Wired for Purpose — Week 2: Foundation
Incident Readiness and the Habits Behind the Moment
Quote
“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Story
You don’t rise to the occasion in a crisis.
You fall back to your habits.
3:42am.
Bridge call.
Everyone talking. No one aligned.
We’ve all been there.
Something breaks.
Pressure rises.
Decisions get made faster… and worse.
I remember a cloud migration that stalled in the early hours of the morning. The team was exhausted. Leadership was asking for updates. The path forward wasn’t clear.
What got us through wasn’t brilliance.
It was preparation.
Runbooks.
Clear roles.
Scenarios we had already walked through.
The outcome wasn’t decided in that moment.
It was decided long before it.
The Reflection
In technology, we spend a lot of time preparing systems for failure.
We build redundancy.
We test failover.
We simulate outages.
But we rarely think about preparing ourselves the same way.
The calm days—the ones where nothing is broken—are where readiness is built.
That’s when habits form.
That’s when clarity is created.
That’s when you define how you’ll respond before you have to.
Because when pressure hits, you don’t invent discipline.
You reveal it.
The Takeaway
What you practice in calm, you execute in chaos.
Today’s AI Prompt
Use this with your preferred AI assistant:
Help me build a personal “incident readiness” system. Based on my role, what are:
- 3 habits I should build weekly
- 2 things I should review regularly
- 1 scenario I should mentally rehearse
So that when something goes wrong, I’m not starting from scratch.
From the Book
This post is part of my new series and book Wired for Purpose—a daily devotional for IT professionals navigating leadership, technology, and the human side of innovation.
It builds on ideas from Finding Direction in the Age of AI, where the focus is on clarity and direction in a world moving at machine speed.