When Activity Becomes the Illusion of Readiness
Profiles in Preparedness #64
Welcome back to The CP Journal, where we break down what it takes to get left of bang.
This week, we published a new white paper: Preparing the Organization You Will Need.
It is a practical doctrine for leaders trying to answer a difficult question: are we actually becoming more prepared—or just busier?
I wrote this article to explain the problem it’s meant to solve.
I’m not exactly sure when I first noticed the pattern, but over the past few years, it’s become hard for me to ignore the fact that organizations are busier than ever when it comes to preparedness.
There is more planning, more training, more exercises, and more meetings about all of it.
And yet, when you stop and ask a simple question, “Is all of this actually making us better? Are we more ready than we were last year?” the answer isn’t always clear. In a lot of cases, it’s not even immediate.
When you consider how busy people are today, the difficulty in answering that question is not a result of people not working hard or not caring.
One reason it’s hard to answer is because activity has become the proxy for readiness, and busyness, on its own, does not necessarily mean more capability.
We have seen this consistently in our work with organizations preparing for disasters, disruptions, and acts of violence.
Public safety—and really, most organizations—improves through experience. Something happens, we study it, and we adjust. And we don’t have to look far to see this pattern:
The shooting at Columbine reshaped active shooter response
Hurricane Katrina transformed emergency management
The Boston Marathon bombing influenced mass casualty coordination
The 2025 Los Angeles Fires are already driving changes in alerting and evacuation
Traditionally, this is how we have learned. But it also means that improvement is tied to hindsight. Capabilities are built after the failure has already occurred, and often at a significant cost.
That is right of bang.
The challenge is that expectations have changed.
Communities, customers, and partners expect more than reactive improvement. They expect that we are anticipating what’s coming and building the capabilities we will need ahead of time.
They expect that we are getting left of bang.
But shifting left of bang at the organizational level isn’t as simple as deciding to do it. This is because most of the systems we use to manage preparedness—planning cycles, training programs, exercise design—were built for a right of bang environment.
When you apply those same systems to an uncertain future, teams get much busier and progress becomes harder to define. That’s the dynamic we keep seeing.
So we spent time studying this problem and working through it with organizations to better understand why the effort to get ahead was creating so much friction.
And ultimately, the problem became clear: preparedness is not an activity problem. You don’t become ready by simply doing more.
You become ready by deliberately building the capabilities your organization will need to perform under the conditions it is likely to face—and ensuring those capabilities actually work.
That requires a different way of thinking about preparedness, a different way of measuring it, and a different way of building it over time.
This week we published a white paper, Preparing the Organization You Will Need, which lays out a practical doctrine for doing exactly that.
In the paper, we show:
How to define what readiness actually requires
How to move beyond activity as a measure of progress
How to intentionally build preparedness as a capability inside your organization
If you’ve ever looked at the volume of work being done and questioned whether it’s truly moving your organization forward, this paper will give you a clear way to think about it—and a path to act on it.
