Our 2025 Letter to Subscribers
What we saw in 2025 and how it’s shaping our focus for the year ahead
As another year comes to a close, we’ve been reflecting on the conversations, projects, and questions that shaped our work in 2025. Many of them centered on the same underlying tension: organizations are being asked to operate in environments that are increasingly uncertain, interconnected, and unforgiving. And often, they are being asked to do that with systems that were not designed to keep pace with that reality.
At The CP Journal, we’ve spent the past year paying close attention to how that tension shows up in practice. Not just in moments of crisis, but in planning cycles, capability decisions, training investments, and the everyday work of professionals trying to do the right thing with limited time and imperfect information.
This letter is a reflection of what we’ve learned, how it has shaped our work, and where that learning is taking us next.
How Left of Bang Became an Organizational Problem
The ideas that became Left of Bang (the book) and were taught in our Tactical Analysis Course, were shaped by the realities of operating in environments where decisions must be made before certainty arrives. On the front lines of conflict, information is incomplete, time is limited, and hesitation carries real consequences. In those conditions, not having a disciplined way to recognize emerging threats and act proactively is a liability.
As those ideas spread beyond their original context and into a wider range of organizations, something else became clear. The growing need for left of bang skills was a signal revealing deeper constraints in how organizations sensed change, made decisions, and adapted over time.
In many cases, individuals were being asked to exercise extraordinary judgment because the systems around them left little room for anything else. Front-line professionals were compensating for organizational blind spots created by operating right of bang to threats, trends, and shifts that should have been identified and addressed years earlier. When organizations lack the ability to anticipate change, they inevitably ask more of the people closest to the consequences.
What surprised us in hindsight was that the same “medicine” worked whether we were treating a symptom or the underlying condition. The principles that help an individual detect danger—recognizing patterns, understanding baselines and anomalies, making sense of incomplete information, and acting decisively without perfect certainty—were the same principles missing at the operational and strategic levels of many organizations.
Over time, those constraints accumulated. Gaps in coherent strategy, mismatches between plans and actual capability, misaligned projects, organizational design decisions made in isolation, and underdeveloped leaders all compounded one another. The result was not a lack of effort or commitment, but an organization that struggled to adapt as its environment changed.
The realization that followed reframed our work. The same way a shared language for what to observe, a disciplined process for interpreting signals, and a decision-making framework for acting under uncertainty allow professionals to get left of bang in the field, those same concepts can be applied at the organizational level. When embedded into how an organization plans, prioritizes, builds capability, and develops leaders, they allow the organization itself to move left of bang—relative to the risks it faces.
At the same time, something else was changing. Communities and organizations are increasingly unwilling to accept the consequences of being reactive. Just as the military recognized that relying solely on better armor and faster reactions was insufficient, organizations are beginning to see that unfocused preparedness efforts, misaligned investments, and capabilities disconnected from real-world demands are no longer tolerable.
What we are seeing—still early, but increasingly consistent—is a recognition that if an organization requires heroic, last-second decisions to succeed, something failed well before the moment of crisis. Emerging leaders, in particular, are not content to accept that as the price of doing business.
That shift in awareness shaped the year we just completed, and it sets the conditions for the work we did in 2025—helping organizations prepare for an uncertain future by building the capacity to recognize change, make disciplined decisions, and act before events force their hand.
A Second Year One
In many respects, 2025 marked a new beginning for us.
While The CP Journal has supported organizations since 2012, Patrick had returned to public service in 2018. Early signals were emerging that public safety organizations were struggling to translate preparedness concepts into true capabilities, so Patrick went to work with the Office of Emergency Management in Boulder, Colorado, before later being selected to help lead work within Hagerty Consulting’s Preparedness Division.
By the end of 2024, we recognized we were as ready as we would ever be to bring those experiences back into The CP Journal. Time spent in local government and with a nationwide consulting firm gave us clarity about the problem we wanted to help organizations solve—and how to design our work around it.
As a result, 2025 became a focused and deliberate “second year one.” With a clear vision and a refined understanding of where we could add the most value, the work we undertook during the year reflects that intent and sets the conditions for what follows.
What We Did in 2025
At the core of our work are two commitments: developing clear, usable thinking for people trying to get left of bang, and working alongside organizations as they build real readiness—not just plans or programs.
In 2025, our efforts were deliberately focused on both.
Simplified How We Deliver Our Work
One of the most consequential decisions we made this year was consolidating our online presence onto a single platform. We shut down multiple standalone websites and relaunched The CP Journal on Substack—not as a branding exercise, but as a design choice aligned with how our subscribers actually engage with our work.
That move simplified our business and allowed us to lower the cost of access to our courses and content. More importantly, it lets us do something we believe strongly in: provide everything we publish—articles, courses, and new material under development—through a single subscription. For the foreseeable future, there is no tiering of access based on when or how someone joins. If you’re in, you’re in.
The feedback we’ve received since the transition reinforced that this was the right call.
Established a Sustainable Writing Routine
We also found a writing and publishing cadence that respects the reality of your time and attention.
Rather than publishing into inboxes every time something goes live, we settled into a consistent weekly rhythm. Most Sundays, subscribers receive a single email anchored in a left-of-bang-related idea, followed by links to everything else published that week. Sometimes that is a lot, sometimes it’s very little. Paid subscribers receive one additional essay roughly every other Wednesday, focused on the challenges of leading organizations preparing for an uncertain future.
This approach reflects how we think about trust: being invited into someone’s inbox is a responsibility, not a license to fill it.
Expanded the Academy as a Capability-Building Platform
Our Academy continued to evolve as the place where concepts turn into practice. In 2025, we migrated the Tactical Analysis Course into the Academy and paired it with structured practice exercises, allowing organizations to use it as more than a one-time training event. Here is a case study of how one state-level agency uses the program.
At the same time, we began developing Playbooks drawn directly from project work with clients, including tools to address recurring organizational challenges and to share lessons learned by organizations developing capabilities.
Finally, we also used the Academy as a testing ground. We experimented with a weekly Watch Office-style Situation Report, ultimately deciding that the greater value was not in delivering reports, but in sharing the prompts, structure, and process so organizations can build versions suited to their own risks and environments. That decision reflects a consistent theme in our approach: we want to enable judgment, not create dependencies.
Working Inside Organizations
Project work remains where we spent most of our time.
In 2025, we completed evacuation planning projects, supported multiple after-action review processes following the January 2025 Los Angeles Fires, worked with investor-owned utilities to assess and exercise their emergency management capabilities, and facilitated strategic planning efforts focused on annual work planning and readiness.
Across these projects, the emphasis was the same: transitioning intent into capability. Helping organizations confront the gap between what they plan to do and what they are actually ready to execute is where we not only find the most enjoyment, but where we can provide the greatest value to our clients.
Additional Engagements
Throughout the year, we also participated in a number of conversations beyond our own platform—appearing on five different podcasts, speaking at five different conferences, and engaging with professional communities across public safety, corporate security, and emergency management.
We also passed a milestone we didn’t take lightly: more than 4,000 reviews of Left of Bang on Amazon.
Each of these moments reinforced the same lesson we saw in our project work: the demand for clearer thinking about preparedness and readiness is growing, and the consequences of being reactive are becoming harder to accept.
Where We’re Going
The work we undertook in 2025 clarified where we want to go next. The focus for the year ahead is on the continued refinement of how we help organizations build, sustain, and exercise real readiness.
The year ahead is less about introducing entirely new directions and more about bringing greater coherence to the work already underway—so that organizations can recognize risk earlier, make better decisions under uncertainty, and act before events force their hand.
Expanding the Academy
The Academy will remain the primary place where our ideas turn into usable tools. In the coming year, we will continue to deepen and broaden what is available to paying subscribers and clients—building new playbooks, completing work already in development, and adding new resources as recurring challenges surface in client work.
Our Project Management Playbook and Operational Readiness Playbook will move into a more complete and stable form, informed by how organizations are actually using them and the questions they continue to raise. Both were written in response to real problems we were seeing across projects, and they will continue to evolve as those problems evolve.
The Academy is intentionally designed to support both durable capabilities and emerging needs. Some topics warrant fully developed courses and playbooks, others benefit from timely tools, frameworks, or short-form guidance. That balance allows us to support long-term change while remaining responsive to the issues organizations are facing right now.
Formalizing the Left of Bang Operating System
A central focus of the coming year will be the formalization of the Left of Bang operating system and maturity model that will bring together the strategic, operational, and tactical layers of our approach into a coherent whole.
This includes clearer structures and processes that organizations can apply during strategic planning and capability selection, as well as practical guidance for building and sustaining those capabilities over time. At the operational level, it includes refining how organizations identify risks, threats, and hazards, and how they establish pre-event indicators—the watch points and action points—that precede them.
Many of these elements have been tested across projects, presentations, and written work over the past several years. The work ahead is about integrating them into a shared framework that organizations can apply consistently, rather than rediscovering the same lessons in isolation.
Creating With AI
We will also continue to refine how we write and analyze complex problems, including how we use AI tools as part of that process. Over the past year, we have used these tools as part of our internal thinking process—stress testing ideas, examining problems from different organizational roles, and identifying gaps or inconsistencies in our arguments.
We have learned that, when we use the tools well, they help us sharpen our judgement, reduce unintentional redundancy, and focus more clearly on what matters. Used poorly, they add noise and can undermine trust. We are increasingly clear about the line between the two.
In the coming year, we will continue to apply these tools in ways that support human judgment and the organizational pursuit of getting left of bang.
In Closing
When we formed the company in 2012, we started with a very simple goal: make the resources to get left of bang available to anyone who wants them. In the decisions we’ve made since our inception, we have always done so with you—our readers, subscribers, students, and clients—at the center of those decisions.
In those 13 years, we have tried to be honest about who we are, what we want to do, and how we can best support the people who work every single day to keep our communities and organizations safe. The topics we pursue, the changes we make, and the things we keep steady are done as a natural, automatic extension of those original ideals and goals.
We appreciate, more than we can express in words, the commitment that you make to getting left of bang and hope we continue to earn your trust as a partner in that pursuit in 2026.
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Appreciate your commitment to systems and structures. Here is to a fruitful 2026!
Impressive accomplishments with fine intellectual rigor! 👏👏 I’m restacking this as inspiration to other thought leaders to focus their mission formulation and action planning.