When the map is wrong

There are two kinds of preparedness. One is having the right plan. The other is the capacity to make a sound call when the terrain changes and the plan no longer holds. Most organisations invest heavily in the first and barely at all in the second. This article is about building both.

A half-day walk that became a night on the river

Years ago, my husband and I set out on what we'd planned as a manageable half-day loop. We'd studied the map, checked the track and planned for a few solid hours of hard walking. We packed for the conditions and duration we had good reason to expect.

Partway in, we hit a closure. A slip had washed out the track ahead. By then we were most of the way through, and turning back no longer felt like the safer option. Continuing on the detour did. What had been a five-hour walk became closer to ten.

The light was fading as we reached the river, with most of it still ahead of us and no way to make it out before dark. We walked for hours with head torches that were of limited use, the light flattening on the water so that depth, edges and footing had to be felt as much as seen. We were carrying supplies for the day we'd planned, not the night we were now in.

Two kinds of preparedness

There's a version of "prepared" that means having the right plan, the right gear and the right route, mapped and checked in advance. We had that. It stopped being true the moment the track washed away.

What got us out was a different kind of preparedness entirely: the ability to stand beside a current we hadn't trained for, on a night that no longer matched the plan, and still ask the right questions. What are our options here? What's the safest next move? How do we do this together? We didn't have a plan anymore. We had the capacity to think clearly without one.

Most organisations prepare only for the first kind. They build the plan, stress-test the assumptions and check the route in advance. All of that is useful. None of it builds the second kind of readiness: the capacity to make a sound call when the terrain changes mid-journey.

Why the first kind runs out

Plans are built from the conditions you can see when you set out. We checked the track, and it was open when we planned. It wasn't when we arrived. No amount of better planning at the start would have shown us a closure that hadn't happened yet.

This is true for organisations more often than we admit. The map was sound when it was drawn. Then funding changed, policy landed differently, or the market moved. The plan wasn't wrong when it was made. The terrain moved after.

When that happens, the instinct is to blame the planning and do it again, more carefully, with more contingencies. Sometimes that helps. But there's a point past which no amount of upfront planning can account for a condition that didn't exist when the plan was made.

What the river actually asks of you

Walking that riverbank in the dark, the question was never what the whole route looked like from there to the end. We didn't have that luxury, and inventing a confident story on the spot would have been its own danger: false confidence, dressed up.

The real question was smaller and harder. What's the next section? What's the safest move through it? Are we making that call together?

We didn't solve the whole journey at once. We assessed the section in front of us, made the best call available with what we could feel and hear more than see, took that step, and then reassessed from the new position. That's a different kind of readiness: the discipline of making a good decision with incomplete information, then the next one, and the next, rather than waiting on the bank for certainty the plan was never going to give back.

What this looks like in an organisation

The organisational equivalent isn't glamorous. It's the team that, mid-disruption, doesn't reach first for a revised three-year strategic document. Instead it asks: given what we know right now, what's the sound next move, and who needs to be in on making that call?

That's less certain than a plan full of tasks, commitments and activity. It's also more honest about the terrain you're actually standing on. Preparedness, in this sense, isn't about eliminating the chance that events overtake the plan. Sometimes they will. It's about building the judgement to still move well when they do.

Reflection

• Where in your organisation is a plan still being trusted, even though the conditions it was built on have already shifted?
• Where would it help more to build the second kind of readiness: the capacity of your people to make a sound call at the water's edge, with the information actually in front of them?
• Who needs to be in on the next call, and do they know that?

The plan won't survive contact with what's actually out there. The skill is making sure you do.