In this weekend’s Left of Bang Briefing, we’re going to explore an important part of the framework that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as recognizing threats.
Reducing the time it takes to act left of bang is just as important as recognizing the need to, and it’s something we’ve been thinking about quite a bit as we build Hazzard. It’s changing how we’re approaching the business itself.
One of the things I’m enjoying the most about building a company for the second time is the opportunity to think differently about how we design a business.
When we started The CP Journal back in 2012, the technology available to us was very different than what we have today. And we built our systems and processes around them, and often in response to a problem we were trying to solve.
I laugh when I think about how, back then, I thought WordPress and Evernote meant that anything was possible. If I had to build from those today, I don’t know if I’d do it all over again.
But starting Hazzard with 2026 technology, a blank slate (no clutter), and 15 years of lessons learned, it’s just a very different picture.
One of our priorities is building a shared organizational knowledge base, designed from the beginning to be accessible to our team and the AI tools we use.
The goal is to make what the company knows available to the people who need it, without requiring them to know where to look or who to ask.
Our goal is not to become an “AI-first” company. Defining our business by the technology we use would be a show-stopper for me. We’re building a mission-first, customer-focused company that can be far more capable because of AI.
That allows for two outcomes that I’m particularly focused on right now.
First, reducing the dependence on any one person’s knowledge.
We don’t want every decision or new project to depend on someone coming back to me or Chris to reconstruct the thinking behind what we’ve already done.
We want people to have access to the context they need to make informed decisions and execute within their responsibilities.
Second, making the work we do today improve our ability to execute tomorrow.
We’re not going to have a complete knowledge base on day one. In fact, we’re nowhere close to that today. But with every bit of completed work, there is new information, new context, and new decisions that get added to the growing library.
So if an opportunity comes along tomorrow, having what we’ve added so far is better than having nothing there. And the opportunities that come along next week will be pursued with even greater context than what we deal with between now and then.
Over time, that accumulated knowledge should reduce the amount of work we need to recreate, reduce the time we have to spend searching for information, and decrease the time needed to complete something we’ve already done before.
It’s incremental, and we’re building the capability while we’re running the business.
We’re still figuring out the right structures, workflows, and safeguards. And I know that as the knowledge base grows, keeping it current and useful will be just as important as adding to it.
But the opportunity to deliberately build these capabilities from the beginning, rather than trying to retrofit them into an established organization, is one of the things I’m most excited about.
Every day, the work we’re already doing can make the organization more capable of what it needs to do next. We’re intentionally using the time we have today to reduce the time we’ll need to act tomorrow.
That’s getting left of bang.