“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson
In emergency management, that first punch can take many forms: a storm track that suddenly shifts, a cyberattack that cascades through systems we assumed were isolated, or a partner agency that doesn’t show up when the call goes out. The point is the same — the moment reality arrives, the plan begins to unravel.
That doesn’t mean planning is worthless. It means we’ve confused the process with the product. A plan is a snapshot of what we thought might happen, written at a moment in time, with assumptions that may or may not survive first contact with chaos. Planning, on the other hand, is the living act of thinking, rehearsing, and coordinating in a way that builds relationships and muscle memory. That’s where resilience actually resides.
The Plan Problem
Emergency managers love plans. We plan for every imaginable contingency: floods, fires, pandemics, active shooters, cyber incidents, civil unrest. We build annexes and checklists. We dutifully send drafts through coordination channels and wait for signatures. Then, too often, we print the final copy, stick it in a three-ring binder, and file it under “prepared.”
But when the lights flicker and the radio crackles, almost nobody reaches for that binder. They grab their phones, their radios, their instincts — and each other. The irony is that the document meant to guide response rarely guides anything at all.
Why? Because a plan written to satisfy compliance requirements is not the same as a plan designed to be lived. The first is paperwork. The second is culture.
The Real Work Happens Elsewhere
The real work of preparedness happens in practice. In exercises, in conversations, in those sometimes-awkward coordination meetings where egos collide and agencies negotiate their turf. It happens in after-action reviews that are brutally honest rather than politically safe. It happens when partners pick up the phone just to check in — not because a grant demands it, but because trust requires it.
Plans can help facilitate that. But only if they’re used as conversation starters, not conversation enders.
During my years in FEMA and in local response work, I watched communities that excelled during disasters. They weren’t the ones with the thickest plans or the most polished templates. They were the ones where the police chief and fire chief had coffee together every week. Where the public works director knew how to reach the school superintendent on a Sunday morning. Where mutual aid agreements weren’t just signatures, but relationships.
You can’t write that into a plan.
Paper Is Easy. People Are Hard.
There’s comfort in paperwork. It feels like progress. When we’re staring down uncertainty, a detailed plan feels like control. But the truth is that most crises fail not because the plan was missing, but because the people were misaligned — politically, emotionally, or logistically.
Disasters test culture, not just capability. They reveal whether your organization values flexibility or hierarchy, whether you empower decisions at the edge or cling to control at the center. A well-rehearsed team with an average plan will outperform a rigid team with a perfect one every time.
Exercises: Where Planning Comes Alive
Exercises are the crucible where planning becomes practical. They expose the seams between agencies, the untested assumptions, the quiet “we’ll figure it out” that turns into “we should’ve figured it out.”
The best exercises don’t just validate a plan — they interrogate it. They ask, “What happens when this doesn’t work?” They stress systems until they bend. They uncover the awkward truth that the person assigned to a key role in the plan is actually on vacation during hurricane season every year.
And then (this is key) the lessons get incorporated back into the culture, not just an after-action report.
When we treat exercises as bureaucratic obligations instead of opportunities to fail safely, we waste them. Countless times I suffered through graded exercises that were performance theater, without real lessons learned or applied. But when we use them to strengthen networks and build shared awareness, we’re doing real preparedness work.
The Collaboration Dividend
There’s a phrase I’ve heard again and again: “We’ll meet for the first time at the disaster.” It’s half joke, half lament. The most resilient communities are those where people meet long before the sirens start.
Collaboration is the beating heart of readiness. It’s messy and human, full of friction and compromise. It’s also where innovation happens. A plan might tell you who’s responsible for what, but collaboration teaches you why and how those responsibilities intersect, and whether it really works..
When the floodwaters rise or the servers crash, no one is thinking, “Page 43, paragraph two.” They’re thinking, “Who do I trust to fix this?” Plans don’t forge trust. People do.
When Planning Gets in the Way
Sometimes, the obsession with planning actually slows response. I’ve seen agencies hesitate to act because “the plan didn’t cover that.” Or worse, they delay improvisation out of fear that deviation might later be criticized. That’s not preparedness — that’s paralysis.
Rigid adherence to the plan can make us brittle. The world we’re planning for doesn’t stand still; our plans shouldn’t either. Remember the original Jurassic Park movie where the character, Dr. Ian Malcolm, explained chaos theory, that complex systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions and therefore unpredictable. We should be cultivating adaptive capacity — the ability to sense, adjust, and act without waiting for permission.
That doesn’t mean anarchy. It means empowering people to use judgment. It means that when the situation shifts, leaders don’t say, “Stick to the plan,” but rather, “What’s working, and what’s not?”
Plans as Prompts, Not Products
So what is the right role of a plan? It’s a prompt — a conversation starter that sparks collective thinking. A plan should help people imagine together, identify gaps, assign roles, and surface uncomfortable questions. Once that’s done, its shelf life is short.
We should build plans that are short, clear, and human — not encyclopedic. We should teach people to use them as springboards for adaptation, not scripts for compliance.
One of the best exercises I ever saw began by literally throwing the plan in the middle of the table. The facilitator said, “Okay, now what if the power goes out and this file is gone?” The group laughed — and then had one of the most productive conversations of their careers.
A Better Way Forward
If we want to move beyond the plan, we have to value practice over paper, relationships over rhetoric, and adaptation over assumption.
That means budgeting for collaboration time, not just document creation. It means rewarding people for exercising initiative, not merely for following procedure. It means testing plans to their breaking point and not coddling them. It means acknowledging that our communities are dynamic, our threats are evolving, and our plans should be, too.
It also means letting go of the illusion that we can control complexity through templates. We can’t. What we can do is prepare people to thrive inside it.
Back to the Punchline
Mike Tyson wasn’t talking about emergency management, but he could’ve been. Everyone has a plan until reality lands that first hit. What matters next is how quickly we adjust — how well we’ve trained, how deeply we trust, and how much we’ve learned from every sparring session before the fight.
Plans have their place. But resilience belongs to those who know what to do after the punch.
Dan Stoneking is the Owner and Principal of Stoneking Strategic Communications, the Author of Cultivate Your Garden: Crisis Communications from 30,000 Feet to Three Feet, the Founder and Vice President of the Emergency Management External Affairs Association, and an Adjunct Professor in the Communications Department at West Chester University.