right now.”

• “We’ve made a lot of improvements over the last few years.”

What it takes to move forward:

This organization already has energy and initiative. The shift is not about doing more—it’s about becoming more deliberate. If everything is a priority, you’re not being proactive—you’re being responsive at a higher tempo.

Progress begins when the organization starts clearly defining the capabilities it is trying to build and uses those to guide decisions about where to invest time and effort. Without that clarity, activity continues, but direction remains diffuse, and the organization stays anchored in place, even as the volume of work increases.

Persona #2 | The Constrained Organization

This organization’s preparedness efforts are shaped by operational demands and perceived limitations. Most time and attention are consumed by day-to-day responsibilities, leaving little space for sustained improvement.

This organization sits far to the right of bang on the timeline because preparedness is driven almost entirely by reaction and immediate demands. Preparedness activities occur intermittently—often when required, when time allows, or after an incident—rather than as part of a consistent effort to improve over time.

What defines this organization is not a lack of awareness, but a lack of agency. Leaders understand what should be done, but do not believe they have the ability to consistently act on it within the constraints they face.

Staffing limitations, workload, and competing demands are experienced as fixed conditions. Over time, this creates a learned realism about what is and isn’t likely to stick, and preparedness becomes something that must fit within the system, rather than something the system can be shaped to support.

You’ll hear this:

• “We just don’t have the time.”

• “We’re going from one thing to the next all day.”

• “We know we should be doing more, but…”

• “Every time we start something, something else takes priority.”

• “That’s just the reality of how this job works.”

• “We’ve tried things before, but they don’t stick.”

What it takes to move forward:

It would be easy to look at this organization and assume something is wrong—but in many cases, they are describing a real set of constraints. Staffing limitations, operational demands, and competing priorities are not abstract—they are experienced daily.

The shift begins with recognizing that improvement is possible within those constraints—not outside of them.

Progress does not come from adding more work, but from creating a simple, repeatable way to focus limited time and attention on what matters most. Early movement often comes from small, visible changes that demonstrate the system can, in fact, be influenced.

Persona #3 | The Transitional Organization

This organization is actively trying to shift from a reactive posture to a more proactive one. Leaders recognize the limitations of focusing only on past incidents and are beginning to look ahead to future risks and demands.

This organization sits just to the left of bang on the timeline because it is beginning to prioritize future conditions and emerging risks, not just past events. At the same time, because this shift is occurring while still managing day-to-day operations, leaders face a constant pull back toward reactive work.

Preparedness efforts include both maintaining current operations and exploring what may be needed next. Some structure exists—key people are involved, conversations are happening, and initiatives are underway—but the approach is not yet fully defined or consistently applied, and progress can vary depending on who is leading it.

You’ll hear this:

• “We can’t just keep reacting.”

• “We’re trying to get ahead of this.”

• “We’ve been talking about that more.”

• “We’re starting to look at what’s happening in other places.”

• “We’ve got the right people involved—we just need to structure it better.”

• “We’re doing some of this already, just not consistently.”

What it takes to move forward:

This organization is already moving in the right direction. The challenge is turning that momentum into something that lasts.

Progress comes from formalizing what is currently informal—defining priorities, assigning ownership, and creating a consistent process for deciding what to work on and how to evaluate it. Without that structure, progress remains uneven, and the organization is pulled back toward reactive work as competing demands take over.

Persona #4 | The Proactive Organization

This organization approaches preparedness as a defined and managed capability. The capabilities it needs are clearly identified, prioritized, and owned.

This organization sits far to the left of bang on the timeline because it is deliberately preparing for conditions that have not yet occurred. Preparedness work is selected based on defined priorities, not recent events, and is sustained over time through a structured system.

Training, planning, resources, and validation efforts are aligned to improve specific capabilities. Performance is regularly reviewed against defined expectations, allowing the organization to understand where it is strong, where it is not, and what to do next.

You’ll hear this:

• “These are the capabilities we’re focused on this year.”

• “We know where we’re strong and where we’re not.”

• “This is who owns that.”

• “We’re measuring that against a defined standard.”

• “This is part of how we run the organization.”

• “When we identify a gap, we turn it into a project and track it.”

What it takes to move forward:

This organization is not focused on shifting left—it is focused on sustaining and refining its system.

Progress comes from continuously evaluating performance, adjusting priorities as conditions change, and strengthening the system so it endures over time. The opportunity is not to build the system, but to evolve it and ensure it remains aligned with the environment it is meant to operate in.

From Diagnosis to Action

Every day, executives and leaders make decisions that shape their organizations—what projects to invest in, what skills to develop, what equipment to purchase. And more importantly, they make decisions about what not to pursue. At their core, these decisions are about turning strategy into real capability.

But there is no guarantee that these decisions will materially improve readiness. They are, at best, hypotheses and bets on what will move the organization forward and further left of bang.

The value of the diagnostic is that it improves the quality of those bets and helps organizations retain their highest-performing team members.

Understanding where your organization sits on the bang timeline provides a preparedness baseline grounded in how it actually behaves today—not what it intends to be or hopes to become. From that baseline, leaders can make more deliberate decisions about what needs to change to move further left of bang—and what is likely to pull them back to the right.

In larger organizations, where no single leader can see every decision affecting their readiness, this becomes even more important. The personas provide a shared language that allows teams to assess preparedness consistently across the entire enterprise.

And that’s the shift we are striving for.

When you can clearly describe where you are—using consistent terms grounded in observable behavior—you can begin to make decisions that actually move you.

Before You Go

If this helped you see your organization more clearly, share it. If this sparked an idea, pass it along to someone responsible for getting left of bang. That’s how this work spreads.

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

And if you’re asking the question many leaders eventually face—are we actually becoming more prepared, or just busier?—the first step is a Left of Bang Strategic Briefing, where we help you identify where your organization is today, where gaps exist, and what that means for your ability to perform when it matters.

Welcome back to The CP Journal, where we break down what it takes to get left of bang.

This week, we published a new white paper: Preparing the Organization You Will Need.

It is a practical doctrine for leaders trying to answer a difficult question: are we actually becoming more prepared—or just busier?

I wrote this article to explain the problem it’s meant to solve.

I’m not exactly sure when I first noticed the pattern, but over the past few years, it’s become hard for me to ignore the fact that organizations are busier than ever when it comes to preparedness.

There is more planning, more training, more exercises, and more meetings about all of it.

And yet, when you stop and ask a simple question, “Is all of this actually making us better? Are we more ready than we were last year?” the answer isn’t always clear. In a lot of cases, it’s not even immediate.

When you consider how busy people are today, the difficulty in answering that question is not a result of people not working hard or not caring.

One reason it’s hard to answer is because activity has become the proxy for readiness, and busyness, on its own, does not necessarily mean more capability.

We have seen this consistently in our work with organizations preparing for disasters, disruptions, and acts of violence.

Public safety—and really, most organizations—improves through experience. Something happens, we study it, and we adjust. And we don’t have to look far to see this pattern:

• The shooting at Columbine reshaped active shooter response

• Hurricane Katrina transformed emergency management

• The Boston Marathon bombing influenced mass casualty coordination

• The 2025 Los Angeles Fires are already driving changes in alerting and evacuation

Traditionally, this is how we have learned. But it also means that improvement is tied to hindsight. Capabilities are built after the failure has already occurred, and often at a significant cost.

That is right of bang.

The challenge is that expectations have changed.

Communities, customers, and partners expect more than reactive improvement. They expect that we are anticipating what’s coming and building the capabilities we will need ahead of time.

They expect that we are getting left of bang.

But shifting left of bang at the organizational level isn’t as simple as deciding to do it. This is because most of the systems we use to manage preparedness—planning cycles, training programs, exercise design—were built for a right of bang environment.

When you apply those same systems to an uncertain future, teams get much busier and progress becomes harder to define. That’s the dynamic we keep seeing.

So we spent time studying this problem and working through it with organizations to better understand why the effort to get ahead was creating so much friction.

And ultimately, the problem became clear: preparedness is not an activity problem. You don’t become ready by simply doing more.

You become ready by deliberately building the capabilities your organization will need to perform under the conditions it is likely to face—and ensuring those capabilities actually work.

That requires a different way of thinking about preparedness, a different way of measuring it, and a different way of building it over time.

This week we published a white paper, Preparing the Organization You Will Need, which lays out a practical doctrine for doing exactly that.

In the paper, we show:

• How to define what readiness actually requires

• How to move beyond activity as a measure of progress

• How to intentionally build preparedness as a capability inside your organization

If you’ve ever looked at the volume of work being done and questioned whether it’s truly moving your organization forward, this paper will give you a clear way to think about it—and a path to act on it.

Read the paper

This is a summary of a longer paper. If you prefer to read the full version, you can access it here.

When disasters, disruptions, and acts of violence occur, organizations do not get to choose how they perform. They rely on the capabilities they built beforehand.

That reality places a clear responsibility on leadership. If an organization lacks the capabilities required to perform under pressure, that is not simply a failure of the moment. It is a failure of preparation shaped by what leaders chose to prioritize, invest in, and build over time.

For many organizations, that responsibility is becoming harder to navigate. Public safety agencies, governments, businesses, and other institutions are operating in environments defined by uncertainty, disruption, and increasing complexity. Leaders recognize that future conditions will not look exactly like the past, yet many organizations still prepare primarily through an experience-based model: they improve after major incidents reveal what was missing.

That approach remains necessary, but it has limits.

When preparedness is driven primarily by experience, organizations improve right of bang. They revise plans, update training, and adjust procedures after an event has already occurred. This produces valuable learning, but it also means lessons become clear only after systems have been stressed and consequences have already been felt. Organizations become better prepared for the last disruption, not necessarily the next one.

Preparing left of bang requires a different approach. It requires leaders to make deliberate decisions about what their organization must be able to do before those capabilities are tested. This shifts preparedness from a reactive process of post-incident improvement to a proactive process of defining what success will require in the future and building toward it in advance.

Making that shift is difficult for two reasons.

The first is a certainty problem. In a right of bang model, leaders can justify investments based on events that have already happened and deficiencies that have already been observed. In a left of bang model, leaders must make informed judgments before an incident occurs. They must decide what to prepare for and what to build without the benefit of complete certainty.

The second is a measurement problem. Many organizations measure preparedness through activity: plans written, exercises completed, training delivered, or improvement items tracked. Those activities matter, but activity alone does not answer the question that matters most: are we actually more prepared? When future conditions are uncertain and the range of possible scenarios is effectively unlimited, busyness is not the same as readiness.

This paper argues that organizations can address both challenges by treating preparedness as a capability.

The full paper defines this approach in detail, including how capabilities are structured, assessed, and built over time. Continue to the full paper.

Preparedness is not a document, an exercise cycle, or a collection of resources. It is an organizational capability: the ability to perform a vital function under specific conditions to a required standard. Like any capability, it must be deliberately built, aligned, and evaluated over time.

A preparedness capability consists of five interdependent elements:

• Plans, which define intended action and structure

• People, who are responsible for execution

• Resources, which make execution possible

• Skills, which determine how effectively people perform

• Validation, which provides evidence that the capability actually works

These elements must function together. A written plan without trained people is insufficient. Resources without defined roles are easily misused. Training that is disconnected from how the organization will actually operate does not create reliable performance. Without validation, leaders are left assuming readiness rather than demonstrating it.

Preparedness therefore begins with a leadership decision about what the organization must be able to do. Leaders must define a portfolio of critical capabilities based on mission, operating environment, and future demands. They must then define what readiness looks like for each capability by establishing the conditions it must function in, the function it must perform, and the standard it must meet.

Only then can preparedness be managed with clarity.

Operationalizing preparedness means integrating this work into how the organization actually runs. Gaps between current performance and required performance must be translated into projects. Ownership must be clear at the executive, capability, and project levels. Leaders must make disciplined go/no-go decisions about which efforts move forward, based on whether they meaningfully improve capability rather than merely generate activity.

This is the work of organizational change.

Preparedness is not improved by intention alone. It improves when leaders build a system that continuously identifies what matters, assesses current capability, prioritizes investments, tests assumptions, and learns over time. In that sense, preparedness projects are not isolated tasks. They are hypotheses about what will move the organization closer to the level of readiness required for future success.

The purpose of this work is not planning for its own sake. It is performance.

When disruption occurs, there is no time to build new capabilities in the earliest moments. The organization acts with what it has. Some organizations fail because they cannot recognize change early enough or do not possess the capabilities the moment demands. Some survive, but at significant cost. Others are able to sustain performance under pressure because they made the necessary decisions in advance and committed to building the organization they would need before conditions forced the issue.

That is the central argument of this paper: preparedness should be treated as a strategic leadership responsibility and managed as a capability.

The question leaders must answer is not whether disruption, crisis, or competition will come. It will.

The question is what version of the organization will show up when it does.

This executive summary outlines the core argument. The full paper translates this into a practical framework—how to define capability, establish performance standards, and build preparedness as part of how your organization operates.

It is written for public safety leaders, emergency managers, and other executives responsible for preparing their organizations for conditions that have not yet fully revealed themselves.

Its purpose is to offer a practical doctrine for getting left of bang at the strategic level: defining what readiness requires, how it should be measured, and how it can be built deliberately over time.

Short on time? Read the Executive Summary

The Leadership Responsibility for Preparedness

“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” –Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, December 2004

When organizations are tested, they don’t get to choose how they perform—they rely on the capabilities they built beforehand.

Donald Rumsfeld’s statement, made nearly two years into Operation Iraqi Freedom, reflects a hard reality: even with time and experience, organizations do not automatically become what they need to be. The organization that shows up is the result of decisions made long before that moment arrives—and the constraints leaders face in that moment are often of their own making.

Ensuring that the organization you want is the one you have is a responsibility that rests with leadership. In fact, preparing the organization to be ready for future disruptions or crises is arguably a leader’s most important responsibility.

If an organization lacks the capabilities required to perform under pressure, that is not a failure of the moment—it is a failure of preparation. And preparation is shaped by what leaders choose to prioritize, invest in, and build over time.

Today, that responsibility is becoming more difficult to navigate.

Leaders across public safety, government, and the private sector are operating in environments defined by uncertainty, disruption, and increasing complexity. They recognize that the conditions they will face are changing, but often lack a clear framework for deciding what those changes mean, what capabilities will matter most, and how to prepare for them in an intentional way.

As a result, many organizations continue to prepare based on what they have experienced, rather than what they are likely to face.

This paper presents a different approach. It outlines a strategic framework for preparing left of bang—treating preparedness as a capability, defining what readiness requires, and providing a structure for building it deliberately over time.

Defining The Challenge: Right of Bang vs. Left of Bang Preparation

Introduction: Learning from Experience—And Its Limits

Preparedness in most organizations improves in a familiar way: in response to major incidents.

After Columbine, active shooter response fundamentally changed. After Hurricane Katrina, emergency management doctrine was reshaped. The Boston Marathon bombing led to improvements in mass casualty coordination. More recently, communities are reevaluating how alerts are issued and how large-scale evacuations are conducted in the face of wind-driven wildfires.

These events, and countless others like them, have played a critical role in advancing our country’s readiness for disasters, disruptions, and acts of violence. These experiences—whether firsthand or observed—provide hard-earned lessons about what works, what fails, and what is missing when organizations are tested under real-world conditions.

But they also reveal a consistent pattern: the lesson only becomes clear after the event occurs.

When preparedness is primarily shaped by experience, organizations improve, but only in hindsight and after people, systems, and entire communities have been impacted by an event.

That is what it means to prepare right of bang.

Right of Bang: The Limits of Experience-Based Preparation

Right of bang preparation is an experience-based model of preparedness and refers to the improvements organizations make after an incident has already happened.

In this context, “bang” represents the events that are meaningful and impactful to an organization or a community—an active shooter, a wildfire, severe weather, civil unrest, or a cyber attack. It can also extend beyond traditional public safety or security incidents to include disruptions such as the loss of a key leader, a failed business initiative, or a breakdown in critical infrastructure.

When an organization is operating right of bang, its preparedness efforts are shaped by events that have already taken place. An incident reveals a gap or exposes a weakness, and the after-action process identifies what needs to change.

From there, organizations adjust.

• Policies get updated to address deficiencies

• Training programs are modified based on lessons learned

• Plans are revised to reflect what experience has shown to be necessary

• Exercises are designed to reinforce new procedures

This is not a flawed system. It is, in many ways, a necessary one.

Real-world events provide a level of clarity that cannot be fully replicated in planning sessions or exercises. They reveal how systems perform under stress, how people make decisions under pressure, and which assumptions prove to be false.

But experience has a limitation: it is always tied to the past.

As a result, organizations preparing right of bang are improving their ability to respond to the last incident—not necessarily the next one. They are learning, adapting, and improving, but in a way that keeps them one disruption behind the environment they operate in.

Left of Bang: Proactive Preparation

Left of bang preparation takes a fundamentally different approach.

Instead of allowing past events to dictate what an organization prepares for, leaders make deliberate decisions about what will be required in the future, and begin building those capabilities before they are tested. This shifts the core question of preparedness from, “What went wrong?” to, “What will be required for us to succeed?”

Answering those questions—and operationalizing the answers—requires four things.

• An understanding of how the operating environment is changing and what threats, hazards, and opportunities may emerge.

• Deliberate decisions about which capabilities the organization must develop.

• Clear definitions of what “ready” looks like for each of those critical functions.

• A structured approach for building and evaluating those capabilities over time.

This is not about predicting the future with certainty. It is about making informed decisions in the absence of certainty—and committing to building the capabilities required to perform under a range of possible conditions.

Organizations that operate this way are not waiting for an incident to reveal their gaps. They are proactively identifying and addressing them in advance.

They are preparing left of bang.

The Challenges of Shifting Left of Bang

The distinction between experience-based and proactive preparedness models is clear in theory. In practice, making the shift is difficult.

Across public safety, government, and the private sector, there is a growing expectation that organizations are preparing for what comes next—not just what has already happened. Leaders are being asked to anticipate emerging risks, adapt to changing conditions, and ensure their organizations are ready for an increasingly uncertain future.

As a result, many organizations are attempting to do this. They monitor trends, discuss future scenarios, and incorporate future-looking considerations into their planning, training, and exercises.

But making the shift from an experience-based model to a proactive one is not as simple as deciding to do so. Often, these efforts remain inconsistent, difficult to sustain, or disconnected from meaningful improvements in readiness.

The reason is not due to a lack of intent, but because the underlying approach to preparedness has not changed with the change in expectations. Organizations are attempting to prepare for the future using systems, decision processes, and measures of progress that were designed for a right of bang model.

As a result, two challenges consistently emerge.

Challenge #1: The Certainty Problem

The first challenge is how leaders make decisions about what to prepare for in the absence of a triggering event.

Right of bang preparedness operates with a high degree of certainty because decisions are based on incidents that have already occurred and after-action reviews that identify what needs to change. In this situation, the need for improvement is clear, the justification is validated by observed experience, and resources—time, budget, and effort—can be allocated with confidence.

Organizations preparing left of bang, however, are making decisions before an incident occurs. As a result, they operate with far less certainty. They cannot point to a specific event and say, “this is why we are doing this.” Instead, they must make informed judgements about what could happen and what will be required to succeed if it does.

This uncertainty introduces friction.

Preparedness efforts compete against other organizational priorities, and leaders must justify investments in capabilities that may not be tested immediately—or at all. At the same time, there is an inherent paradox in preparedness: by the time there is certainty about what will happen, the ability to do anything meaningful about it has often already passed.

Without a way to make decisions under these conditions, organizations default to what is easier to justify. They revert to preparing for what has already happened.

Challenge #2: The Measurement Problem

The second challenge is determining whether preparedness efforts are actually improving readiness.

In many organizations, preparedness is measured through activity. Organizations can quantify the number of plans written, exercises conducted, training sessions delivered, and improvement items completed. These activities are visible and measurable, which creates the perception of progress.

In a right of bang model, that assumption often aligns with reality. Because these activities are tied to known gaps identified in real events, more activity can reasonably lead to improved readiness.

That assumption breaks down in a left of bang model.

When preparing for the future, the number of potential risks and scenarios is effectively unlimited. There is no natural endpoint, and no clear signal that the organization is “ready.” Activity alone is no longer a reliable measure of preparedness.

Organizations can invest significant time and effort into the planning, training, and exercises—and still lack the capabilities required to perform under future conditions. This creates a different kind of risk.

Teams can be busy, but not necessarily more capable. Effort expands and resources are consumed, but that doesn’t always translate into improved performance. In many cases, the people responsible for preparedness become overwhelmed long before the organization becomes ready.

This is where many attempts to move left of bang begin to stall. Not because the intent is wrong—but because the approach has not changed.

Moving Beyond the Challenges

Taken together, these two challenges explain why many organizations struggle to move beyond an experience-based model of preparedness. It is not a lack of awareness or effort. It is a function of how preparedness decisions are made—and how progress is measured.

If organizations are going to operate left of bang, both must change.

Which raises the central question: what does a preparedness capability actually look like—and how do organizations intentionally build one?

The Preparedness Capability

Introduction: Preparedness as a Capability

The challenges outlined in the previous section highlight a fundamental issue in how preparedness is often approached.

Organizations struggle to decide what to prepare for in the absence of certainty—and to determine whether their efforts are actually improving their readiness. As a result, preparedness is frequently managed through activity: plans are written, exercises are conducted, training is delivered.

But activity does not answer a simple question: Are we more prepared today than we were yesterday? Or last year? Or three years ago?

Answering that question requires that we manage preparedness as an organizational capability. Like any capability, preparedness reflects an organization’s ability to perform a vital function under specific conditions. In this sense, preparedness is something built over time, developed through deliberate effort, and demonstrated through performance.

Making this shift requires leaders to do three things:

• Understand what a capability consists of

• Define the capabilities that will determine success or failure

• Establish what it means for each of those capabilities to be “ready”

The sections that follow outline a structured approach for doing so—one that allows organizations to move beyond activity and deliberately build, measure, and improve their preparedness over time.

The Components of a Preparedness Capability

If preparedness is to be developed as a capability, it must be clearly defined.

A capability is not a single plan, training program, or collection of resources. It is the integration of multiple elements that, together, determine whether an organization can perform a function when required. When any one of the elements is missing or underdeveloped, the capability itself is incomplete—regardless of how much activity is taking place.

Capabilities are built from five interdependent elements.

Plans define what the organization intends to do and how it intends to do it.

They provide structure, outline responsibilities, and establish how the organization expects to operate under specific conditions. Plans translate intent into a shared understanding of action—but on their own, they do not ensure execution.

People determine who is responsible for executing the plans and performing the function.

This includes not only an organization’s staff, but also its partners. Functions are ultimately performed by people, not documents, which makes clarity of roles, accountability, and leadership essential.

Resources provide what is required to execute the plans.

This includes equipment, systems, facilities, software, funding, and external support. Even well-designed plans and well-trained personnel will fail to meet performance expectations if the necessary resources are unavailable, inaccessible, or insufficient under real-world conditions.

Skills determine how well people perform their roles.

Training, experience, and repetition develop the ability to execute under pressure. Skills are what allow individuals and teams to translate decisions into action when conditions are uncertain and time is limited.

Validation determines whether the capability actually works.

Exercises, real-world events, and assessments provide evidence of performance. Without validation, organizations are left to assume they are prepared—often based on activity rather than demonstrated ability.

These elements do not exist independently.

A plan that is not supported by trained personnel will fail. Resources without defined roles will be misused. Training that is not tied to a plan will not translate into coordinated action. And without validation, none of these elements can be trusted.

This is where many organizations encounter the illusion of a capability. They have plans, acquire resources, attend training, and complete exercises—but because these elements are not deliberately integrated and evaluated together, it remains unclear whether the organization can actually perform when it matters.

Understanding preparedness through these elements provides a different lens. It allows organizations to assess where they are strong, where they are weak, and where effort is not translating into capability.

A Portfolio of Capabilities

A preparedness capability does not begin with a plan—it begins with a leadership decision about what your organization must be able to do.

For leaders, this means defining a portfolio of critical operational and organizational support capabilities.

This capability portfolio is the set of functions an organization has determined are critical—the ones that must exist and be utilized if it is going to succeed in its operating environment. It is not an exhaustive list of everything the organization does day-to-day, but rather a deliberate selection of what matters most.

Defining this portfolio is a leadership decision. It requires leaders to assess their operating environment, understand how it is changing, understand their mission, and determine which capabilities will be most critical to success. The specific capabilities included in a portfolio will vary by organization.

For example:

• A law enforcement agency may prioritize: critical incident response, mass notification, investigations, or evacuation.

• A fire department may prioritize: structure fire suppression, search and rescue, mutual aid integration, or wildfire response.

• A business may prioritize: business development, talent acquisition, supply chain management, or product development.

• A non-profit may prioritize: fundraising, volunteer coordination, resource distribution, or partner integration.

The goal is not to adopt a pre-determined list, but to define the set of capabilities that reflect the organization’s mission and operating environment. This portfolio becomes the foundation for all preparedness efforts. It informs how plans are written, how people are assigned, how resources are allocated, how skills are developed, and how performance is evaluated.

Organizations that do not explicitly define their capability portfolio often default to preparing for everything—and prioritizing nothing.

Defining Performance for Each Capability

Defining a portfolio of capabilities establishes what the organization must be able to do. The next step is to define how well it must be able to do it.

Without defined performance standards, preparedness efforts lack a clear end state. Capabilities may exist in some form, but it remains unclear whether they are sufficient or whether they will perform when required.

To address this, each capability in the portfolio must have a defined performance target.

We are ready for X, to do Y, to Z standards.

• X defines the conditions or incidents the organization is preparing for.

• Y defines the function the organization must be able to perform.

• Z defines the required level of performance.

This is what makes readiness observable and measurable.

It allows leaders to prioritize, teams to align, and capabilities to be evaluated based on whether they meet the needs of the organization—not simply whether work has been completed or whether people feel ready.

Importantly, these definitions are not static. As the operating environment changes, so must the conditions, capabilities, and standards that define readiness. Adjusting the X, Y, and Z variables is how organizations maintain alignment with the future they are preparing for. It allows leaders to revisit assumptions, reassess performance, and determine whether existing capabilities remain sufficient—or whether they must be invested in and developed further.

Readiness, then, is not a fixed state. It is the condition that emerges when an organization has developed a sufficient set of capabilities, each to a defined standard, that collectively provide confidence in its ability to perform under anticipated conditions.

From Definition to Execution

Defining capabilities and performance is necessary, but not sufficient.

At this point, an organization may have clarity and may know what capabilities matter and what “ready” looks like. But clarity does not improve performance. Preparedness only improves when each capability is deliberately developed, resourced, and sustained over time.

That is the role of an operational preparedness system, which we will outline in the next section.

Operationalizing Preparedness

Introduction: Making Preparedness Part of How You Operate

Defining capabilities and performance standards establishes what preparedness requires. The next step is making the pursuit of those outcomes a natural part of how the organization operates.

To do that, preparedness must be integrated into how budget and staffing decisions are made, and how work is prioritized on a daily basis. When it is treated as something separate—assigned to a specific unit, addressed only during planning cycles, or only revisited after major incidents—it competes with other priorities for time and attention.

Preparedness only improves when it becomes part of how the organization runs.

Most organizations already have the structures required to do this: they have leaders who set priorities, managers who oversee functions, and teams that execute work. Operationalizing preparedness means using those structures deliberately to develop the capabilities the organization has identified as critical.

From Capabilities to Work: Turning Gaps into Action

For each capability in the portfolio, organizations must first assess their current state against the defined performance standard. This comparison reveals where the capability is sufficient, where it is degraded, and where it does not yet exist at the level required.

The gaps then define the work.

Some gaps may be small—updates to plans, targeted training, or adjustments to existing processes. Others may require more significant effort—new resources, new partnerships, or the development of entirely new capabilities. Regardless of size, each gap reflects a deficiency in one or more of the five elements of the capability and represents an opportunity to improve performance.

Defining these gaps is the critical step in shifting preparedness from definition to execution.

Rather than asking, “What should we work on?”, organizations ask, “What must we do to bring this capability up to the standard?”

In practice, this work is best organized and executed through discrete projects, because capabilities are not improved all at once. They are improved through focused efforts that move the capability closer to the required standard.

Projects are the mechanism through which preparedness improves.

Roles, Responsibilities, and Ownership

A project-based approach to preparedness requires clear ownership to function effectively.

Without defined roles and responsibilities, gaps may be identified, but they are not consistently addressed. Work becomes fragmented, accountability is unclear, and progress depends on individual initiatives rather than organizational intent.

Operationalizing preparedness requires assigning ownership at three levels.

At the executive level, a senior leader is responsible for the preparedness portfolio.

This role is accountable for determining which capabilities matter most, setting priorities, and making decisions about how time, attention, and resources will be allocated across the organization. These decisions reflect the organization’s strategic direction and establish the conditions under which preparedness efforts will succeed or fail.

At the capability level, each capability must have an owner.

These individuals are responsible for assessing current performance, identifying gaps, and defining the work required to meet the standard. They maintain visibility and serve as the primary point of accountability for that capability over time.

At the execution level, projects are led by individuals responsible for delivering defined outcomes.

Project leaders are responsible for closing gaps, improving performance, and moving the capability toward the required standard. Their work is scoped, time-bound, and directly tied to the priorities established at the executive and capability levels. These roles are not new positions, but are functions and responsibilities that already exist within the organization.

The difference between organizations that successfully move their preparedness efforts left of bang and those that don’t lies in whether preparedness ownership is clear and deliberately managed through each of these roles.

The Go/No-Go Decision System: Prioritizing What Gets Done

Organizations will often identify more gaps than they have the time, resources, or capacity to address. Preparedness, therefore, becomes a matter of prioritization.

To support this process, capability owners are responsible for assessing performance and identifying the gap that must be addressed. These gaps are then translated into proposed projects—each with a defined scope, objectives, and expected impact on the capability.

At the executive level, leaders decide which of those efforts move forward. This is the function of the go/no-go decision.

As each proposed project or purchase represents an investment, selecting one means not selecting another. Leaders must determine whether the effort will move the organization meaningfully closer to the defined standard—and whether it is the best use of limited resources relative to other priorities.

Projects that meet that threshold move forward while projects that do not are deferred or declined. Yet, without this discipline, projects are often approved based on urgency, visibility, or individual initiative. Over time, this leads to disconnected efforts that consume resources without improving readiness.

A structured decision process creates alignment and ensures work is tied to defined capabilities. This process forces tradeoffs into the open and establishes a clear rationale for prioritization.

Change as a Leadership Responsibility

Operationalizing preparedness is not simply a matter of managing projects or improving individual capabilities. It is a process of changing what an organization is able to do.

If required capabilities do not exist, they must be built. If they are insufficient, they must be improved. If the organization you have is not the one you want, leaders are responsible for transforming it into the one capable of succeeding.

Each project undertaken to close a gap is a decision to change how the organization operates—how people are trained, how resources are allocated, and how decisions are made.

These decisions are oriented towards the future, so they cannot be treated as final conclusions. Preparedness exists in conditions of uncertainty, and leaders must make decisions about what to build without knowing exactly what will be required. As a result, projects selected to move forward should be considered to be hypotheses about how to move the organization closer to the defined level of readiness.

When projects test those hypotheses, and when exercises and real-world operations provide feedback, the organization creates a continuous cycle of decision, action, and learning.

Preparedness, then, is not about getting every decision right. It is about building a system that can adapt over time and as conditions evolve.

From Preparation to Performance

The concepts outlined in this section define how preparedness is built. But preparedness is only meaningful in what it enables.

The purpose of this work is not the plans, the projects, or the systems that support them. It is the organization’s ability to perform under conditions where time is limited, information is incomplete, and decisions matter.

Even though the mechanics of preparation—planning, training, staffing, exercises, assessments—are utilized in both right of bang and left of bang models, a proactive approach acknowledges them for what they are: inputs.

But inputs are not the outcome.

Preparedness is defined by whether those inputs translate into capability—and whether that capability enables the organization to perform when required. When that happens, leaders become able to answer a critical question: “Prepared to do what, exactly, and how well?”

This system is designed to close the gap between preparation and performance—ensuring the work being done translates into the capabilities required to perform.

Preparing for the Moment That Matters

When something happens—when there is a disruption, when decisions must be made quickly, and when the organization is forced to act—there is no time to build new capabilities.

The organization performs with what it has.

Some organizations fail. They are unable to recognize what is happening early enough to act, and they do not have the capabilities the situation demands.

Some organizations survive. They might be able to respond, but their actions are reactive, and performance is inconsistent. They meet the demands placed on them, but often at a significant cost in time, resources, and long-term impact.

And some organizations grow. They recognize the changes in their environment early, develop the capabilities their organization will need, and commit the resources in time to influence the outcome. As a result, they sustain performance under pressure and not only withstand the disruption, but also use it to improve, adapt, and strengthen their position for what comes next.

The difference between these outcomes is not determined at the moment of the incident. It is determined beforehand.

It is determined by the capabilities that were built, the standards those capabilities were developed to, and the discipline with which the organization prepared itself.

Preparedness does not guarantee success or eliminate uncertainty—but it does shape what is possible. It influences how quickly an organization recognizes change, how effectively it makes decisions, how well it coordinates action, and how long it can sustain performance.

These factors are established long before the moment they are needed.

The question is not whether the organization will face disruption, competition, or crisis.

They will.

The question is what version of the organization will show up when they do.

Preparing for an uncertain future requires more than awareness. It requires leaders to decide what capabilities will matter, what “ready” looks like, and to prioritize the work required to close the gap between the organization they have today and the one they will need tomorrow.

For leadership teams looking to put this into practice, The CP Journal applies this framework through a Left of Bang Strategic Briefing and advisory work focused on building preparedness as a capability.

There’s one question that has consistently slowed those conversations down. This article is built around that question.

If you’re a public safety or security executive and open to discussing how your organization prepares, reply to this email—we’d love to have the conversation.

Many agencies I talk to about preparing their organizations for the future are doing a lot of things right.

They have plans and train regularly. They’ve handled incidents well and have experienced people in key roles.

If you asked them whether they’re prepared, the answer is usually some version of: “Yes—we’re in a good place.”

And to be fair, that’s often true.

But there’s a question that tends to slow the conversation down: What does it mean for your department to be ready to perform?

Not in general terms and not conceptually. But specifically.

Prepared for what? Prepared to do what? Prepared to what standard?

This question sits at the strategic level of left of bang—where leaders are responsible for not just how their organization responds to incidents, but for shaping the capabilities that determine how it performs before those incidents occur.

The Difference Between Inputs and Outcomes

Preparedness is one of those words that feels clear—until you try to define it. I believe this stems from the fact that it’s easy to point to:

• Plans that have been written

• Exercises that have been conducted

• Training that has been delivered

• Equipment that has been purchased

Those activities are all real—and they are important—but they’re also all only inputs. Over time and with repetition, it is easy for those inputs to become the proof that says, “we’ve done the work, so we’re prepared.”

But recognizing that these activities are inputs to readiness, and not the end product, isn’t just a philosophical issue or a nuanced view.

When organizations and their leaders are unable to answer the question: “prepared to do what, exactly, and how well?” there’s no real way to prioritize between different programs and capabilities, make tradeoffs, understand the opportunity costs of different investments, measure progress, or align a leadership team around the same outcome.

So even though preparation continues, the direction the organization is heading in, and the clarity leaders have about their progress, starts to get a little fuzzy.

Confidence vs. Clarity

One of the more interesting dynamics in our conversations with chiefs and executives is that most leaders are confident in their teams, which makes sense.

• They’ve seen how their people perform.

• They trust their experience.

• They’ve handled real incidents before.

While that confidence is earned, confidence and clarity are not the same thing. Confidence comes from experience, people, and past performance, while clarity comes from defining expectations, making assumptions explicit, and deciding what “good enough” actually looks like. You can have both, but you can also have one without the other.

If you want a quick way to test this, try asking a few people on your senior leadership team:

• What are the top 2–3 things we need to be prepared for right now?

• What does success look like if those things happen?

• How well do we need to perform?

Then compare the answers to see how consistent they are. When there’s variation in the answers, which happens in many organizations, it’s often because those priorities and goals haven’t been explicitly defined.

The Difficulty

I believe there’s a reason this question about how ready an organization is isn’t addressed more directly.

At the leadership level, preparedness doesn’t show up as a single, clearly defined problem. It shows up as a series of competing requests and demands on an agency’s time, staff, and budget. Each division, team, and functional area in an organization has its own set of priorities:

• Equipment that needs to be replaced

• Training that needs to be attended

• Projects that need to be launched

Most of these requests are often valid and important for the organization, but without a clear definition of what it is preparing for, and to what standard, there isn’t a consistent way to evaluate the requests against each other.

So decisions get made the only way they can:

• Based on experience

• Based on recent events

• Based on what feels most urgent

• Based on what has the strongest internal advocate

In our work with organizations to assess or establish preparedness programs, we routinely see different leaders describe preparedness in different ways. And the priorities each person is pursuing vary depending on those different perspectives.

It’s not that this ambiguity is “bad,” it’s just that in that environment, it’s always possible to feel like progress is being made, because nothing has been defined clearly enough to prove otherwise.

And when preparedness is treated as the result of a high volume of activities completed, the organization is left to navigate important decisions without a clear, agreed-upon target.

In many organizations, that target has never been made explicit.

Before the Next Plan, Training, or Exercise

Most organizations are already investing time and effort into preparedness. Right now, you probably have plans being written, training getting scheduled, equipment being purchased, and exercises getting designed.

Because those things are already in motion, use the opportunity to step back and ask whether they were chosen and shaped by a clear understanding of what the organization is working towards, or whether they are continuing because they are what has always been done.

Are these activities actually making us more ready to perform when it matters—or just keeping us busy?

That question doesn’t need to be answered perfectly, but I do think it needs to be asked directly. And it should be asked before the work begins—not after an incident or after an exercise—because once work is underway, it becomes much harder to change direction.

In some cases, simply working through that question as a leadership team has changed how organizations approach preparedness entirely. But it starts by asking it.

Where to Go Next

If this question resonates, there are a few ways to take it further.

For some, it starts with getting clearer on what readiness actually looks like—what it means to define capabilities, set performance expectations, and describe what “good enough” actually is before the work begins. I’ve written about that in more detail here:

👉 Beyond the Illusion of Capability: A leader’s guide to replacing assumption with clarity, rigor, and readiness.

For others, this becomes a leadership conversation. Sitting down with a senior leadership team and working through what the organization is actually trying to be ready to do—and how well—can quickly surface where perspectives align and where they don’t. In a number of organizations, that discussion alone has changed how preparedness decisions get made—which is the focus of our strategic briefing:

👉 The Left of Bang Strategic Briefing: A facilitated session to shift towards a proactive readiness model

And in some cases, organizations choose to take it a step further—structuring that conversation into a project that defines preparedness priorities, clarifies capability expectations, and builds a more deliberate approach to readiness over time.

But regardless of how far you take it, the starting point is the same.

Before the next plan is written, training is scheduled, or exercise is conducted, it’s worth asking: what are we trying to be ready to do—and how will we know if this actually gets us there?

Enjoyed this article? Pass it on.

If this sparked ideas, share it with a colleague or your network.

That’s how we expand the community of professionals committed to staying left of bang.

When we talk about the strategic benefits of getting left of bang, the focus is usually on what preparedness makes possible after a disruption occurs.

Organizations that invest in their readiness are better positioned to absorb shocks, adapt to changing conditions, and in some cases even emerge stronger than before. While some organizations measure that outcome in financial terms, others define success through improved public trust, operational credibility, or strengthened partnerships.

But before an organization reaches those outcomes, it must first navigate the moment when disruption actually arrives. In the graphic at the top of this article, that moment is represented by the shaded circle surrounding the point of impact, and is what we refer to as bang.

This period—when the disruption is still fresh and the conditions are changing quickly—is the hinge. The organization’s readiness determines how deep the dip at bang becomes, how long it lasts, and how quickly the organization stabilizes. Preparation either becomes the springboard organizations use to move forward and grow, or it exposes that they were not ready to escape the survival cycle.

As a result, this is the point where leadership becomes most visible and most impactful. Leaders are expected to make decisions about what the organization should do—what to prioritize, where to focus, and how to allocate effort—often without the benefit of a stable or complete understanding of what is happening.

In that sense, the moment of disruption is what leaders are actually preparing for. For incidents that cannot be prevented, bang is the point when preparation becomes operational.

Leadership is not expressed through plans or intent, but through decisions (and those decisions are best understood as hypotheses about what is actually happening). Those decisions are shaped by two things: an organization’s ability to understand what is happening, and its ability to act on that understanding.

This article focuses on the first.

Read more

When people reference “left of bang,” they usually think about the concept at the tactical level.

They think about the individual officer, soldier, or operator recognizing behavioral cues, detecting anomalies, and identifying threats before an attack occurs.

That interpretation is correct, but as I’ve learned throughout my career, it’s also only one part of the picture. Because the same idea that helps an individual detect danger before it unfolds can also apply to how organizations prepare and ready themselves for disruption.

The difference is that instead of behavioral cues, organizations are looking for signals in their environment—operational indicators, emerging risks, and early warnings that conditions are changing.

In other words, getting left of bang isn’t just something individuals pursue, but is something organizations can design into how they operate.

And when you start looking at preparedness through that lens, three distinct levels begin to emerge: tactical, operational, and strategic.

Each level operates on a different timescale and answers a different question about readiness.

Tactical: Detecting Danger in the Moment

At the tactical level, getting left of bang is about recognizing danger before it becomes unavoidable.

This level focuses on detection in the moment—identifying threats or anomalies before they fully unfold.

This is the level most people associate with the concept.

• It is the officer recognizing pre-event indicators before violence occurs.

• It is the cybersecurity analyst identifying abnormal network activity before a breach spreads.

• It is the meteorologist recognizing atmospheric conditions that signal a severe storm is forming.

Across disciplines, the principle is the same: trained individuals recognize anomalies and act before the situation fully unfolds.

The tactical level is where situational awareness lives as it focuses on: observing the environment, recognizing indicators and anomalies, interpreting what those signals mean, and acting before the moment of impact.

When this works well, individuals are able to interrupt events before they escalate.

But this level alone has a limitation: it often depends on the skill of individuals rather than the design of the organization.

Operational: Creating Early Warning Signals

The operational level is where organizations move beyond relying on individual awareness and begin designing and building the systems needed to detect, decide and act earlier.

Instead of a single person recognizing a threat in their own domain, the organization establishes watch points and action points that help leaders understand when conditions are shifting and when those changes may begin to impact their operations.

These signals come from many places: intelligence or threat reporting, weather forecasts, supply chain disruptions, staffing shortages, infrastructure stress, geopolitical issues, or economic shifts.

But the purpose of operational readiness is not simply to observe signals and consume briefings. It is to connect signals to decisions.

Operational readiness systems answer questions like:

• What indicators should we be watching?

• Who is responsible for monitoring them?

• At what point should leadership be alerted?

• What actions should occur if those thresholds are crossed?

When organizations design these systems well, they move from simply being informed of potential issues to being able to act earlier.

This is where organizations begin deploying their capabilities before disruption fully arrives—adjusting posture, shifting resources, protecting operations, or pursuing emerging opportunities while there is still time to influence the outcome.

Operational readiness, in other words, is not about producing more briefings, but creating a structure that enables earlier decisions and action.

Strategic: Building the Capabilities You’ll Need

At the strategic level, getting left of bang looks even further ahead.

Instead of asking “what signals should we watch for?”, leaders begin asking: “what capabilities will we need before the next disruption appears?”

This level of readiness is about shaping the future rather than reacting to it. Strategic readiness involves:

• Understanding the environment and emerging risks

• Identifying the capabilities required to operate in that future

• Prioritizing investments, training, and planning before the need becomes urgent

In this sense, the strategic level is about ensuring the organization will be ready when the next incident arrives.

This is where decisions about staffing, technology, partnerships, training and doctrine are made. And because those capabilities take time to build, this work must happen long before the moment of crisis.

Why This Matters

Most organizations believe they are left of bang because they train individuals well. But without operational and strategic readiness, they are often much closer to the moment of impact than they realize.

But being left of bang is not defined by how well individuals react to problems. It is defined by how early the organization begins making decisions before the problem fully arrives.

Understanding these three levels helps leaders step back and determine if they are truly focusing on and building at all three levels, or if they are over-emphasizing or over-allocating resources to only one of them.

Some organizations invest heavily in tactical skills—training individuals to recognize problems as they emerge. Others build plans and strategies, but never connect them to the operational signals that should trigger action.

It is rare to see organizations deliberately connect all three, yet when they do, they stop relying on luck, heroics, or hindsight. Instead, they begin operating with a deliberate ability:

• Recognize change early

• Adapt before conditions deteriorate

• Build capabilities before they are urgently needed

In other words, they move further and further left of bang.

And the earlier an organization can operate on that timeline, the more options leaders have to influence the outcome.

Before You Go

Found this useful? Share it. Passing this along helps grow a community focused on staying left of bang.

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

And if you’re working to strengthen how you get ahead of problems, before they become emergencies, that’s our work—from strategy and assessments to planning and exercises.

Welcome back to The CP Journal, where we break down what it takes to get left of bang.

When you’re right of bang, there is a small and fleeting window where people and teams are willing to change.

The window opens when an executive says something like, “We can’t let that happen again.” Or asks a question like, “Why were we surprised by that?”

For a brief moment after a disruption, the perception of risk is at its highest across an organization. The vulnerability is no longer theoretical. There is something that has just affected the organization directly in a way that everyone can see.

And for people working to shift their organizations left of bang, recognizing this window is critical because when risk feels immediate and real, barriers that normally slow preparedness efforts often come down.

Projects that previously struggled to get attention suddenly feel important and urgent. Leaders and partners become more open to making changes they might have resisted weeks earlier.

But as we wrote about in an article last fall, this window rarely stays open for long.

Once the disruption stabilizes, routines return and the perception of danger fades fast. As a result, the pressure to act dissipates and the organization gradually settles back into its previous patterns.

We’ve been thinking about this throughout the week as we watched the war in Iran unfold and as we spoke with clients and organizations either already dealing with disruptions or preparing for them as reserve supplies and contingency options become more limited.

Even though their teams are focused on responding to the disruption they are experiencing (or believe they will soon), this is when organizations have the greatest opportunity to make meaningful preparedness changes.

But capturing that opportunity rarely happens automatically.

During an incident, most people are understandably focused on managing the present problem. They are stabilizing operations, communicating with stakeholders, and trying to reduce the immediate impact.

Yet someone needs to be thinking about how the organization prepares for the next incident while everyone else is managing the current one.

If the organization is going to improve how it gets left of bang to the next disaster, disruption, or act of violence, there needs to be someone finishing the sentence:

“Our ability to do _____ was affected by the war, and we can address that by _____.”

The first goal is to quantify the problems that were revealed: identifying which dependencies were exposed, which contingency plans proved insufficient, and which assumptions turned out to be wrong.

Then the organization can turn to scoping solutions that align with its preparedness strategy.

This often needs to be done during the incident because the moment when leaders say “we can’t let that happen again” does not last forever. Once the environment stabilizes, the urgency fades quickly, and competing priorities return. In a shockingly short amount of time, the memory of why the change felt necessary begins to fade.

So if your organization has been affected by recent disruptions, this is the moment when a decision is being made.

Will the experience become a catalyst for meaningful improvements? Or will the organization return to its previous routines once the disruption passes?

Getting left of bang is a choice. The question is, which one are you—or your organization—going to make?

Inside The CP Journal

This week, we published a new playbook for Academy subscribers: The Individual Readiness Playbook.

We wrote it because most preparedness advice falls into two categories: fear or gear. One side focuses on everything that could go wrong. The other focuses on everything you should buy.

Neither approach answers the question most people actually have: How do you prepare in a deliberate way so you can make good decisions when conditions change?

That’s the purpose of the Individual Readiness Playbook.

The playbook applies the same readiness concepts we use in our work with organizations—situational awareness, early decision-making, and capability development—and brings them to the individual and household level.

Here’s what a couple of early readers have said:

“This playbook should be required reading in every household.”

— Ernie G.

I’ve read several books on home preparedness, and this playbook covers all the bases in fewer words with actionable considerations. Such a good, easy read that has left me with several ideas to update my current preparedness plans and ways to incorporate them into my family’s natural routines.

— Kyle S.

Read the Playbook:

Before You Go

Found this useful? Share it. Passing this along helps grow a community focused on staying left of bang.

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

And if you’re working to strengthen how you get ahead of problems, before they become emergencies, that’s our work—from strategy and assessments to planning and exercises.

Preparedness advice usually falls into two categories: fear or gear.

One side focuses on everything that could go wrong.

The other focuses on everything you should buy.

Neither approach answers the question most people actually have:

How do you prepare in a deliberate way so you can make good decisions when conditions change?

That’s the purpose of the Individual Readiness Playbook.

This guide applies the same readiness concepts we use in our work with organizations—situational awareness, early decision-making, and capability development—and brings them to the individual and household level.

The goal isn’t to create anxiety.

It’s to help you develop the quiet confidence that comes from knowing that when something disruptive happens in your city—a wildfire, winter storm, prolonged outage, or other crisis—you’ve already done the thinking and preparation required to respond early and proactively, rather than react under pressure.

Preparedness isn’t something you buy. It’s something you build.

Who This Playbook Is For

This playbook is designed for people who want to apply a capability-based approach to preparedness.

People who:

• Want to prepare for disruptions without fear-driven messaging

• Prefer a structured framework rather than endless gear lists

• Want to think clearly about evacuation, staying home, and decision-making under pressure

• Value deliberate preparation over reactive scrambling

If you want an approach to readiness that focuses on capability rather than consumption, this playbook was written for you.

Inside the Playbook

The Individual Readiness Playbook is a six-part guide designed to help you approach preparedness systematically and focus on the capabilities that matter most.

Introduction — A Different Way to Prepare

The opening chapter explains the premise behind the playbook and why most preparedness advice misses the mark. It introduces a capability-based approach that prioritizes decision-making, awareness, and deliberate preparation.

Principles — The Foundations of Individual Readiness

Six principles that guide the entire approach. These assumptions shape how preparedness should be approached and ensure the effort you invest leads to practical outcomes.

Situational Awareness — Seeing Change Early

You can’t prepare for something you never see coming. This chapter introduces the fundamentals of situational awareness and explains how recognizing early signals allows you to act sooner on the timeline.

Evacuation — Getting Out in Time

When conditions are deteriorating, leaving early can be the safest decision you make. This chapter explores how preparation affects your ability to move quickly and what decisions matter most when time is limited.

Protect-in-Place — Staying Home Intentionally

Sometimes the safest option is to remain where you are. Protecting your household during disruptions requires more than simply waiting things out. This section outlines the capabilities required to safely remain at home during extended disruptions.

The Change and the Capability

Preparedness ultimately comes down to capability. The final chapter brings the concepts together and shows how deliberate preparation leads to a simple but powerful outcome: confidence that your household is ready when disruptions occur.

What Readers Are Saying

“This playbook should be required reading in every household.”
— Ernie G.

I’ve read several books on home preparedness, and this playbook covers all the bases in fewer words with actionable considerations. Such a good, easy read that has left me with several ideas to update my current preparedness plans and ways to incorporate them into my family’s natural routines.
— Kyle S.

Built For Operational Readiness

The Individual Readiness Playbook reflects the same philosophy that guides The CP Journal’s work with organizations.

For years, we’ve helped leaders think about readiness through the lens of operational capability—identifying the conditions that signal change, making decisions earlier on the timeline, and building the structures required to act effectively under pressure.

This playbook brings those same ideas to the individual level.

Because the principles that help organizations prepare for disruption also apply to individuals and families.

Part of The CP Journal’s Academy

The Individual Readiness Playbook is available to paid subscribers immediately through The CP Journal’s Academy, alongside our other courses, guides, and resources.

Because our Academy content is supported by subscriptions rather than sponsors, the playbook contains no advertisements, no affiliate links, and no outside influence.

Just practical guidance focused on helping you build real readiness.

Start Reading the Playbook

Learn more about and begin exploring the Individual Readiness Playbook.

Not Yet a Subscriber?

Upgrade to a paid subscription to access the Individual Readiness Playbook and the full Academy.

Upgrade Your Subscription

It’s hard to celebrate preparedness.

To say you were prepared and unaffected by an incident can feel insensitive to those who did not have the resources, time, or margin to prepare—and suffered as a result.

Yet the quiet confidence that comes from being ready for disasters and disruptions is what we are striving for.

To go back to the opening chapter, this is about developing the situational awareness and capabilities required to evacuate when necessary and protect-in-place when appropriate. So that when something is happening in your city—a wildfire, a winter storm, a prolonged outage, widespread civil unrest—and someone reaches out to ask if you’re okay, you can say:

“Don’t worry about us. We’re prepared.”

That sentence results from deliberate work and is what it means to get left of bang.

Disruption is no longer rare. Severe weather, infrastructure strain, cyber incidents, and regional instability mean that most families will experience some form of disruption in the coming years.

Being left of bang is not about predicting exactly what will happen, but using the time available before a disruption to build the capabilities that reduce surprise and compress chaos when it arrives.

The same event can feel like a major crisis or a minor inconvenience depending on your capability. Two families can live on the same street, experience the same storm, and walk away with very different stories—not because one was lucky, but because one was ready.

You now have the foundation to be the latter.

Read more

When most agencies tell you to remain where you are during an incident, they use the phrase shelter-in-place.

We’re not going to use that term here.

“Shelter” has always sounded passive to me. As if you’re simply waiting something out.

Instead, we’re going to use the phrase protect-in-place.

Because when you stay in your home during a disruption, you are not hiding. You are actively protecting the people inside your house from something happening outside of it.

Sometimes that threat is acute and visible—a tornado, a severe storm, a hazardous materials incident. Other times it’s more generalized—a winter storm that makes travel dangerous, a public safety power shutoff during high winds, or a prolonged outage after infrastructure failure.

In both cases, the objective is the same.

Can your household function independently for at least 72 hours without outside support?

Not indefinitely. Not off-the-grid forever. Just long enough to avoid panic, bad decisions, and unnecessary risk.

The 72-Hour Threshold

Seventy-two hours is slightly arbitrary, but it is often enough time for roads to be cleared and utility crews to begin restoration, information to stabilize, and initial chaos to subside after an incident occurs.

I’ve also found it is a long enough period of time that many people are forced to go beyond short-term plans, yet isn’t so long that readiness feels unattainable. So if you can operate for 72 hours without resupply you have bought yourself some margin, and that margin is the objective.

Plus, once the planning for 72 hours is established, it offers a framework that can be expanded upon to hit 96-hour, 1 week, or any other time frame goals you may have.

Most of what you need for 72 hours is already part of your normal routines. So when applying Principle #3 - Keep It Simple and Tied to Real Life, you realize you don’t need to build a separate emergency supply, but can accomplish this by building depth into your existing one.

The Six Household Functions

Now, if your family is going to protect-in-place for 72 hours, your household must continue performing six essential functions, which form the basis of our planning:

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Let me ask you a question. If your house caught fire right now, what would you grab on your way out the door?

How would that change if you had ten minutes of warning before you needed to leave?

What if you had one hour?

Those three time windows show that evacuating your home isn’t just about leaving, but a reflection of how ready you are to make decisions when time is of the essence. When there is pressure and emotions are running high, what will you do?

And there are two competing dynamics at play when a person evacuates their home:

• There is the possibility that you won’t have a home to return to.

• The reality that every minute you delay leaving increases the risk you face.

The more stuff you try to save by packing into your car, the longer you stay, and the longer it takes you to get to a safe location. This creates an increased risk of not getting out of the area in time.

The faster you leave, the less time it takes to get out of harm’s way, but potentially at a cost of not having the things that would make recovery from the incident faster or easier.

While an evacuation plan cannot eliminate the tension between these elements, it can help you decide how you will navigate it if you are ever forced into a situation where evacuation is the best option available.

A Short Primer

Evacuation is simply the movement from an area potentially at risk to an area that is not.

And there are two types of “safe locations” you’re looking for during this movement:

• Immediate Safe Location - a spot where you are physically out of danger.

• A Sustained Safe Location - a place you can sleep, eat, and operate from until stability returns.

Sometimes immediate safety is just a few steps away and only requires you to leave the building you are in. Other times, as we have seen in large wildfires, hurricanes, or fast moving incidents, it can be tens or hundreds of miles away.

But of the two approaches we discuss in this playbook—evacuating and protecting-in-place—evacuation is rarely the preferred option. Movement introduces variables like traffic, fuel, road closures, food, weather, and panic. Staying in place is often the simpler and safer choice, but when evacuation is necessary, hesitation becomes the hazard. This article is here to prevent that.

A quick word on “Bug-Out Bags.”

You’ll notice this article won’t be talking about “bug out bags.” Evacuation and “bugging out” are often treated as the same thing, but they really aren’t.

The common cultural image of a bug-out bag assumes societal collapse—off-grid living, long-term displacement, and self-sufficiency in a lawless environment. I suppose that scenario is not impossible, but it isn’t the highest probability either.

Most evacuations are for fires, storms, gas leaks, infrastructure failures, or localized violence. In those cases, people go to a hotel, a friend’s house, or a government shelter—not into the wilderness.

If you want to prepare for collapse, by all means, go for it. But don’t let cinematic scenarios distract you from the events that are statistically far more common to force you from your home.

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When you are in a situation where safety has become a consideration, the decision usually comes down to one question: Do I stay, or do I go?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in an office building, at a crowded parade, in your home, or in a parking garage.

It also doesn’t matter whether the threat you are facing is a shooter, severe weather, a wildfire, a power outage, or a house fire.

In any of these situations, the question you are trying to answer is whether you will be safest by leaving (evacuating) or staying (protecting yourself “in place”).

There is a third option: intervene.

For public safety professionals, that may be a sworn duty. A police officer responding to an active shooter does not get to “stay or go.” Security providers may have job expectations that require them to move toward danger. There are times when people with specific skills—military training, medical experience, defensive capability—may act.

And there are rare situations where survival requires confronting an attacker.

For most people, though, intervention is the last option—only when no other way to ensure safety exists. For the purposes of this playbook, we will be focusing on the two primary options: evacuate or protect-in-place.

This playbook doesn’t recommend one over the other. This is not “run-hide-fight” in sequence. The correct choice depends on what you know and don’t know, who you are with, the environment you are in, the nature of the threat, your capabilities, your resources, and your constraints.

There are almost always tradeoffs, but your goal is to make the decision that best protects you, based on the information you have available at the time.

Situational Awareness

This is where situational awareness comes into the picture.

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