The Gap Between Activity and Readiness
Profiles in Preparedness #63
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been having a series of conversations with public safety chiefs about how their departments are preparing for the future. Not just training or equipment purchases, but how they think about preparedness as a capability.
There’s one question that has consistently slowed those conversations down. This article is built around that question.
If you’re a public safety or security executive and open to discussing how your organization prepares, reply to this email—we’d love to have the conversation.
Many agencies I talk to about preparing their organizations for the future are doing a lot of things right.
They have plans and train regularly. They’ve handled incidents well and have experienced people in key roles.
If you asked them whether they’re prepared, the answer is usually some version of: “Yes—we’re in a good place.”
And to be fair, that’s often true.
But there’s a question that tends to slow the conversation down: What does it mean for your department to be ready to perform?
Not in general terms and not conceptually. But specifically.
Prepared for what? Prepared to do what? Prepared to what standard?
This question sits at the strategic level of left of bang—where leaders are responsible for not just how their organization responds to incidents, but for shaping the capabilities that determine how it performs before those incidents occur.
The Difference Between Inputs and Outcomes
Preparedness is one of those words that feels clear—until you try to define it. I believe this stems from the fact that it’s easy to point to:
Plans that have been written
Exercises that have been conducted
Training that has been delivered
Equipment that has been purchased
Those activities are all real—and they are important—but they’re also all only inputs. Over time and with repetition, it is easy for those inputs to become the proof that says, “we’ve done the work, so we’re prepared.”
But recognizing that these activities are inputs to readiness, and not the end product, isn’t just a philosophical issue or a nuanced view.
When organizations and their leaders are unable to answer the question: “prepared to do what, exactly, and how well?” there’s no real way to prioritize between different programs and capabilities, make tradeoffs, understand the opportunity costs of different investments, measure progress, or align a leadership team around the same outcome.
So even though preparation continues, the direction the organization is heading in, and the clarity leaders have about their progress, starts to get a little fuzzy.
Confidence vs. Clarity
One of the more interesting dynamics in our conversations with chiefs and executives is that most leaders are confident in their teams, which makes sense.
They’ve seen how their people perform.
They trust their experience.
They’ve handled real incidents before.
While that confidence is earned, confidence and clarity are not the same thing. Confidence comes from experience, people, and past performance, while clarity comes from defining expectations, making assumptions explicit, and deciding what “good enough” actually looks like. You can have both, but you can also have one without the other.
If you want a quick way to test this, try asking a few people on your senior leadership team:
What are the top 2–3 things we need to be prepared for right now?
What does success look like if those things happen?
How well do we need to perform?
Then compare the answers to see how consistent they are. When there’s variation in the answers, which happens in many organizations, it’s often because those priorities and goals haven’t been explicitly defined.
The Difficulty
I believe there’s a reason this question about how ready an organization is isn’t addressed more directly.
At the leadership level, preparedness doesn’t show up as a single, clearly defined problem. It shows up as a series of competing requests and demands on an agency’s time, staff, and budget. Each division, team, and functional area in an organization has its own set of priorities:
Equipment that needs to be replaced
Training that needs to be attended
Projects that need to be launched
Most of these requests are often valid and important for the organization, but without a clear definition of what it is preparing for, and to what standard, there isn’t a consistent way to evaluate the requests against each other.
So decisions get made the only way they can:
Based on experience
Based on recent events
Based on what feels most urgent
Based on what has the strongest internal advocate
In our work with organizations to assess or establish preparedness programs, we routinely see different leaders describe preparedness in different ways. And the priorities each person is pursuing vary depending on those different perspectives.
It’s not that this ambiguity is “bad,” it’s just that in that environment, it’s always possible to feel like progress is being made, because nothing has been defined clearly enough to prove otherwise.
And when preparedness is treated as the result of a high volume of activities completed, the organization is left to navigate important decisions without a clear, agreed-upon target.
In many organizations, that target has never been made explicit.
Before the Next Plan, Training, or Exercise
Most organizations are already investing time and effort into preparedness. Right now, you probably have plans being written, training getting scheduled, equipment being purchased, and exercises getting designed.
Because those things are already in motion, use the opportunity to step back and ask whether they were chosen and shaped by a clear understanding of what the organization is working towards, or whether they are continuing because they are what has always been done.
Are these activities actually making us more ready to perform when it matters—or just keeping us busy?
That question doesn’t need to be answered perfectly, but I do think it needs to be asked directly. And it should be asked before the work begins—not after an incident or after an exercise—because once work is underway, it becomes much harder to change direction.
In some cases, simply working through that question as a leadership team has changed how organizations approach preparedness entirely. But it starts by asking it.
Where to Go Next
If this question resonates, there are a few ways to take it further.
For some, it starts with getting clearer on what readiness actually looks like—what it means to define capabilities, set performance expectations, and describe what “good enough” actually is before the work begins. I’ve written about that in more detail here:
For others, this becomes a leadership conversation. Sitting down with a senior leadership team and working through what the organization is actually trying to be ready to do—and how well—can quickly surface where perspectives align and where they don’t. In a number of organizations, that discussion alone has changed how preparedness decisions get made—which is the focus of our strategic briefing:
And in some cases, organizations choose to take it a step further—structuring that conversation into a project that defines preparedness priorities, clarifies capability expectations, and builds a more deliberate approach to readiness over time.
But regardless of how far you take it, the starting point is the same.
Before the next plan is written, training is scheduled, or exercise is conducted, it’s worth asking: what are we trying to be ready to do—and how will we know if this actually gets us there?
Enjoyed this article? Pass it on.
If this sparked ideas, share it with a colleague or your network.
That’s how we expand the community of professionals committed to staying left of bang.