Reorientation, Lines of Succession, Consulting & More

Profiles in Preparedness #43

Welcome back to The CP Journal, where we break down what it takes to get left of bang.

After presenting at the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Association Conference this week, I had the chance to speak with several emergency managers who are thinking about a shift into consulting. The conversation came on the heels of a recent Atlantic article about FEMA’s growing reliance on contractors, which sparked questions about what it takes to make that transition.

While there are plenty of reasons for emergency managers to move into consulting—and just as many reasons not to—this isn’t about that choice. It’s about what the decision represents: how we prepare for uncertainty. Whether it’s your career or a changing operating environment, the same principle applies—the time to build capability is before the disruption.

Using careers as the example, five areas are often evaluated during a consulting hiring process:

• Technical knowledge: Your understanding of the systems, frameworks, and subject matter needed to solve problems.

• Project Management: Your ability to organize people, resources, and timelines to turn a vision into results.

• Communication: How effectively you translate complexity into clarity for decision-makers and stakeholders, both verbally and in writing.

• Culture Fit: The degree to which your values, style, and mindset align with the team or organization you’re joining.

• Business Development: Your capacity to identify opportunities, build relationships, and contribute to long-term growth.

The thing is, you rarely know which mix of those five elements will be needed for that role, any more than you can know what organizational capability will be needed during the next disaster. The role a company is interviewing for will determine what level and what mix of skill and experience they are looking for, and it will rarely be presented to the candidates during the process.

When preparing for uncertainty, whether personal or organizational, success comes down to recognizing the capabilities you’ll need and putting in the deliberate work to build them. You may never know exactly how success will be defined, but you can tilt the odds in your favor by deciding today which capabilities will keep you left of bang when change arrives.

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This Week‘s Reads

Here are a few standout reads from this week with insights, ideas, and perspectives that caught my attention.

• Video | Reorientation and Resilience with Mark McGrath. I’ve had the chance to join both Kyle Shepard and Mark McGrath for conversations on their platforms, so it was great to hear Kyle interview Mark in this discussion. Mark writes extensively about John Boyd’s work and how it shapes his understanding of strategy and our operating environment in his two must-read newsletters, The Whirl of Reorientation and Contra Frame. Both challenge you to think critically about perception, adaptation, and the dynamics shaping our world, and in this conversation, Kyle and Mark dive into the 5T Protocol, a framework Mark developed for breaking down how people use messaging to shape an audience’s perception. It’s a long listen, but one that’s well worth the time.

• Article | Training Your Successor is the Smart Move. What if being irreplaceable in your job is actually what’s holding you back? It’s a dynamic I’ve seen play out more than a few times—people who were essential to day-to-day operations got passed over for new opportunities, and eventually left out of frustration. Succession planning, a core part of any continuity of operations capability, isn’t just a safety net for when you’re out of office. It’s how you create the bandwidth to develop new skills, take on new projects, and gain fresh perspective. At the organizational-level, it helps retain your top performers by providing paths to grow. If you’re thinking about this within your team, this article offers practical steps to start the process—and to remove yourself as the single point of failure in your organization.

• Article | And when it breaks? As a follow-up to the article above, this short and sharp reflection from Seth Godin offers a simple litmus test for any leader approving a plan, process, or product. It doesn’t matter whether you call it mission assurance, business continuity, or continuity of operations—we know things will break. They always do. The real question is: what happens when it does?

• Video | Can AI and LLMs like ChatGPT assess school shooting threats? From David Riedman at the School Shooting Database, this video looks at variability in threat assessments. Discussing research that included 245 law enforcement officers who rated the severity of the same six threat scenarios, assessments for each scenario routinely ranged from being non-threatening (not a problem) to highly credible threats (a big problem). The officers were, naturally, influenced by their personal experience, assumptions, their level of training, and adherence to procedures. AI tools, however, were much more consistent. With notional scenarios, the accuracy of the assessment (for both AI tools and humans) couldn’t be determined, yet the video, the research, and the implications (especially for schools without a dedicated team of threat assessment professionals or those with a high volume of threats) are worth considering as we look to prevent attacks.

• Article | After Disasters, Cities Race to Rescue Tourism. Here’s the Playbook. After disasters, disruptions, and acts of violence, cities often see a dip in visitors, which can have a massive impact on the city’s finances, as it simultaneously seeks to refill its emergency funds. This Bloomberg article looks at the crisis playbooks cities use to keep a brand image intact, keep travel dollars flowing, and jumpstart the long-term recovery that impacted cities need.

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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.

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