What makes a risk assessment good?

I realize that might not be the most engaging way to open an article hitting your inbox on a Sunday morning, but I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few weeks thinking about, talking about, and writing about risk beyond what you see on this site. Somewhere along the way, I’ve become a little fixated on the subject.

At least in theory, every major emergency management, public safety, and corporate security decision begins with an assessment of risk.

For these agencies and teams—again, at least in theory—most major investments eventually get justified by the risk they help address. Regardless of whether it is a piece of equipment that gets purchased, a plan that gets developed, an exercise conducted, a staff member that gets hired, or a funding request approved, it is often tied to one or more ways organizations reduce risk.

In every case, someone is making a judgment about what could get in the way of the organization doing what it is supposed to do, so we naturally spend a lot of time trying to understand that risk.

But I’m increasingly convinced that the way we assess risk and the way we actually use those assessments don’t line up very well.

When people talk about developing a risk assessment, the emphasis is usually on the quality of the analysis. Is it comprehensive? Is it data-driven? Did we consider enough scenarios? Did we miss anything important? And I understand why. If you are the person responsible for the assessment, leaving something out feels risky.

But once all of that work is finished, it gets handed to someone who has to make a decision, which is at the core of what I’ve been focused on.

A risk assessment approached as a deliverable gets developed differently than one designed—from the beginning—to support decisions.

When the assessment itself is the deliverable, there is a natural incentive to keep adding to it. More research makes the work feel more defensible, and before long the document is carrying more detail, data, citations, and supporting material because completeness starts to feel like quality.

Yet, even though all of that research is necessary at times, the problem emerges when the complexity required to develop the assessment becomes complexity for the person trying to use it.

You can end up with an analyst who has spent weeks or months buried in the information and who has developed a document so long that few of the people making decisions will ever use it.

But the executive doesn’t have that same benefit. They don’t have the same understanding of the assumptions, the tradeoffs, or the weak spots in the data used to develop that report.

Unless the analyst is attached to the executive’s hip—sitting in the meetings and present on the calls where decisions are actually made—that deeper understanding doesn’t automatically translate into better decisions for the organization.

This is because executives already have another way of assessing risk. They have their intuition.

Many experienced leaders maintain a natural understanding of their operating environment and the risks they face. Their job is to know where their organization is strong, where it is exposed, what keeps going wrong, what has changed recently, and what concerns them.

That isn’t to say their intuition reflects the “best” information available. Their understanding may be incomplete, biased by personal experience or beliefs, or overly influenced by recent events. But it has one enormous advantage over a formal risk assessment: it is available immediately and all the time.

So any documented assessment has to compete with it. If finding the assessment takes too long, if interpreting it requires outside help, or if the executive questions whether the information is still current, then there is a good chance they bypass a review of the formal assessment and just make the decision using the understanding already in their head.

That puts a different standard on the assessment. If its purpose is to help people make better risk-informed decisions, then I think a few things have to be true.

It needs to be accessible.

When someone is making a risk-oriented decision, they should be able to quickly check the assessment and understand how the issue they are considering fits within the organization’s larger risk picture.

That means they need to know the assessment exists, where to find it, and get to the relevant information without needing an analyst to walk them through it. The more friction involved in finding the information, the less likely it is to be used when decisions are made.

It needs to be current.

Even if an executive can find the information quickly, they still have to trust that what they are looking at reflects today’s reality.

An assessment that accurately describes an organization’s risk two years ago may still contain useful information, but risk changes all of the time. New information and research becomes available, threats and hazards evolve, the operating environment shifts, and organizations gain and lose capabilities every time a person joins or leaves the organization.

So updating the assessment has to be easy too. Adding new information and data, and recalculating its effect on risk can’t require restarting the entire process. The goal is to provide a living understanding of risk that can change as the environment changes.

It needs to be fast.

There is also a problem of how long it takes to create a risk assessment. If you think about a hazard mitigation planning process, the goal is to determine which mitigation projects will have the greatest impact and where a community can invest their limited funding and resources.

Yet before getting to those decisions, they might spend months assessing or reassessing their risk. Some of that work to collect good information, validate it, and apply it will take time, but every week spent getting to a usable understanding of risk is another week before the organization can begin deciding what to do about it.

And sometimes you don’t have months. If a leader asks how a newly identified threat compares to existing priorities, whether a proposed investment addresses a significant risk, or what has changed since the last assessment, the answer can not take months to produce. It has to be answered while the decision is being made.

Finally, it needs to be relevant to the decision being made.

This might be the most important test and probably the question I’d start with. Before beginning a risk assessment, we should be able to answer a fairly simple question: What decisions are we trying to make better?

The answer should shape the assessment itself—what gets included, how deep and far you go with the analysis, and what the decision-maker actually needs to see presented.

There will always be more that could be researched. There is always another data source, another scenario or angle to explore, another vulnerability, and another layer of analysis that could be added. But at some point, that process needs to stop and the information has to reach the person making the decision in a form they can actually use.

The judgment required to know when to stop can only come from knowing what decision is being made.

That brings me back to the question I started with: What makes a risk assessment good?

Comprehensiveness, accuracy, methodology, and the quality of the underlying research are all important, but those elements are secondary to making better decisions. The outputs of this process should show up in the quality and intentionality of where an organization invests its time and money.

A good risk assessment should reduce the friction and time required to develop an assessment because that friction and time carry a cost. Every additional week spent researching, analyzing, documenting, or updating a previous risk assessment delays the moment when an organization or a leader can recognize a priority, choose between competing investments, identify where additional capability is needed, or decide where limited time and resources should go.

The less friction there is between understanding the risk and making those decisions, the more valuable the assessment becomes and the sooner an organization can get to the work of actually doing something about the risk it identified.

As we close out this essay, I’m curious where the most amount of friction shows up in your organization’s risk assessment process—developing it, keeping it current, or actually using it. If you’re open to it, hit reply and let me know.

Fifteen years ago this month—in August 2011—I wrote the first article that eventually became The CP Journal.

At the time, we had just received an offer to write Left of Bang, and I realized that if the book was going to have any chance of succeeding, I needed to become a better writer. And after reflecting on some early article drafts, I recognized that I needed to become a better thinker.

Looking back today, those early articles make me cringe as often as they make me smile. They were rough and often lacked the clarity that comes with experience writing and teaching the concepts. But they also taught me a lesson that has shaped every article we’ve published since then.

Those early articles are the reason why we call this platform The CP Journal.

The “CP” is a nod to our origins. While Left of Bang tells the story of the Marine Corps’ Combat Hunter Program, much of the book focuses on Combat Profiling—the ability to observe human behavior, establish baselines, recognize anomalies, make decisions, and act before a threat materializes.

Although our work has expanded beyond those original topics, our founding principle to make the concepts available and accessible to anyone who is interested in learning how to get ahead of events hasn’t changed. Whether someone is deploying overseas, responding to a wildfire, managing an emergency operations center, protecting a business, or leading a public safety organization, the people who volunteer to protect others deserve immediate access to the ideas that can help them make better decisions before a crisis unfolds.

To this day, the “CP” provides the only reminder we need about who we exist to serve and what is at stake. The “Journal” portion of our name, however, sometimes raises a different question.

No, it wasn’t chosen because we wanted to sound like a newspaper or an academic publication. We chose “journal” because it best describes how we think about writing.

For me, writing is part of the process of learning. It isn’t the final step, but part of the process for me to translate disconnected observations into a coherent idea. It allows me to find gaps in my understanding of a topic that weren’t obvious before the first sentence was written and it exposes assumptions that don’t hold up the scrutiny of real world application. More often than not, I start writing because I’m trying to figure out what the problem I’m trying to solve or articulate a potential solution to it.

Publishing ideas that are still evolving has been a foundational principle since that first blog post. Once I realized that writing was how I improved my thinking, I realized that readers shouldn’t only see the finished product, but should also benefit from the thinking while it was evolving.

We would rather share our best current understanding of an important problem today than wait years to publish a version that appears more complete, but is too late to actually help people.

Sometimes that means an article is Version 1. Sometimes it’s Version 2. Sometimes we realize we were wrong and need to rethink the problem entirely.

One of our most-read essays, The Evolution of Left of Bang, has been revised multiple times over the years. We haven’t changed it because it was “wrong,” but because the clients and professionals we are working with have taught us something new. Those experiences changed our understanding of the framework, and the article changed with it.

This isn’t just about how we write though. The question, at least to me is, what does that mean for you as a subscriber?

It means that you’ll see ideas develop over time instead of being presented as immutable doctrine. It means that every article is written with the same question in mind: Will this help someone make a better decision before a crisis, disruption, or opportunity presents itself?

That’s the standard we try to hold ourselves to. Sometimes we hit it. Sometimes we don’t. And we don’t promise a perfect writing process or promise that our methods, tools, or approach will never change.

But what we do promise is that every article represents our best current understanding of problems that are important to professionals working to get left of bang.

Even though what we write about has changed in the past fifteen years, we’ve remained remarkably consistent to that mission.

We’re still learning, refining, and writing, but that is what The CP Journal means to me. We’re still doing that for the people who raise their hand and accept the responsibility of protecting others.

If you’ve been with us since the beginning, thank you for that support. It means more to us than you know. If you’re new to The CP Journal, thanks for joining us on this journey.

For the past fifteen years, The CP Journal has been our public journal of learning and we hope it continues to help you get left of bang for the next fifteen.

—Patrick

While you're here

We released a new episode of Baselines & Anomalies this week examining what July's flood of incidents teaches us about organizational readiness and decision-making under uncertainty. Watch or listen here, and enable notifications in your profile if you'd like future episodes sent directly to your inbox.

This episode is part of Baselines & Anomalies, a podcast from The CP Journal that examines events through the left of bang framework.

Episode Summary

The middle of July brought a relentless stream of floods, wildfires, extreme heat, power grid concerns, tropical weather, public health alerts, and international disruptions. While few organizations were directly affected by every incident, nearly every public safety, security, or resilience professional was forced to evaluate whether those events posed a threat to their organization or community.

This episode argues that periods of concurrent disruption are more than busy news cycles—they are real-world stress tests for an organization’s assessment capability. By examining how your team recognized, assessed, and prioritized this wave of incidents, you can identify whether your assessment process enables proactive decision-making or has become the bottleneck that limits your ability to stay left of bang.

Read more

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

We talk a lot about situational awareness in our articles and with our clients, but I don’t know if I’ve written much about the hidden cost that emerges once people begin using it in their organizations to become more proactive.

Situational awareness comes with its own set of terms and conditions that you accept when you set out to get left of bang. The problem is, just like the T&C box we blindly accept when using a software platform, we rarely read it or understand the tradeoffs before we take the first step.

When it comes to awareness, what you are agreeing to is this: once you start to see some things, you start seeing a lot of things. Situational awareness is like turning on the lights in a dark room. When that happens, you see the whole room, not just the thing you were looking for.

You can’t necessarily control or limit or contain where that awareness gets directed. So you see the good and the bad. You see things that are pleasant, and you see things that aren’t. And it changes something in you because once you see reality clearly, you lose the ability to pretend you didn’t.

This is the hidden cost of situational awareness.

Once that awareness exists, the responsibility to act also presents itself since you can no longer honestly say, “I didn’t know,” or “nobody could have predicted this,” or “we never saw it coming.” While I think this is easy to accept in theory and when the risks are abstract, I have routinely seen the impacts of this reality on organizations and their leaders the moment a risk becomes something real and tangible.

The difference between an individual improving their situational awareness and an organization doing the same is how public the decision-making process is. When an individual observes human behavior, establishes a baseline, identifies anomalies, assesses the threat level, makes a decision, and acts, the entire decision-making process occurs in their head. An external observer is limited to whatever explanation that person gives to justify their action, or lack of action, in a situation.

But in an organization, the entire recognize→assess→decide→act process is visible. There are emails, messages, debates around conference tables or video meetings, and there is a record—at least with those present—of what decision was or wasn’t made.

Without awareness of your surroundings or environment, that process never happens because nothing ever triggered the conversation about a potential threat, hazard, or opportunity. Yet with awareness, it happens routinely.

When I said at the top of the essay that situational awareness costs a person the ability to say, “we never saw it coming,” this is what I mean. Once a conversation about a potential threat happens, there is a record that you were in fact aware and that you made a decision about what to do about it.

So, what decisions do organizations make? In my experience, I’ve found that there are four general ways that people respond to being presented with challenging and uncomfortable issues in their organizations.

First, there are those that simply opt out. They recognize the cost of situational awareness and shut down the program, essentially choosing to revert back to how they were operating before they were aware because they don’t believe the cost of awareness is worth the reward. Whether this is the right or wrong way to deal with the challenge is beside the point—many organizations choose to not see what is happening.

Second, there are those who manifest the organizational equivalent of the “freeze” response to a new stress or threat. They don’t explicitly opt out, because that decision carries its own risk, but they avoid making any meaningful decisions once they become aware of a problem. They might rationalize away any perceived risks. They may postpone a decision by requesting more information or data in the pursuit of certainty. They may defer a decision until the next budget cycle in an attempt to buy themselves time before actually making a choice about how to respond.

Third, there are those that become incredibly busy. In response to an unanticipated problem they just discovered, people and teams start moving a thousand miles an hour, frantically trying to address everything all at once. But there are no real priorities, and whether those actions are the right ones is a different story. There is an odd form of career safety in activity. Being busy can feel safer and easier to justify than actually prioritizing what would be the best use of their time.

And fourth, you have the leaders who recognize the environment for what it is, understand that they are going to have to make some decisions—often some very tough ones—and act based on what they understand now. This path is admittedly reserved for only those who can accept their reality, and even though they can’t change the past or redo the decisions that got them into this position, they recognize they can control what they do going forward.

To be clear, I don’t envy the leaders in this situation. Sometimes clients become friends through a project, and I often find myself wishing that they didn’t have to do the hard thing. I recognize that what they thought they would do in the job, or what they wanted to do in the job, needs to get put aside so they can focus on what has to be done.

They might need to upset some external partners or members of their own team. They might need to re-allocate their limited budget, tell people no, accept short-term political pain, change priorities, and admit that previous assumptions might have been wrong. Even when those decisions are necessary, it doesn’t mean they are particularly fun or enjoyable or easy.

But at the same time, it’s what their organization, or their community, requires of them. It’s what their role as an executive and leader demands of them. It’s where they have to decide whether they are the ones to continue leading the organization—whether they have the resolve and willingness to lead that transformation—or whether they need to step aside so someone with the energy to drive this change can take the helm.

That’s why it is important to acknowledge the cost that situational awareness carries from the onset. The better you and your organization become at seeing emerging problems, the more uncomfortable truths you will encounter. In other words, better observations only increase the frequency of difficult decisions.

But with each early recognition of an emerging problem and each tough decision that follows, organizations gain the ability to get ahead of it, shape their environment, position themselves, and be well-prepared whenever it happens. To me, that’s the test. It is what happens after awareness has been achieved that makes situational awareness valuable.

Before You Go

Know someone responsible for helping an organization prepare for uncertainty? Share this newsletter with them.

Go deeper with a paid subscription for advanced courses, playbooks, and full podcast episodes.

Ready to strengthen your organization’s readiness? Active Analysis Consulting helps organizations improve decision-making, operational capability, and preparedness.

I had a commander in the Marines who taught what he called his “gear theory” of leadership.

His idea was simple. Every person in an organization is a gear and their role determines the size of their gear. The commander at the top of the org chart is a very large gear and turns relatively slowly.

Each level below him on the organizational chart is a smaller gear, which has to spin progressively faster just to keep pace with him. By the time you reach the most junior Marine in the unit, that gear is spinning at a sprint—even if the commander doesn’t feel like he’s moving particularly fast.

Even though people will adapt to almost any baseline operating tempo in time, his lesson was about what happens when the commander changes how fast his gear turns.

Every time a leader suddenly accelerates, every gear beneath them has to accelerate even more to keep pace. A small increase at the top becomes a much larger increase at the bottom of the organization and it creates this pattern of sudden spikes in the work and effort of the organization.

As a leader, if you do that often enough or do it without warning, eventually the gears in the organization begin to break as they are unable to keep up. The people represented by those gears make mistakes or choose to disconnect from the system altogether, counteracting many of the gains the organization has made.

His point was, even though you can’t always prevent that spike in work from happening, as a leader, you need to be aware of it and understand the impacts that sudden changes in pace have on a team.

I’ve thought about that lesson many times over the years, but it’s been coming to mind more and more often recently. The environment we work in is becoming increasingly more demanding. Every week seems to bring another new vulnerability, another threat to evaluate, another new technology to understand, and another expectation to meet.

What this means—in practice—is that organizations are not only experiencing a higher baseline operating tempo, but also a non-stop set of spikes in work. This is taking a toll on the people leading these organizations and the organization’s ability to prepare for an uncertain future.

Here’s my premise for this essay: as the pace of required adaptation increases, the ability to absorb change and adapt to new threats and hazards will be what separates organizations that emerge stronger from those that break.

Doing that requires organizations to build three distinct capabilities to keep the organization’s gears spinning at pace that both matches the demands of the environment and is sustainable to continue changing in the future as well.

Let’s get into what those are.

The Three Capabilities

Every time an organization successfully adapts to a new threat, vulnerability, or expectation, it completes the same basic cycle.

• First, someone has to recognize that a gap or vulnerability exists.

• Second, someone has to develop a solution that addresses the issue.

• Third, that solution has to spread throughout the organization and be adopted by people who were never involved in identifying the problem or developing the solution.

Those three steps sound almost too simple to write down, yet organizations routinely face the consequences of failing to complete the cycle.

• When a vulnerability isn’t recognized, organizations continue operating as if nothing has changed and with a false sense of security.

• When a solution can’t be developed, organizations are left with open vulnerabilities to known problems.

• When a solution is never implemented, the organization has done little more than build a good idea that sits on the shelf.

Regardless of which capability isn’t functioning, any failure to complete these three steps creates the same outcome: the organization remains exposed.

So, for leaders focused on moving their organizations further left of bang, recognizing which of these three capabilities is limiting adaptation in their organization becomes one of the most important questions they can ask.

You can see this cycle in cybersecurity.

While recording this week’s episode of Baselines & Anomalies, I looked at CISA’s directive to shorten the time federal agencies have to address high-priority vulnerabilities. Agencies that once had two or three weeks to deploy a patch now only have three days.

Someone has already identified the vulnerability, and the technical problem has already been solved with a patch. And then the race begins.

Can the update reach thousands of devices before attackers exploit the vulnerability? Recognition and solutions matter, but in this case, implementation determines whether the organization actually becomes more secure.

You can see this cycle in physical security.

In last week’s briefing, we shared an article describing Boko Haram’s use of AI tools to modify motorcycles so fighters could jump over defensive trenches that had stopped them during an earlier attack in Nigeria.

Whether those efforts were identified through intelligence or first became known after the reporting doesn’t really change what comes next. The organization responsible for defending against that threat must recognize what changed, determine how to respond, and ensure every location adopts the new defensive measures before the next attack occurs.

Any delay in developing the solution leaves the vulnerability open.

There are countless more examples we could analyze, and even though the names, threats, and environments all change, the cycle doesn’t.

Building Organizations That Can Keep Up

While understanding this cycle is relatively easy, building an organization that can complete it over and over again is where leadership becomes critical.

In my experience, I’ve found that different people gravitate toward different parts of this process. Some people are naturally skilled or interested in recognizing emerging problems, others know how to build solutions, while others have learned how to communicate, organize, and drive implementation across a large system.

But organizations only become more ready and more resilient when all three capabilities work together. Strength in one area can never compensate for weakness in another.

• Recognition without solutions changes nothing.

• Solutions without implementation accomplishes nothing.

• And the ability to implement without the ability to recognize gaps produces nothing.

Ensuring that all functions can perform—and perform well together—is where leadership comes in. Building the ability to do this is rarely automatic, so leaders need to choose where to invest their time, money, and effort to ensure their organization can do all three.

Since each function depends on the same foundation, the process to determine the greatest need can be done consistently. You need people with the right skills, plans and processes that ensure effort is applied productively, sufficient resources, and regular validation that everything works before it’s needed.

These investments often feel expensive because they are made before anyone knows exactly when they’ll be tested, but they determine whether the next identified gap becomes a manageable adjustment or another organizational fire drill.

My point is that leaders can’t control how quickly the environment changes, but they can control whether their organizations are prepared to adapt when it does. And increasingly, that may be the difference between organizations that simply survive change and those that emerge stronger because of it.

Before You Go

Know someone responsible for helping an organization prepare for uncertainty? Share this newsletter with them.

Go deeper with a paid subscription for advanced courses, playbooks, and full podcast episodes.

Ready to strengthen your organization’s readiness? Active Analysis Consulting helps organizations improve decision-making, operational capability, and preparedness.

This episode is part of Baselines & Anomalies, a podcast from The CP Journal that examines events through the left of bang framework.

Episode Summary

Artificial intelligence is changing more than the tools available to defenders and attackers—it is changing the speed at which organizations are expected to adapt. In this episode, we examine CISA’s decision to reduce the time federal agencies have to patch critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities from roughly three weeks to just three days and explore why that policy change matters far beyond cybersecurity.

Rather than focusing on patch management itself, this episode uses the directive as a case study to examine a broader leadership challenge: how organizations respond when performance expectations suddenly change. As adversaries become faster and more capable, leaders must understand which capabilities need to evolve—and how to adapt their plans, people, resources, skills, and validation processes to meet a changing environment.

Read more

Hey everyone,

Over the past couple of weeks, I had the opportunity to revisit and update some of the foundational pages on The CP Journal.

Admittedly, these are pages that most readers don’t notice all that often. But the pages that explain what the company is, where we came from, and how to get the most out of the site serve a critical role as the connective tissue across all of the articles we’ve written.

When these pages do their job well, they help new readers get oriented, allow existing subscribers to discover resources they may have missed, and make the site a little easier to navigate. Because of that, I like to come to these pages from time to time to make sure they are doing their job.

As I worked through those updates, I could see where my thinking has remained consistent since our first blog post was published in 2011, but also where it has evolved as the threats, hazards, and operating environment in which our readers and clients work have changed. Just as importantly, I could see how we’ve continued to refine how we package and deliver those ideas so they’re easier to apply in the real world.

That backward-looking perspective was helpful as we quietly launched the next version of how we will share our concepts this past week.

Our new podcast, Baselines & Anomalies, is another way we will explore these ideas. Some stories work better in conversation than they do as essays, and the podcast format will give us room to work through current events and what they reveal about the changing environments we work in.

We’ll share more about it over the next few weeks once we’ve built up a small library of episodes, but if you’d like an early look, our first episode goes into Europe’s wildfire readiness challenge and the importance of defining readiness problems accurately.

There is still plenty more to build, but every step brings us closer to helping more people recognize change earlier, make better decisions, and prepare with greater confidence.

Four Things We Read This Week

Here are some articles we read this week that can shape how you’re getting left of bang.

How Terrorist Groups are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle

Here’s the hook: members of Boko Haram are using A.I. to learn how to jump motorcycles over trenches (how they were stopped in a past attack). They then practice by having members actually jump motorcycles over trenches filled with fire and broken glass as an incentive to not fail (not everyone makes it).

Why we’re sharing it: A lot of conversation about A.I. and security has centered on cybersecurity or the use of A.I. for misinformation/cognitive warfare. The research this article is based on is one of the first that shows how terrorist groups are using it to improve their capabilities and conduct their mission planning.

You can read the article here.

3 Factors Determine if a Strait Becomes a Flashpoint

I absolutely loved this deep dive from the “People’s Art of War” that breaks down what makes a great naval chokepoint. “The world’s trade runs through a handful of gaps narrow enough to see across…Those who control the chokepoints, control the world.”

But how do you determine which ones matter?

The bypass cost is one factor. Who is nearby is a second. How replaceable the things on a stopped ship are is a third. After explaining each of those elements, the article then goes on to identify 5 critical straits not named Hormuz.

You can read the article here.

The Problem of Unlimited Hindsight

Every after-action review faces the same problem: once you know how an event ends, it’s almost impossible to put yourself back into the uncertainty that existed beforehand.

In this article, Von Kliem, President of Force Science, examines the prosecution of a Hartford, CT police officer and the broader debate over accountability, de-escalation, and hindsight in use-of-force investigations. What I found interesting (amongst other things) was the discussion on hindsight.

The challenge when evaluating an incident—whether it is a police use of force or a hurricane—is to only consider the information available to the person or organization at the time of the incident and what preceded it. Perception of a threat, for example, can’t be objectively assessed if it includes information that only revealed itself after the incident occurred.

This is critical for determining what was reasonable before an event—while left of bang—since certainty only becomes possible after the fact—once right of bang. If your role involves taking action without certainty, this article is worth the read as you shape organizational policy and expectations.

You can read the article here.

The Builders Creed

One of the themes we come back to often is that getting left of bang isn’t just about recognizing threats—it’s about intentionally building better organizations before those threats arrive. The future is not something that happens to us—it is something we make.

In this article, Seth Godin outlines 32 rules, concepts, and promises for actually building something, not just talking about it. This article provides an excellent set of reminders for anyone building a better organization, a safer community, or their personal skill set.

You can read the article here.

Before You Go

Know someone responsible for helping an organization prepare for uncertainty? Share this newsletter with them.

Go deeper with a paid subscription for advanced courses, playbooks, and full podcast episodes.

Ready to strengthen your organization’s readiness? Active Analysis Consulting helps organizations improve decision-making, operational capability, and preparedness.

This episode is part of Baselines & Anomalies, a podcast from The CP Journal that examines events through the left of bang framework.

Episode Summary

Europe’s firefighters are warning that they are underfunded, understaffed, and unprepared for another severe wildfire season. But while the article we discuss frames these challenges as a readiness problem, it also highlights a broader leadership issue: organizations often use the same word to describe fundamentally different problems.

In this episode, we examine why defining the problem is the first step toward building organizational readiness, and how separating hazards, mitigation, capabilities, and resources leads to better decisions and better investments.

Read more

This episode is part of Baselines & Anomalies, a podcast from The CP Journal that examines events through the left of bang framework.

Transcript

• Hey everyone—I’m Patrick Van Horne, co-founder of The CP Journal, and today, we are launching something new for our subscribers.

• Every day, leaders are expected to stay on top of what’s happening around the world, identify what’s relevant to their organization, and implement improvements before they’re needed.

• We recognize that it’s easier said than done.

• Every morning you wake up to an avalanche of emails, news, commentary, and analysis. Trying to sort through it all, determine what’s actually important, and figure out what you should do about it is a big ask.

• It isn’t always as simple as reading the article or the AI-generated summary.

• So today, we’re launching a new podcast series that looks at current and past events through the Left of Bang lens.

• In each episode, we’ll break down incidents, case studies, and stories from around the world and help leaders understand what happened, why it matters, and what lessons they can apply in their own organizations.

• We’ll examine events from strategic, operational, and tactical perspectives, and we’ll also speak with the leaders, the operators, and the practitioners who are addressing these challenges head-on in their organizations.

• We’re calling the series Baselines & Anomalies because the goal is to help you understand what’s normal, recognize what’s changing, and think through how those changes might impact you.

• I certainly hope you’ll join us.

• The first episode is available now, and we’ll be releasing new episodes throughout the year.

• Thanks for watching, and I look forward to helping you and your organization get Left of Bang.

America exists because millions of people, over generations, accepted responsibility for things larger than themselves.

To me, America’s Independence Day isn’t about pretending our country is perfect or that we don’t have room to improve. It’s about recognizing how many people—and how much effort—went into building what we have, and our responsibility to leave it stronger than we found it.

One day won’t sustain our freedoms, but it can remind us why the work matters on the other 364. So—for our U.S. readers—go enjoy the country we’re fortunate enough to live in.

Spend time with your family.

Meet your neighbors (and check on them if you’re in one of the hot parts of the country).

Attend a parade.

Visit a memorial.

Thank someone who has served your community.

Enjoy the freedoms that generations before us worked to preserve.

And while you’re doing that, take a moment to notice something you’ve never noticed before about your own community. Watch how people gather, how volunteers organize an event, how first responders work behind the scenes, and how neighbors help one another.

Just pay attention. The view might impress and inspire you.

Then come back next week. As America begins its 251^st year, we’ll return to the work that The CP Journal exists for: helping leaders recognize change earlier, prepare more effectively, and build organizations that are ready for whatever comes next.

Happy Independence Day.

A military commander preparing for battle does more than develop plans for how their unit will fight. They also work to shape the conditions under which the fight will occur.

• They clear fields of fire, harden positions, disperse supplies, and establish obstacles.

• They remove anything and any condition that might give the enemy an advantage.

• They reduce the number of things that could turn a small problem into a catastrophic setback.

Even though none of these actions guarantees victory, each one changes the terms of the future fight and increases the likelihood that their side will win.

Naturally, influencing the environment we operate in is not limited to military applications. Business, government, and organizational leaders do this as well. In the context of disasters, however, the work of shaping the environment before an incident occurs is referred to as mitigation.

And even though hazard mitigation planning is one of the most common preparedness activities conducted by local governments across the United States, I don’t think we’ve done ourselves any favors in the way we’ve come to think about mitigation itself.

Let me explain.

A Short Primer on Hazard Mitigation Planning

For those unfamiliar with hazard mitigation planning, it is a recurring planning process that nearly every city, county, special district, tribal nation, and state undertakes every five years. Under federal law, jurisdictions must have a FEMA-approved hazard mitigation plan to remain eligible for many federal grant programs.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that arrangement. In fact, it has helped thousands of communities identify risks, prioritize mitigation projects, and secure funding for improvements that reduce future disaster impacts.

Over time, however, I believe an unintended consequence has emerged. Because FEMA approval is tied to the planning process, mitigation itself has gradually come to be associated with producing a FEMA-approved plan rather than with the broader strategic objective of shaping future operating conditions before disasters occur.

The incentives built into the process reinforce that perception. Since FEMA approval focuses on natural hazards, communities naturally devote most of their limited planning capacity to those risks. While jurisdictions can certainly consider other risks—such as crime, targeted violence, cyber attacks, or other human-caused threats—those topics play a much smaller role in the review and approval process. When time, funding, and staff capacity are limited, it is understandable that communities prioritize the work that leads directly to plan approval and grant eligibility.

The planning process itself also demands a significant investment in time and resources. I recently reviewed a hazard mitigation plan that exceeded 900 pages. While that document undoubtedly satisfied the planning requirements, very few people will ever read it from beginning to end after it is approved.

More importantly, the effort required to produce a document of that size often consumes much of an organization’s available planning capacity. By the time a jurisdiction completes the process, there is rarely much time, funding, or organizational energy left to step back and ask a broader question: How else can we shape our environment to reduce the impacts of future events?

So when I say we haven’t done ourselves any favors, this is what I mean. This isn’t about blaming FEMA or criticizing hazard mitigation planning, far from it. The process serves an important purpose and has delivered meaningful benefits to communities across the country.

Rather, I think we’ve unintentionally allowed one planning process to become synonymous with mitigation itself. Hazard mitigation planning is one application of mitigation, but it is not the complete definition of the strategy.

Where Mitigation Fits

Personally, I don’t believe compliance is the best way to think about mitigation. Mitigation is about intentionally shaping the environment before an event occurs so that, if it does happen, the event unfolds differently than it otherwise would have.

This is where mitigation complements the other left of bang strategies we discussed earlier.

• Prevention focuses on reducing the probability of an event occurring in the first place. Mitigation assumes that some events cannot be prevented and instead works to reduce their consequences.

• Operational Readiness develops the capabilities an organization will need once an incident begins. Mitigation, on the other hand, works to reduce the demands that will eventually be placed on those capabilities.

As a simple example, picture a culvert that allows a stream to pass underneath a road in your town. If the culvert is too small, it doesn’t take an especially large rainstorm for water to back up at the culver entrance, flood the roadway, and become an emergency that requires a response. But if the community replaces that culvert with one that can handle a greater volume of water, the same rainstorm may simply remain…rain.

The mitigation effort didn’t change the weather—it changed the environment.

Because the environment changed, the demands placed on responders changed as well. There was no flooded roadway, no stranded motorists, no road closure, and no emergency response required.

That is why mitigation is a left of bang strategy: it changes the relationship between supply and demand.

Most organizations think about preparedness with the goal of increasing supply. They hire more people, purchase more equipment, attend more training, and build additional capabilities so they can respond more effectively when something goes wrong. Those investments are important, but they are only one side of the equation.

Mitigation works from the opposite direction. Rather than increasing the supply of response capabilities, mitigation reduces the demands placed on them in the first place.

This is why mitigation extends beyond flood control projects and building codes. Communities can shape their future operating environment in countless ways: financial reserves that reduce the impacts of unexpected costs, redundant communications systems to reduce the impacts of equipment failure, and public education to reduce confusion during emergencies.

Even trust can be viewed through this lens.

Earlier this week, I wrote for paid subscribers about how public trust influences the effectiveness of response efforts during the current Ebola outbreak. At first glance, trust appears to be a response issue because it affects whether people cooperate with responders.

But trust is established long before a crisis begins. It shapes the environment responders will eventually operate in, reducing resistance and making response capabilities more effective when they are needed most.

Whether the issue is infrastructure, finances, technology, relationships, or public trust, the underlying question remains the same: how can you shape the environment today so that tomorrow’s event places fewer demands on your organizations and your community?

In Closing

When considering mitigation, I believe that we’ve unintentionally allowed one planning process to define an entire strategic approach. Hazard mitigation planning remains valuable and necessary, but mitigation itself is much broader.

Every leader has the opportunity to shape tomorrow’s operating environment before tomorrow arrives. That timeframe matters because you can’t surge mitigation. Trust, fuel reduction, building codes, drainage improvements, public education, and relationships all require years to become effective and meaningful.

The organizations that consistently get left of bang are not simply better at responding to difficult environments. They spend years shaping those environments before the crisis begins.

Before You Go

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

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

There is an organizational readiness equivalent to the myth that “if you build it, they will come.”

The myth appears when organizations invest significant time, money, and effort into launching new programs, buying new equipment, or training their teams. And it comes from an understandable assumption: if an organization becomes better at doing something, then it should be able to achieve better outcomes because of it.

Yet organizations routinely discover that having a capability—the combination of people, plans, skills, and resources that allows an organization to do something well—and being able to use it are not the same thing.

The reality is that many capabilities never reach their full potential. Sometimes they are used only sparingly before being abandoned. Other times, organizations find that the very people they intended to help with their capabilities ultimately resist, reject, or undermine the use of something developed for their benefit.

Why does that happen?

Part of the answer is that success in public safety and security is determined externally. Organizations can develop expertise, acquire equipment, and write plans—all of those things are within their control—but if the people they are responsible for protecting do not trust them enough to accept, or support, or cooperate with the use of those capabilities, then much of that investment becomes an unrealized promise.

So here is my premise for this essay: capabilities do not exist in a vacuum.

Their effectiveness depends on the environment in which they operate. They require legitimacy, trust, and public cooperation to function, and that trust must exist in both the organization deploying the capability and the capability itself.

I have chosen to write this as a leadership essay because preparing an organization for the future is not simply a matter of building the ability to do something well. It also requires preparing the environment in which that capability must operate.

Said another way, if leaders are responsible for ensuring the capabilities they invest in are usable, then they are also responsible for helping create the conditions that allow those capabilities to succeed when they are needed the most.

Few examples illustrate the relationship between capability and trust more clearly than the current Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Read more

There are two ways to learn a lesson.

• The first is to experience it yourself.

• The second is to learn it from someone else.

One of those options is much more expensive than the other.

In fact, learning from your own crisis is often the most expensive way to acquire knowledge, only to be surpassed by having to learn the lesson a second time. Of course, sometimes this is unavoidable, but it should not be the preferred method.

Yet when I ask professionals whether they learn from the experiences of others, the answer is almost always yes. They can quickly point to the conferences they attended, the after-action reports they read, the professional associations they belong to, the podcasts they listen to, and the news they follow.

At first glance, these answers seem reasonable. But if organizations are truly learning from the experiences of others, why do so many of the same lessons continue to appear year after year?

Why do after-action reports and post-mortems repeatedly identify communication and coordination challenges, leadership gaps, staffing shortages, training deficiencies, and planning shortfalls that have already been discussed countless times before?

The lesson is often known, the information is available, and the experience has already happened to someone else, yet the same issues continue to appear.

This raises an uncomfortable possibility. Maybe we are better at consuming information than we are at converting it into better performance and greater readiness?

It might seem obvious, but consuming information is different than learning.

• Knowing that something happened is not the same thing as understanding why it happened.

• Understanding why it happened is not the same thing as changing behavior because of it.

And changing behavior is ultimately the point.

In today’s operating environment, where access to information is no longer the issue or limitation it once was, the question is whether you can convert what you read, watch, or hear into improved readiness.

Even though these two skills are often confused with one another, they are very different. And this confusion becomes most visible when an event you’re reading or hearing about has happened “somewhere else.”

When you hear about a cyberattack, a wildfire, an infrastructure failure, a disease outbreak, or a crisis in another organization or happening in another part of the world, it is easy to quickly dismiss it.

• “It doesn’t affect me.”

• “It isn’t in my industry.”

• “It has never happened here.”

So you move on.

The problem is that this perspective assumes the value of an event lies in the event itself. But it doesn’t. The value lies in the lesson.

Most people naturally look at an event and focus on the likelihood that it will happen to them. They are essentially asking, “Could this happen here?” But organizations that consistently get left of bang ask, “What can I learn from this before I need the lesson myself?”

I recognize that this shift seems very small, but it really isn’t. The first question focuses on the event and probability, while the second question focuses on the pattern and readiness.

To learn about how likelihood, impact, and readiness combine to inform risk and opportunity assessments, start with our event assessment article.

This is why studying past and current events is so important. The goal of learning how to do this well isn’t to predict the future, become more aware, entertain yourself, or spend hours doomscrolling through articles and analysis.

We do it so we can identify patterns before they become our problem. That is why learning how to learn from others is a critical skill to prepare for an uncertain future.

• When a wildfire occurs, there are lessons that extend beyond firefighting.

• When a cyberattack occurs, there are lessons for non-technical people.

• When a recruiting crisis emerges, there are lessons for many professionals.

The event is simply the vehicle through which the lesson arrives, but the lesson lives within the patterns of performance.

Proactive and forward-looking organizations already understand this. They don’t wait for a local incident to become their instructor. They are continually learning from the failures, near misses, successes, and experiences of others. They use those lessons to identify gaps, challenge assumptions, and improve their readiness before circumstances force the issue.

The question is not whether there are lessons available.

The question is whether you have learned how to recognize them before they become personal.

Before You Go

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

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

There’s a story that I sometimes use during presentations that captures the essence of what it means to get left of bang. Apologies if you’ve heard me talk about this before, but it’s a story I think about a lot.

A Roman general was leading his legions toward the enemy in a swampy country.

He knew that the next day’s battle would be fought on a certain plain because it was the only dry, flat place for miles.

He pushed his army all night, marching them through a frightening and formidable swamp, so that they reached the battle site before the foe and could claim the high ground.

In the aftermath of the victory, the general called his troops together and asked them, “Brothers, when did we win the battle?”

One captain replied, “Sir, when the infantry attacked.”

Another said, “Sir, we won when the cavalry broke through.”

“No,” said the general. “We won the battle the night before - when our men marched through that swamp and took the high ground.”

—As presented in Steven Pressfield’s The Warrior Ethos.

The reason I like this story is that it challenges how most of us instinctively think about success. The captains point to the visible moments—the infantry attack and the cavalry breakthrough—yet the general points to the decision, the positioning, and the work that occurred before the battle began.

Looking backward, his logic seems obvious.

• The battle would be fought on the only flat and dry piece of land.

• The high ground offered an advantage.

• Therefore, getting there first is what would make the difference.

The challenge, of course, is that we rarely get to operate from hindsight. We have to make decisions before we know which facts will influence the outcome and before events reveal the answer.

That is so much easier said than done, which is why we tend to admire people who can do it consistently.

One of the most remarkable things you will ever see is someone who can repeatedly put themselves or their organization in the right place, at the right time, with the right teams, skills, and resources before events unfold.

• The executive or investor who identifies a market shift early.

• The military commander who places forces where they will be needed rather than where they are needed now.

• The public safety professional or emergency manager who recognizes a threat or hazard before conditions deteriorate.

As a society, we tell stories about them. We talk about them as if they are legends who single-handedly tipped the scales in their favor. And it’s tempting to assume they possess some special intuition or that they are simply gifted.

But mastery usually only looks magical from the outside. You might see people who appear to be naturally better at anticipating events, but there was a process for that person to learn how to do it. The question—the one that I think is the most interesting—is how do people develop the ability to do it?

What the Roman General, the investor, the commander, and the emergency manager have in common is that they rarely arrive at those decisions by accident. What appears to be intuition is often the result of years of accumulated practice and experience.

• The executive who spots a trend early has likely spent years studying markets, customers, and competitors.

• The military commander who sees the significance of terrain, timing, and movement has likely spent years studying how battles are won and lost.

• The emergency manager who recognizes a developing threat or hazards has likely spent years examining incidents, hazards, and warning signs.

By the time they encounter a critical decision, they are not inventing a solution from scratch, but applying a skill that has been developed through years of experience and practice.

Mastery Starts With Mechanics

I was thinking about the story and how people develop their intuition this week while writing our bi-weekly leadership essay for our paying subscribers.

The article outlines a four-step sequence—Recognize → Assess → Decide → Act—that we use to apply the concepts written about in Left of Bang to the broader and wider range of threats, hazards, and opportunities that organizations want to get ahead of.

Dive deeper into the sequence here:

These steps are deceptively simple, but simple is not the same as easy.

Like any skill, mastery requires repetition. Sometimes a lot of it, and often in a variety of different settings, before it becomes intuition and second nature.

• An NFL quarterback could teach me how to read a defense, but it doesn’t mean I’ll simply be able to do it right away.

• A musician could teach me how to play scales on the piano, but it doesn’t mean I could make my fingers perform to the level of a concert pianist.

• A pilot could teach me emergency maneuvers (once I learned how to get the plane off the ground), but the PowerPoint presentation wouldn’t make me ready for Top Gun.

We provide the steps in the article, just like we teach the Baseline + Anomaly = Decision structure in the book or the behavioral approach to threat recognition in the Tactical Analysis Program, because it creates a way to practice.

Frameworks simply make the mechanics visible and give people a process they can apply deliberately until the skill becomes familiar and eventually automatic.

At first, the mechanics will feel clunky. They feel overly analytical. They can even feel slower than simply relying on instinct. We start by defining the mechanics, though, because once you have a way to practice seeing and acting early, the mechanics eventually fade into the background.

In the real-world settings where people live and work, reality often moves too fast to consciously walk through every step of an analytical process. But if mechanics have become second nature, then you won’t find yourself trying to invent a solution in the moment. You’ll be applying a well-developed skill to a problem you’ve learned how to solve.

From the outside, that can look like intuition. In reality, it is often the result of thousands of repetitions that nobody else saw.

And that, to me, is what the Roman General’s decision represents. His march through the swamp wasn’t a lucky guess or just a hunch. To me, it was the visible manifestation of a capability that had been developed long before that particular battle ever began.

Pursuing Mastery in Proactivity

This process of beginning with the mechanics—starting with the rules of the domain—is how people develop a deep skillset in almost every field.

In Mastery—a book I have gifted more than any other—Robert Greene describes how professionals progress through different stages of development. It begins with an apprenticeship phase, where people learn the fundamentals of their craft. As apprentices, they learn the rules, the mechanics, and the principles that determine their success. Then they practice those fundamentals repeatedly until they become familiar with them.

And then at some point during that process, they see a change.

The mechanics that once required a great deal of conscious effort become more natural. And when the professional is no longer focused on performing the task itself, their attention becomes available for something more important: understanding why things are happening, recognizing patterns, adapting to changing conditions, and improving their performance.

This transition creates the opportunity for their experience to begin compounding at a faster rate. They begin applying those principles in different settings and under different conditions, and if they remain objective enough to observe the results of their decisions and adjust their approach, they continue refining the craft. Eventually, intuition and analysis begin to blend together.

What once required a deliberate process becomes a capability.

For many professionals, this progression can continue uninterrupted for decades. A carpenter continues building. A chef continues cooking. A brewer continues brewing.

But, ironically, military leaders, public safety professionals, security practitioners, emergency managers, and business leaders rarely have that luxury.

We get promoted. And every promotion changes the game.

• The operator becomes a team leader.

• The team leader becomes a supervisor.

• The supervisor becomes an executive.

And each transition introduces new responsibilities, new priorities, and new decisions. The skills that created success in the previous role remain valuable, but they are no longer sufficient.

In many ways, each promotion drives us to re-enter the apprenticeship phase. We leave a role where we had confidence and competence, and we return to a position where we need to learn the rules of the new game.

This is one of the reasons why proactive leadership can feel difficult at first. The indicators, decisions, and actions that matter at one level of an organization are often different from those that matter at the next.

• A patrol officer and a police chief both need to identify potential threats, but they are paying attention to different information.

• A project manager and an executive both need to anticipate change, but they are making decisions on different timelines and with different consequences.

The challenge isn’t simply becoming proficient once. That is for a day gone by. Today, leaders need to develop new forms of proficiency as responsibilities expand.

This reality is one of the reasons we continue to build training, articles, and resources around proactive decision-making. We aren’t trying to provide a collection of unrelated models, but provide continuity in the process as professionals move between roles, responsibilities, and levels of decision-making.

As readers and our clients apply the Recognize → Assess → Decide → Act sequence to a new set of threats, hazards, and opportunities, we hope that the parallel to the Baseline + Anomaly = Decision becomes immediately apparent.

The mechanics are intentionally designed to be similar. When professionals re-enter the apprenticeship phase of a new job, they don’t have to start from scratch and can bring familiar decision-making mechanics with them.

We can’t eliminate the learning process and don’t believe there are any shortcuts to mastery. But I think we can shorten the time required to become effective by allowing people to build on skills they have already developed.

In that sense, professionals can begin acting before a new set of events impacts them, and do so with greater confidence.

Returning to Rome

And this brings us back to the story of the Roman General.

Many organizations want the outcome without accepting the requirement. They want better anticipation, better decisions, more agility, and people who can operate effectively under uncertainty. But they often treat those capabilities as traits rather than skills. They act as if some people simply possess them while others do not.

But as we’ve shown, reality is much less mysterious. It just requires putting in the work to recognize meaningful indicators, assess what they mean, make decisions under uncertain conditions, and take action before events unfold. It simply takes practice. It requires learning the mechanics, applying them repeatedly, and developing the judgment that comes from experience.

When I read the story about the Roman General, I don’t believe that he won because he knew the future. I think he won because he understood the present better than his opponent. He understood the terrain and where two armies were likely to converge. And because of that understanding, he was able to act before the outcome became obvious.

That same opportunity exists for all of us. But the people who consistently get ahead of events are rarely guessing. They are just applying skills that have been practiced so thoroughly that they appear effortless from the outside.

What looks like intuition is often mastery at work.

Before You Go

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

If you want to go deeper, a paid subscription gives you access to additional articles, training programs, workshops, and leadership development resources we’ve created to help professionals build the ability to recognize meaningful change, assess what it means, make decisions under uncertainty, and act before events force their hand.

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

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

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

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

But organizations are different.

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

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

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

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

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

What follows is an initial introduction to that approach.

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cognitive Warfare | Defined

Cognitive warfare1 is no longer a theoretical concept.

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

Consider a few recent examples:

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

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

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

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

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

• Attention — what people notice

• Perception — how people interpret what they notice

• Memory — what they remember afterward

• Emotion — how they feel about the information

• Decision-making — what they ultimately choose to do

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

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

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

But cognitive warfare is relevant beyond military conflicts.

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

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

Cognitive Warfare & the Interpretation Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9 Ways Interpretation Gets Shaped

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

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

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

1. There is a process to capture attention

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

You’ll see articles:

• Establish or highlight a threat

• Explain why it affects you personally

• Create a sense of urgency

• Imply that action is required immediately

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

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

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

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

2. The writer becomes the prophet

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

You’ll see statements such as:

• Everyone else is asleep

• Most people are missing this

• The warning signs are already here

• This is only the beginning

• Here’s what happens next

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

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

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

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

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

3. Hidden Sources and Unverifiable Information

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

You’ll see statements such as:

• “I have sources.”

• “I’ve been told.”

• “People in the know.”

• “What I can’t say publicly.”

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

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

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

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

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

4. Credential Signaling

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

• “As a former…”

• “Having worked across…”

• “After spending years in…”

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

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

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

5. Identity Formation

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

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

• People like us

• Our side

• Our community

• What we believe

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

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

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

• What evidence would cause me to change my mind?

6. Anchored Against an Enemy

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

This could be the:

• Government

• Media

• Experts

• Corporations

• The Left

• The Right

• Political opponents

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

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

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

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

7. Urgency and the Compression of Time

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

Watch for phrases such as:

• Act now

• Before it’s too late

• The next 30 days

• Available until Wednesday

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

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

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

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

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

8. Blending Fact with Speculation

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

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

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

• Established facts

• Reasonable assumptions

• Speculative forecasts

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

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

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

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

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

• Where does the evidence end and the forecast begin?

9. The Community as Validation

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

Writers often reinforce credibility through social proof:

• Subscriber counts

• Revenue figures

• Comment volume

• Audience growth

• Endorsements

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

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

When you encounter this pattern, ask:

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

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

In Closing

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

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

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

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

But you should seek to maintain ownership over the assessment.

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

More importantly, you get to choose.

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

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

Before You Go

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

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

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

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

That creates a difficult challenge.

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

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

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

• Planning gets compressed into the final week

• Outreach happens later than it should

• Slides are being edited the night before

• The event finishes without a clear path forward

• The report never gets completed

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

This is a problem that we exist to address.

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

The Prolonged Power Outage Readiness Workshop and Workspace

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

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

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

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

• Facilitation guide and speaking notes

• Workshop slides

• Participant placemats

• Project management plan

• Email outreach templates and calendar invitations

• Small-group facilitator briefing materials

• Post-workshop report template

• Short daily implementation videos to guide preparation and project closeout

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

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

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

Accessing the Workspace

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

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

Learn more about the Workspace here:

Looking Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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About This Workspace

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

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

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

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

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

Workspace Table of Contents

Questions or Support

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

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

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