Welcome back to The CP Journal, where we break down what it takes to get left of bang.
Strategy, at its core, is a bid for success. It is a hypothesis about how your organization can win in a changing environment.
That theme—and the willingness to see things differently while maintaining the discipline to move forward together—is the focus of this week’s edition.
We are entering a time of year when many organizations (both public and private) will begin reflecting on their performance in 2025 and setting the way forward for 2026.
Some leaders will say they are good and will want to stay the course. And others will recognize that things need to change next year. Sometimes that recognition comes from a near-miss. Other times it comes from a direct hit. Sometimes it’s the result of drastic changes in the operating environment, and other times, it’s the result of gradual, incremental shifts that, when taken together, are no longer tolerable.
The recognition that things need to change, though, is what creates the pre-event indicators that can alert attuned observers to a new willingness in their organization to actually (finally!) take a step back and think about how they can succeed. Recognition of this changing environment is the gateway a leader or an organization HAS to pass through before change becomes possible, because why would you invest time, money, or effort in something when things are “good enough?”
But in the same way that threat recognition only allows you to prevent an attack from occurring IF you are in the right spot to do something about it, recognizing the willingness for your organization to change only matters IF you are ready to reorient a leadership team and get them to commit to its follow-through.
Awareness creates opportunity, but only preparation turns that opportunity into progress. We hope the articles in The CP Journal and what we read this week help you create that awareness, transition it into forward progress, and take the next step toward getting left of bang.
Inside The CP Journal
Here are some of the articles that were added to the site this week.
The way the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s inspectors and investigators learn to recognize threats is what we had in mind when we first transitioned our Tactical Analysis Course to an online format.
This case study shows how the agency blends video-based training with agency-led discussions to embed the concepts from Left of Bang into its organizational culture and daily routines.
Left of bang strategies require two things: the ability to identify the capabilities you will need in the future, and the focused effort to turn those visions into your organization’s reality.
This “unlocked” left of bang leadership article outlines ways organizations can balance divergence (exploration) and convergence (focus) to prevent fractures and fragmentation that arise when preparing for an uncertain future.
🔒For Academy Subscribers, this article looks at the prompts, tools, and process we use to develop weekly situation reports.
Leveraging the advantages that AI offers, while acknowledging its limitations and the continued need for a human-in-the-loop, this article can help organizations build a process to proactively monitor their environment for the week ahead.
This Week‘s Reads
Here are a few standout reads from this week with insights, ideas, and perspectives that caught my attention.
Article | How To Apply Marine Corps Philosophy To Hardship. How we react to challenges, the unplanned, and frustrating inconveniences is a choice. We can choose to be discontent and disgruntled, or we can choose to flow with it and start the march uphill. As Sam Alaimo talks about in this essay on stoicism, there is a lot we can learn about making judgments under duress from first acknowledging, “There it is.”
Article | Companies Build “Capabilities” Before They Build “Moats.” What are your advantages that grow stronger over time? It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about businesses, the military, or public safety operators looking at how they gain the upper hand, but “moats” don’t come pre-formed. Organizations build them by first developing their capabilities. I re-read this article this week as I prepared for a strategy session we’re running for a client and thought it was worth sharing. Depending on what your organization does, the capabilities this article lists may or may not be what is needed in the year ahead, but they will undoubtedly get you thinking.
Article | Polymodern Warfare. Building on a great description of the “generations of warfare,” Adam Karaoguz describes the shift in power and conflict from the nation to a multipolar world that includes both sub-state (smaller than a state) and supra-state (larger than a state) actors. While I recognize that some readers will agree with this specific framing and others will disagree, the point is that our operating environment is changing. Because we’re in the process of navigating that shift (and we have not yet reached the end point of the change), getting left of bang requires recognizing that the act of change creates opportunities for competition. That competition is occurring online, which has become a conflict space for our perception and attention.
Book Review | Before 9/11, There Was Beirut - The First Salvo in a New War. Targeted: Beirut by Jack Carr is an excellent book about the 1983 bombing of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon. We recommended it last year, but thought this recent review was outstanding. If you’re looking for something to read, give this review (and then the book) a read.
Enjoyed This Issue? Pass It On and Go Deeper.
If this newsletter sparked ideas or challenged your thinking, share it with your network, a colleague, or on social media. Sharing is how we expand the community of professionals committed to getting and staying left of bang.
And if you want to go further, become a paying subscriber for exclusive access to:
The Tactical Analysis Course & behavioral analysis practice exercises from the book *Left of Bang.*
A growing list of playbooks and resource guides that are being developed alongside our client work to prepare for an uncertain future.
Exclusive “left of bang leadership” articles, sent out twice a month.
And if you’re thinking about how to strengthen your organization’s preparedness, that’s what we do. Whether it’s strategy development, assessments, planning, speaking events, or exercises, we help teams build the skills and strategies to stay ahead of the next challenge.