Preparedness and the Pursuit of Mastery
Lessons from the kitchen on capability building and craft
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One of the challenges in writing about preparedness—and how it connects to getting left of bang—is that people often assume the concepts only apply during disasters, military operations, crises, or high-consequence events.
Those are certainly some of the moments when an organization’s readiness becomes the most visible, but preparedness is about how people and teams build capabilities before they are needed.
And once you start thinking that way, you begin to notice the same patterns in surprisingly ordinary places. For me, one of those places is in the kitchen.
Cooking doesn’t carry the same stakes as disasters, war, or acts of violence, but there are parallels between a person pursuing mastery in the kitchen and an organization preparing itself for an uncertain future.
That might sound a little ridiculous at first, but when you apply the idea of capability building to something as ordinary as cooking dinner, some of the traditional arguments surrounding preparation begin to look a little ridiculous too.
In both cases, improvement rarely comes from isolated moments of preparation. It comes from systems that allow people to learn, refine, and improve while they are operating. Over time, those small adjustments compound into capability.
There are at least three patterns that exist in both places: