It’s one thing to prepare well—it’s another to prepare for the right things.
Preparation is always forward-looking. It’s a bet on what skills, capabilities, and resources you’ll need tomorrow, not just what you already know how to do today. That makes it inherently speculative, because building a capability takes time: time to develop or review plans, train your team, secure the right equipment and resources, and validate that you can put it into action.
The larger and more complex the capability, the further into the future you have to project to be confident you’ll be ready when it’s needed.
This is why perspective matters so much. Perspective shapes how leaders interpret the world. It determines what they notice and what they dismiss, which scenarios they see as possible or whether they fall victim to a failure of imagination. It guides the information they anchor on, the patterns they recognize from past experience, and ultimately whether the future feels familiar and navigable or completely uncharted.
A leader’s perspective defines the scenarios their team prepares for. Those scenarios, in turn, dictate the capabilities required and allow leaders to assess whether the organization is truly ready to perform. Developing this perspective—and translating it into an understanding of which strengths must be sustained and which gaps must be closed—requires bandwidth, disciplined thinking, and a process practiced before the pressure of disasters, wars, or crises.
Your process for developing and refining perspective is what determines whether your community is ready to evacuate in the face of the next wildfire, whether a military unit can confidently conduct a noncombatant evacuation operation (NEO), whether a business can exit one market to free resources for growth in another, or whether your organization can shift public-facing applications from a primary data center to a secondary one when the primary environment is compromised.
Asking whether you’re preparing for the last disaster or the next one has become a cliché. What matters more is whether you’ve built a process that broadens and strengthens perspective, so your organization can anticipate the future with confidence rather than react to it in crisis.
Inside The CP Journal
Here are some of the articles that were added to the site this week.
As I wrap up one evacuation-planning project and prepare to begin another, I’ve been thinking about how much this work has evolved. Each community brings its own challenges, but the themes are consistent: balancing urgency with confidence, pre-planning with the need to adapt to a dynamic incident, and navigating the practical realities of moving entire populations to safety.
This article seeks to place community-wide evacuation into its broader context within disaster response and highlight three strategies that cities and counties can use when preparing for these complex operations.
🔒For Academy Subscribers, we expanded the Project Management in Emergency Management Playbook this week with an article that offers ways to improve how we plan our projects with people front and center.
This Week‘s Reads
Here are a few standout reads from this week with insights, ideas, and perspectives that caught my attention.
Article | How a Beautiful Summer Day on Lake Tahoe Suddenly Turned Deadly. This is a remarkable visual article from the New York Times about the storm that killed eight people on Lake Tahoe this past June. By embedding videos and time-lapse pictures into the article, it puts the reader on the boats and the shore to see this storm come together in a way that traditional text-based articles or stand-alone videos can't. When we consider how our own organizations can learn and grow from incidents that occur elsewhere, this serves as a powerful medium.
Article | Drug Cartels Are the New APTs. Last month, hackers breached the electronic case filing systems used by the federal judiciary. The concern is that cartels, criminal groups, and nation-states are now able to use that stolen data to identify witnesses and gain knowledge of ongoing investigations. "The problem here is that each individual agency is learning, hack by hack, that its data is highly prized by multiple groups who are actually capable of stealing it. Unfortunately, when the data in question contains sensitive information such as witness identities, learning lessons after a hack is simply too late."
Article | Training for the Probable, Not Just the Possible. In domestic disaster response, there is a constant tradeoff between preparing for the most intense scenario imaginable and those that are highly likely to occur in the following year. When considering the debate of frequency vs. complexity, preparing for one doesn't necessarily mean you're ready for the other. This article highlights the challenges that Marines face and how they differ from what they prepare for. You don't need to understand the organizational structure of a Marine Expeditionary Unit, though, to understand the takeaways and considerations for whatever your role or organization does.
Paper | Destruction and Creation. I read and re-read Colonel John Boyd's paper on destruction and creation a few times this week as I thought about the introduction to this week's edition. My takeaway was that, if you want to be independent in charting your organization's path to the future (instead of relying on anyone else’s thoughts about what the future may hold), you need the ability to break down and rebuild your operating environment on your own. The cycle of creating models and scenarios of what the future might hold from the ground up, breaking down generalized concepts into their component parts, and rebuilding your model takes time and effort, yet is critical to focusing your team's time, money, and attention on the things that matter the most.
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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.
I would have listed this as one of my favorite articles of yours in my summary post after our convo. Great stuff man