Saturday morning, Cyclone Alfred had made landfall. However, the sun was breaking through, whilst warnings continued to echo through the media.
I stood on my back deck, debating whether to rehang the baskets of plants I’d taken down to prevent them from becoming flying missiles. The worst seemed to have passed. But something held me back.
This was the first time I’d been through a cyclone since I was a small child. I left the baskets scattered around the dining room—just in case.
That night, the winds returned, fiercer than before. Power flickered out. The internet followed. I was grateful I hadn’t rehung the baskets, but my mind turned to the preparation frenzy I’d witnessed—the empty store shelves, the long queues for sandbags, and people distracted from everyday priorities due to the emerging threat.
There was a clear divide between those who took action and those who dismissed it as an overreaction. For some, the storm never arrived. For others, it was more than expected.
Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general in the U.S. Army during World War II and former U.S. President, once said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
He wasn’t talking about weather events, but the wisdom applies.
We don’t prepare because we know exactly what’s coming. We prepare because we don’t.
The act of preparation—thinking through risks, weighing options, making decisions—builds our capacity to respond, not just to this moment but to whatever comes next.
Consider a fire drill. It’s a disruption, an inconvenience, but no one questions its value. We don’t rehearse because we expect a fire today; we rehearse so that when one breaks out, we don’t hesitate. We move, and we know what to do to keep us safe.
The same principle applies when leading in times of complex change.
Complexity theorist Dave Snowden argues that in complex systems—where cause and effect only become clear in hindsight—the strongest leaders aren’t the ones with rigid, flawless plans.
They’re the ones who’ve built adaptability through experience. They’ve practised responding across different scenarios. When uncertainty strikes, they aren’t scrambling. They’re stepping into action. Their experiences allow them to rapidly take existing competencies and use them for something completely novel.
Snowden explains this in more depth in Managing Complexity (and Chaos) in Times of Crisis: A field guide for decision makers inspired by the Cynefin framework, co-authored during the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, the next time you feel you may have prepared for something that didn’t happen, make the most of what you learned.
Ask yourself:
- What did I learn from the process of preparing?
- Did I strengthen habits or skills that might serve me in a future unknown?
- If the worst had happened, how would I have responded?
- If I dismissed the warnings, why? Confidence? Experience? Something else?
Preparation isn’t about a single storm. It’s about readiness, agility and confidence. And next time, I’ll know more about what to do if another cyclone rolls our way.
