A few years ago, my wife and I moved to Florida. For a kid from the Midwest, what a life hack — warm weather in January, sunshine in February. Very, very nice.
After some time in a condo, we wanted to take full advantage of everything the Sunshine State had to offer, so we picked a home on one of the canals, close to the beach. Everything we had always hoped for. Being cautious by nature, I did a little investigation before we committed to the neighborhood. We chose one where flooding had never damaged homes — not through any number of hurricanes over the years. In fact, we were told we were in a 500-year flood zone. Meaning: only once every 500 years would there be an event significant enough to flood the area.
That gave us confidence.
Then we met Ian.
A Gulf Coast hurricane. Eight feet of water in our home. Devastating, to say the least. But we cleaned up, fixed up, and took some comfort in the idea that, well, at least we won’t have to worry about that for another 500 years.
Within 24 months, we met Milton. Three to four feet of water.
I'm not sure I understand this concept of "500 years" anymore. Do you know what the odds are of two 500-year events happening within two years of each other? Neither do I, but it's got to be a pretty high number.
My analysis led me to a fairly clear conclusion: we were no longer in a 500-year flood zone. The environment had changed. Whatever model had defined our risk had been overtaken by new realities.
When I started talking to neighbors about what their strategy was given the new reality, one of them said something that stuck with me.
"Sandbags," he said. "That was the problem last time. If I'd gotten the sandbags down early enough, I would've avoided the damage." He said it with confidence.
Sandbags, hmm.
I didn't say it to his face, but I didn't think sandbags were a strategy. At best, they were a tactic (and maybe a flawed one) for addressing what was clearly a new and permanent reality. We weren't in a once-in-a-lifetime situation anymore. We were in a new environment, and in a new environment, the old playbook doesn't hold.
My strategy wasn't sandbags. My strategy was to move inland: far enough from the problem area that the likelihood of flooding would become very, very remote. That required acknowledging something uncomfortable: the environment had fundamentally changed, and a fundamentally different response was necessary.
Sandbags might help you survive one storm. Maybe two. But sandbags are not a strategy for living in a flood zone — not when the floods keep coming.
Which brings me back to where we started with this series.
Throughout these posts, we've been exploring what I call the Ready, Fire, Aim problem — the pattern I see repeatedly in mid-market and small corporate organizations as they scramble to respond to the AI disruption. The rush to do something. The pressure to spend money, report progress, and signal to leadership that all is well, even when the environment has changed in ways that are not yet understood, let alone mitigated.
In The Penske File, we talked about what happens when leadership wants action without a framework for what good looks like. Organizations create the appearance of momentum while circling the same unresolved questions. Inspect-and-adapt capabilities, and the organizational muscle needed to actually learn from what you're doing, remain underdeveloped.
In The Good News Is… We Have All the Answers, we explored something hopeful: the intelligence organizations need to navigate this environment already exists inside them. The people closest to the work know more than leadership often gives them credit for. But that distributed intelligence goes untapped when culture doesn't support two-way communication and co-creation.
In the Age of the Finch, we discussed success no longer comes from being the best at exploiting a stable environment, but rather from being best at modifying your approach based on real time changes to the business environment. Leaders can’t know everything, information and market knowledge is distributed across your organization, so building the capability to evaluate that organization knowledge and then make dynamic course changes as a result, becomes essential.
Sandbags, as it turns out, show up in all of these stories. They're the pilot programs that never scale. The AI task forces that produce decks but not decisions. The vendor relationships that generate activity without generating strategy. They are answers in search of a question. What we actually need is a question worth answering.
So what do we do?
We can't simply pause. The disruption isn't waiting. The tactical work, the sandbags, has its place. Addressing immediate competitive threats, managing near-term pressure, staying in the game: these are legitimate and necessary. But they are tactics. And tactics without strategy are just expensive improvisation.
The strategic question is this: What kind of organization do we need to be in three to five years to thrive in this new environment?
That question requires us to sit with something uncomfortable before we act. It requires us to define what "good" looks like before we start moving. A North Star. Without that shining object to pursue, we are, as I've said before, wandering in the wilderness. Busy, perhaps. Funded, possibly. But wandering.
Once we have that North Star, we can begin the real work: aligning organizational capabilities, building the foundational changes needed to adapt to a new environment, and finally initiating those changes with intention and coherence.
Here's my assertion, and it's one I've been building toward across this entire series: the new environment doesn't just require new tools. It requires a new core competency. The environment is changing constantly. Therefore, the organizations that thrive will be the ones that learn to change at pace with it.
At LightSight, we call this continuous innovation. Not a rush to market, but a rush to modify. The ability to inspect, evaluate, and adapt in real time. The metrics that matter in this new world aren't just revenue and margin. They're the metrics of a learning organization: How quickly do we incorporate new information? How well does our culture support honest, two-way communication? How fast can we respond when we actually learn something?
Those are the muscles we need to build.
Turning Ready, Fire, Aim into Ready, Aim, Fire doesn't mean abandoning the sandbags. It means seeing them clearly for what they are: a near-term tactical necessity, not a substitute for strategy.
Our actual strategy is to develop capabilities that are perhaps new to us: the ability to synthesize information quickly, shorten feedback loops, reduce response time, and build organizations that don't just survive disruption but are structured to thrive within it.
The flood zones are real. The storms are coming. But sandbags, my friends, are not a strategy.
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