Being Prepared And Being Ready
At this point, the poet Mark Nepo offers an important insight into solving problems. As he explains, “Being ready centers on the foundational ground we stand on and the clarity of view we meet a situation with. We often mistake being prepared for being ready, through the process of getting prepared can be the exercise by which we ready ourselves inwardly to meet any situation…. In life and love and in meeting our suffering, we need both - to be prepared and to be ready. To be prepared is to know how to step. To be ready is to see where to step. To be prepared is to know how to pick up what is broken. To be ready is to have a some sense of how the pieces go back together. To be prepared is to make a schedule. To be ready is to lean into the day with an open heart when the schedule is lost in the rain.”
Brene’ Brown in her book, Strong Grounds: The Lessons Of Daring Leadership, The Tenacity Of Paradox, and The Wisdom Of The Human Spirit ( Random House, 2025), writes that “What you’re trying to achieve will require a deep, broad, and disciplined commitment to individual change, team change, and systems change.” Brown continues that a transformation of this natures includes “creating stronger levels of self-awareness, cultural awareness, situational awareness, and anticipatory awareness.”
From my perspective, this level of transformational change involves being well prepared and being ready. Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen in their book, Great By Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck - Why Some Thrive Despite Them All (HarperCollins, 2011), explain that leaders of companies, who thrive in uncertainty, and even chaos, do something very unique, namely they zoom out before they zoom in. When then sense danger, i.e. situational awareness, they zoom out. They attempt to discern whether or not there are changes in market conditions. When I have seen leaders do this, they attempt to sense and identify these changes as well as try to frame them up and name them in order that others can understand the changes before they mobilize people into a problem solving process, and later action.
Collins and Hansen point out that the zooming out process is not about seeing the big picture as much as an attempt to understand how the big picture is changing, and if there are particular changes in the service delivery environment. Then, they assess the time frame for action, i.e. anticipatory awareness, asking themselves three important questions: “How much time before the risk profile changes?”, “Do the new conditions call for disrupting plans?”, and “If so, how?”. Then, with the answers in hand, they zoom in, and focus on problem solving and subsequent execution. During this course of action, Collins and Hansen remind us that “Rapid change does not call for abandoning disciplined thought and disciplined action. Rather it calls for upping the intensity to zoom out for fast yet rigorous decision making and zoom in for fast yet superb execution.”
Improve Decision-Making Expertise
For leaders of leaders, this all comes down to improving rigorous decision-making expertise across the management team, and the organization as a whole. Recognizing the aforementioned approach related to situational and anticipatory awareness, leaders need to help people evaluate the time frame within which they must respond to a problem. As part of this work, they need to help others understand that they are often forced to make decisions with incomplete information, and often do not have the time for a formal analysis of options like they did in the past. They also need to help people understand that there will be failures because of this, and that some failures will require an agile response, i.e. being able to be flexible, adaptable and able to quickly respond to changing circumstance and new information.
Over time, and in order to improve decision-making expertise, leaders also must connect people, who are facing similar complex problems, with other people, and help all involved engage in after action reviews in order help everyone learn from, and improve their decision making. They must celebrate short term wins, smart decision-making, and innovative solutions, too.
But from my experience and observations, improved and rigorous decision-making can not effectively happen without comprehending, and then embracing the Stockade Paradox. Jim Collins writes about this paradox in his book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap. . . and Others Don't (HarperBusiness, 2001). The paradox originated from Navy Vice Admiral, James Stockade’s experiences as a POW during the Vietnam War, where he survived years of torture and deprivation by balancing his harsh and painful reality with a strong belief in a better future. As Collins explains, this paradox is based on the ability to “retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” By combining realistic acceptance of current challenges, e.g. we are attempting to solve ever-evolving problems within dynamic complexity, with a stedfast and optimistic outlook, e.g. we can, and we will over time improve our decision-making expertise in the midst of this complexity, will ultimately result in successful solutions. In short, by holding two contradictory truths at the same time, and with the regular coaching and support, leaders can get better at decision-making in the midst of these challenges.
The Elegant Beauty Of Simplicity
Right now, current events are volatile. Complexity abounds. As a result, people at work and at home are pendulum swinging from fear to hope, and then back to fear, all due to the numerous chaotic situations that are happening around them.
What we want is to feel less vulnerability, and to experience less uncertainty. What we have come to understand is that these feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty have moved from being episodic to systemic, and the resulting anxiety has become contagious. In short, we are caught in a cycle of intensity and reactivity, all wrapped up in dynamic complexity.
“The key to complexity,” writes John Paul Lederach, “is finding the elegant beauty of simplicity.” The pathway to this level of simplicity begins with creating an adaptable problem solving process, and to seek a solution, not the solution, recognizing that the problems are evolving faster than the solutions can be created and executed. Next, we must build and maintain healthy teams who work within healthy relational spaces. We also need to focus on building a shared consciousness within our teams and the whole company based on a common identity and a common understanding about who we are, how we work through our challenges. Then, we need to recognize that a truth that influences our feelings can create more change than an in-depth analysis. As we make these important choices over time, all involved will embrace complexity, rather than try to fix complexity. We also need to watch out for grit gaslighting, and to choose empowered execution.
The search for “finding the elegant beauty of simplicity” requires discipline and commitment on a daily basis. It also requires us to acknowledge our interdependency, and to accept both the constants and the changes of these times. For in the end, the ground level truth of solving problems within complexity is that we have to work with what we are given. And as we do this, we need to remember that respectful engagement, where people move from being anonymous employees to individuals with personal biography and professional skills, needs to be the norm rather than the exception. Then, wise and skillful choices can be made, and realistic and effective solutions can be created, and executed in the midst dynamic complexity.
© Geery Howe 2026
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