CONTAGION: An Epitaph: “He Died Future-Ready

18 March 2026

Dr Leandro Herrero:

There is a headstone I keep imagining. Clean granite. Tasteful font. It reads: “He was future-ready”. We have built an entire industry on that headstone. Readiness. This piece could just as well be titled ‘On the absurdity of readiness’.

“Future readiness.” “Strategic resilience.” “Disruption preparedness.” These phrases now circulate through the business world like liturgy, repeated with such conviction that questioning them feels faintly heretical. Consulting firms sell frameworks for navigating uncertainty. Conferences are convened to map scenarios that have not happened. Leadership teams spend long hours stress-testing futures they will never inhabit.

And all the while, the present – with its actual customers, its live problems, its awkward decisions – sits quietly in the waiting room.

Getting Ready While Life Is Already Ahead

My problem with readiness is simple: people spend their time getting ready while life is already moving.

Readiness has become a socially acceptable way of not acting. A respectable delay. An alibi. Nobody is against readiness, which is precisely why it works so well as a refuge from commitment.

British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once observed that “a culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyse itself”. He might just as well have said, when discussing its readiness.

This is not an argument against thinking. It is an argument against substituting thinking for acting, the modern delusion that more analysis somehow produces more readiness, that polishing the map improves the territory.

The Business Model of Reassurance

The future-readiness industry runs on a beautifully elegant business model. It sells you the feeling of control over what cannot be controlled, at the cost of your attention to what can.

Every hour your senior team spends in a scenario workshop is an hour not spent talking to a difficult client, noticing what is quietly shifting on the ground, or making the decision that has been needed for six months and carefully avoided.

The consultants fly home. The decks are filed. You are, officially, prepared.

What you are not is present.

There is something philosophically confused at the heart of all this. The future is, by definition, the thing you cannot fully know. Every framework designed to navigate it is built from patterns of the past, dressed up in the language of tomorrow. The scenarios you rehearse are the ones you can already imagine – which means they are probably not the ones that will arrive. History, inconveniently, has a habit of originality.

I am convinced that we have created a business environment in which the climax of excitement is to talk to each other in our own tribes (corporate functions, independent consultants who think that AI is GPT on steroids) with no consequence to the world. A world of followers following each other in the dark. But this is a conversation for another day.

Readiness Is Built Backwards

Meanwhile, the capacity to respond well when the unexpected does arrive – what we might reasonably call readiness – is not created in workshops. It is built backwards, through action.

It is the accumulated scar tissue of decisions taken under uncertainty. Problems solved with incomplete information. Failures absorbed, metabolised, and turned into judgment. You cannot rehearse that into existence. You have to earn it.

Which leads to a truth so bracing that most people will not say it out loud:

Act and you will discover how ready you were.

Not recklessly. Not without reflection. But the organization that is in the habit of moving – committing, adjusting, learning, committing again – will consistently outperform the one that has ‘optimised its preparedness’.

Because readiness is not a state you reach before acting. It is a quality you develop through acting. Preparation that never resolves into action is not prudence. It is a very expensive form of avoidance.

Managing Anxiety, Not Uncertainty

The future-readiness brigade will tell you the world is now too volatile, too uncertain, too complex and too ambiguous. VUCA, we used to call it with the great excitement of having created a new acronym. Perfect for people who believe that naming a thing tames it.

But volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity have always been the conditions of business. The merchants of the Hanseatic League who operated in Northern Europe for 700 years, did so on its own VUCA conditions. So did every entrepreneur who ever built anything worth keeping, long before someone invented the word disruption. Yes, what is changing fast is the world’s complexity. And with it, the market for managing anxiety about it.

Readiness has quietly become one of those silent tyrannies: not imposed, not enforced, but willingly embraced because it soothes. It promises time. And time, we tell ourselves, will make us safe.

Readiness, understood as a kind of special state of your mind waiting for a magical signal to act is a red herring and an alibi. We need to call it out. If readiness is understood as fast trial and error, fast learning and accumulation of agility with eyes wide open, then I can begin to accept the term. But this is not how it is used. Most readiness seems to be kind of an a posteriori label: ‘look what they have done, they were ready for it’, ’they went to the streets when they were ready for it,’ etc. So, does the revolution happen when everybody has agreed to have a revolution?

A Different Epitaph

So, here is an alternative epitaph.

Not he was fully prepared, but he acted well. Not she had a robust framework for navigating uncertainty, but she built something real. Not they were future-ready, but they were present, alive, and moving – which, as it turns out, is the only kind of ready that has ever mattered.

PS: A malign form of over-analysing is seen in many corporate functions that spend their time introspecting about themselves. Which is a form of checking for their readiness. It reminds me of the two line ‘Jamesian’ poem by Thom Gun:

Their relationship consisted.
In discussing if it existed

Are we still friends?

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Dr Leandro Herrero is Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, psychiatrist, author, and international speaker. For over 25 years, he and his team have transformed organizational cultures worldwide through his pioneering Viral Change™ methodology – where a social movement approach creates lasting change. Follow Dr Herrero on LinkedIn for his latest updates.

 

Written by: orlaclancy