Ready until the moment arrives
The plan is what you can control. The reality of the moment is what you cannot.
Ready Until The Moment Arrives
September 2008. I was on holiday in New York.
I walked down a street in midtown, past a crowd of press gathered outside the Lehman Brothers building. A short time later I was in my hotel room, watching the news tell me what the crowd already knew. I opened my emails. Five hours ahead, the London office of the UK real estate investment company I worked for had been open, working, and on it before me.
Lehman's collapse in the US forced its UK arm into administration the same day. They were one of our investment banks, an adviser, and suddenly, a question. The first message went out to our people, the kind of message every organisation sends in the first hours, words to the effect of: we are looking into it with our other advisers, stay focused on your priorities. Essentially, keep calm and carry on. Almost every firm in the market sent some version of it.
I had been appointed to the board nine months earlier. I was not yet the chief executive. Had I been at work in the office that day, I probably would have supported that calming message too. For us as the leaders, behind the scenes was different: the quest for information, for impact, for answers was underway. First-order thinking calmness was not enough. The complexity of the challenge would unfold over the following hours, days and months.
Here is what makes that moment worth returning to now. We were not unprepared per se. We were prepared for many things except what actually happened.
The plans we had
We proactively and actively monitored and managed risks of all kinds. We had seen Bear Stearns fail six months earlier. Banks had failed before that. We ran multiple banks, advisers and suppliers precisely so that any single failure left us covered. We had risk mitigation plans, succession plans for people leaving. We had disaster recovery plans for a terrorist attack, for loss of power, for loss of data.
We had all sorts of plans. We did not have a plan for the failure of a systemically important bank.
And notice what that whole architecture of preparation quietly assumed: that failures arrive one at a time, in one place, leaving the rest of the system standing to absorb them. A systemic surprise breaks the assumption itself. Every adviser and every part of the financial and economic system we might have leaned on was impacted at once, and every one of them turned inward to their own survival exactly when we needed them looking outward. The redundancy was real. The moment took it out in one move.
The credit crunch or sub prime mortgage crisis, as it was called before that September, had been read by most as something several orders of magnitude less complex than it was, another challenge of the kind that comes and goes. Beyond the now famous few, not enough people saw the systemic event coming, because almost everybody was watching their own organisation, not the systems it lived inside.
The gap between prepared and ready
This is the lens this article carries: the readiness gap, the distance between what a team has prepared for and how it actually decides when the moment arrives. And the uncertainty in it: readiness cannot be known in advance. It is only ever revealed, and it is revealed by the surprises your planning did not contain. The plan is what you can control. The reality of the moment is what you cannot.
The plan tells you what your team intends to do. Only the moment tells you how it decides.
What the surprise did to our decisions
What I remember most is not a shortage of activity. The team pulled together. There were meetings upon meetings. What there was not, for a long time, was clear information and knowledge. Views varied wildly about the breadth and depth of the implications. There was uncertainty at every level of business and government. There was much discussion, little knowledge and no real world experience of issues of this magnitude.
And in the surprise, perspectives turn inward first. Ours did. Everyone was trying to work out what does this mean for us, while every adviser and counterparty asked the same question about themselves. The habit of thinking beyond your own organisation, in systems, in second and third order consequences, is exactly the habit that a shock punishes you for not having practised.
Looking back, my view of the recurring themes are clear. Not enough systemic thinking, nor multiple-order thinking. And the hardest balance in a crisis: reassurance and calm on one side, clarity about impact and the actions required on the other. Initially I feel we leaned toward reassurance while the knowledge was still being sought, and the cost of that was things took too long to respond to at the appropriate scale.
The debates went on for weeks and months. They were tense, tough, and challenging, a battle of views before it became a shared direction. Eventually the energy pulled in one direction, executives and non-executives together, with a sense of togetherness and purpose. I have thought a great deal since about how much earlier we might have made different choices.
The leader who lives with this weekly
There is a kind of leader for whom the untested plan is a permanent professional condition. Those who carry public service, defence, or national infrastructure maintain plans they hope never to use, and are examined by events on no schedule they control.
The best of them hold a discipline worth borrowing: they rehearse the deciding, building skill, resilience and experience, not just the plan. They practise how the team will work in wargames, when the information is poor and the time is short, because they know the moment will not wait for the process the plan describes.
The question their condition puts to every executive team is the one this article turns on: when the surprise arrives, and it will, what has your team actually practised, reading the words of a plan on a page, or making tough decisions under pressure?
What ready teams do differently
Looking back at the years before Lehman, I would not just have added another plan to the shelf. I would have changed how we decided together, and the elements of that are developable. They move in five directions.
1. Align on the problem before you solve it. Lots of people get to solution before they have understood the problem. Under pressure, almost everyone does. So make the question explicit: are we here to understand the nature of the problem, or to solve it? Are we aligned on what the challenge actually is and its level of complexity? A team that skips this decides quickly and wrongly, at yesterday's scale. Then ask who should decide the approach to this problem; it may not be you.
2. Hear every view in the room, properly. Not just listening, but hearing, so that people feel heard and understood. Every single person in that room has some wisdom, and it is not just seniority, not just experience. In any team, under any pressure, there are views that could have been and should have been expressed that were not. The loudest voices have the room, and a point of deep contention acts like a vacuum, sucking up all the oxygen so that other important points never get discussed. Notice what your contentions are costing you in unspoken views.
3. Ask what is missing. Ask what perspectives are we missing from the room, and think about it in multiple dimensions: individually and collectively, objectively and systemically. And include the subjective too: how do I feel about it, and how do we feel about it, how might they feel about it.
4. Explore the tensions, then integrate them. Draw out all the perspectives. Differentiate them, one thing from another. Find the themes. Integrate them into a shared picture, and align around that picture at each stage before you move to the action. Where there are tensions, explore them properly rather than letting the strongest voice resolve them by volume. Alignment built this way survives contact with events; alignment built by fatigue does not.
5. Rehearse the decision making. Practise quality decision making every time you meet, so that it is embodied as wise judgement by all members of your team by the time you truly need it. Then at least once a year, take a surprise your plans do not contain, including the kind where the system fails, not just a customer or supplier, and practise the arguments. Watch how your team behaves when knowledge is missing: who goes quiet, who fills the silence, who dominates, who reaches for reassurance, who reaches for clarity. That behaviour, not the document, is a taste of what will meet the real moment.
A leadership reality
The plan tells you what your team intends to do. Only the moment tells you how it decides.
No leadership team gets to know in advance whether it is ready, and the moments that test you will keep coming from outside your expectations, faster and more complex than before. Covid taught us that again, and conflicts even more recently.
What you can know, because you can watch it every week, is how your team decides: whether every voice is genuinely heard, whether problems are understood before they are addressed, whether tensions are explored, dismissed or merely won. That is the part of readiness that can be developed, and it must be developed before the moment, to be of any service when it arrives.
One question worth carrying
When did my team last make a hard call well, at speed, and what did that day show us that our planning has not?
Sit with the second half. The evidence is already there, in the last genuinely hard call your team made together: what was heard and what was not, who reached for reassurance, who challenged, and who sought clarity, and how long it took to respond at the appropriate scale. The moment has already told you something. The question is whether you were taking note.
It is a wise leadership move to practise and develop how your team decides, because readiness cannot be added on the day the moment arrives.
May you always find wise judgement when certainty is unfindable.