10 The Inevitability of Inclement Weather
This chapter is currently in draft form.
I was hired to replace people who had been struggling. I knew that going in.
On day one, my manager gave me a rollout schedule—dates when I’d be taking over various teams. What I didn’t know was that he hadn’t told them. They had no idea this was happening. I found out when one of them accosted me in a hallway.
My manager was out a lot in those days. He was already failing, though I didn’t have the pattern recognition to see it yet. I called him, described the situation, and said we needed to talk. He came in the next morning. We went next door for coffee. As soon as we sat down, he put his head in his hands and started to cry.
The people I was supposed to replace were his friends. He’d known for months they were struggling. He’d been told to act. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. The performance problems had compounded, the situation had deteriorated, and he’d been paralyzed by loyalty.
He resigned that morning.
That started two and a half years of pain.
At another organization, I inherited a different kind of storm. The previous leadership had spent two years reimplementing core systems with technology that wasn’t suited to the task. Performance visibly degraded. The CEO was hyper-focused. Every week or two, something broke badly enough to trigger an all-hands scramble.
We fixed it incrementally. The incidents started spacing out within a few months and were mostly gone after six. But that was six months of sustained emergency—the kind of pressure that grinds people down.
This one was genuinely outside my control. Inherited decisions, accumulated over years.
Two different storms. One I walked into. One arose on my watch. Both lasted months. Both were exhausting. Both were, in retrospect, completely normal.
10.1 Storms Come From Outside
The Conservation of Momentum dealt with self-inflicted disruption—the pivots and direction changes that leaders impose on their own teams. This chapter is about the other kind: the shocks that land on you from outside. Inherited messes. Market shifts. Key departures. Crises you didn’t create but must navigate.
The Swedes have a saying: Det finns inget dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder—there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.
Storms aren’t violations. They’re weather. When it rains, you put on a raincoat. When it snows, you put on boots. You don’t stand outside railing against the sky. You dress appropriately and go about your business.
But not everything that feels like a storm actually is one. Some pressure is genuinely exogenous—it lands on you from outside your control. Some is consequence—the bill coming due for work you didn’t do. Most leaders experience both as undifferentiated chaos. The distinction matters because the response is different.
10.2 The Storm as Audit
Storms reveal whether you’ve done the other work.
When an exogenous shock hits, it stress-tests everything you’ve built (Williams et al., 2017). If your political capital is banked, you survive the storm. If your structure is sound, the storm doesn’t shatter it. If your people are strong, they weather it with you. The storm doesn’t create dysfunction. It exposes dysfunction that was already there.
Think of it like an earthquake. The earthquake doesn’t make buildings weak. It reveals which buildings were weak all along. Your organization works the same way. The customer who churns exposes product gaps you hadn’t addressed. The key engineer who leaves reveals the documentation you neglected. The new CEO who questions your roadmap surfaces the clarity you never actually had.
This reframe is humbling. It means you can’t fully blame the storm for what breaks. The storm is the audit. If you fail the audit, that’s information about work you should have done before the storm arrived and still need to do.
That manager who broke down over coffee? His friends were failing, and rather than navigate that reality, he froze. The storm didn’t create the performance problems. It exposed them.
10.3 Distinguishing Weather from Consequences
It’s weather if: you couldn’t have prevented it. You weren’t there when the decisions were made. The cause originated outside your system. The inherited mess I walked into was weather—nothing I could have done would have changed it.
It’s consequence if: the trigger is external but the damage traces to something you avoided. The key engineer leaving is weather. The chaos their departure causes, because you never documented their knowledge, is consequence.
Watch for false positives. Leaders consistently mislabel consequences as weather. The performance problems that “suddenly” became visible had been building for months. The stakeholder explosion that “came out of nowhere” followed warnings you dismissed. These feel like storms. They’re consequences wearing storm clothing.
The same event can be both, depending on where you sit. My manager’s paralysis was consequence for him—he’d been avoiding hard conversations for years. For me, it was weather. I didn’t create it. It landed on me.
The distinction matters for response. Weather requires endurance. Consequence requires repair. If you treat consequence as weather, you’ll wait for it to pass. It won’t.
10.4 What Storms Actually Require
True storms, the exogenous shocks you didn’t cause and can’t prevent, require a specific kind of response. Not every storm is actionable. Some you simply have to weather.
When I walked into that inherited mess, there was no quick fix. The dysfunction had been building for years. I couldn’t undo it in weeks or months. I had to assess my reserves, decide whether I could outlast it, and then endure. The questions were concrete: How long could I sustain this pace? What would break first—the situation or me? Did I have the political capital to weather it, or would confidence collapse before the problems resolved? These aren’t comfortable questions. But they’re honest ones.
Other storms are actionable, but on longer timeframes than the pressure suggests. The performance crisis fell into this category. We couldn’t fix it overnight, but we could fix it incrementally. Every week, we made it slightly better. Every incident became an opportunity to address root causes. Six months later, the problem was mostly solved. Not because we found a silver bullet, but because we threaded fixes through the chaos, consistently, until the fixes accumulated into resolution.
The skill is knowing which kind of storm you’re in. Some require endurance. Some require action on a longer timeframe than anyone wants. Some require both. Thrashing against storms you can’t change wastes energy. Stalling on storms you can wastes time. The first step is always the same: honest assessment of which kind you’re facing.
Either way, there’s a political capital dimension. Storms bleed capital. Even when it’s not your fault, the ongoing problem costs you—stakeholders see things not getting fixed, confidence erodes. You have to minimize that bleed and look for ways to get capital back. Visible wins replenish some of what the storm is draining. Structure the fixes so each one buys you room for the next. That’s part of managing the storm, whichever kind you’re in.
10.5 Calm as Clothing
A mentor once told me something I’ve never forgotten: a good executive, when they walk into a room, changes the feel of that room. It should shift from chaotic to calm just because they’re there.
Think of the Apollo 13 recordings. “Houston, we have a problem.” Life-threatening disaster, communicated as information. Or airline pilots reporting emergencies to the tower: “We’ve lost an engine.” Horrendous, life-threatening situations delivered in the same tone you’d use to order coffee. That’s not detachment. That’s professional discipline. It inspires the right response. Panic doesn’t help. Information does.
Calm is the clothing that matters most. When everyone else is panicking, you’re steady. Your steady presence changes the temperature in the room. When everyone is looking every which way, you become the point they focus on.
This is simply discipline, not some inherent quality some people have. Calm shows up in your tone of voice. Not flat, not detached, but controlled. The voice that says “we’ve got this” without having to say it. It shows up in how you react to problems: not shock, not anger, not visible anxiety. Problems are information. You process them. It shows up in making concrete decisions without waffling, without deferring, without waiting for someone else to choose. And it shows up in presence itself. People should feel steadier for having been in the room with you.
This is what executive presence actually means (Coqual (formerly Center for Talent Innovation), 2012). Calm.
It doesn’t happen on day one. It may not happen in year one. You earn it through accumulated credibility, through being right enough, often enough, that people trust your steadiness. You have to rebuild it at every new role. The calm you earned at your last company doesn’t transfer. You start over, proving again that your presence is worth trusting.
10.6 The Private Struggle
Calm as clothing has a cost. The room sees your steadiness. No one sees what that steadiness requires.
You will lose it. The only question is where.
Leaders who run hot leak frustration constantly. They sigh in meetings. They make cutting remarks about other teams. They send emails at 2 a.m. that radiate stress. They think they’re being authentic or transparent. They’re actually training their organization to manage around their volatility instead of bringing problems early.
The cost isn’t just that people see you’re stressed. The cost is information loss. When your team knows your mood swings with the pressure, they start filtering what they tell you. They wait until they’ve solved a problem to mention it existed. They route around you for decisions that might set you off. You end up leading blind because your emotional leakage made honesty expensive.
This connects to The Thermodynamics of Emotional Intelligence. You’re managing output, not suppressing feeling. The question is whether you pay the cost privately or make your organization pay it for you.
10.7 The Forecasting Arc
In the 1950s, weather forecasting was barely reliable. Now we can predict storms days in advance with remarkable accuracy. Modern six-day forecasts are as accurate as one-day forecasts were in 1980 (Bauer, Thorpe and Brunet, 2015). That improvement came from better instruments, better models, and better historical data. Satellites and weather stations replaced guesswork. Computational power enabled pattern recognition at scale. Decades of records let meteorologists see what usually follows what.
Leadership forecasting works the same way, but it requires intentionality. You have to build your own instruments. Early in your career, you were surprised a lot. You didn’t see storms coming. You got caught without a coat. That’s because you hadn’t yet built the habit of looking.
The instruments are learnable. You notice who’s not speaking. You spot the tension behind professional courtesy. You learn what it means when a board member starts asking detailed questions, when a key engineer goes quiet, when a customer conversation shifts from tactical to strategic. These are weather stations. You have to decide to install them.
The pattern recognition develops with repetitions, but only if you’re paying attention. The first time a CEO says “let’s talk about the roadmap,” you don’t know what that means. The fifth time, you know it means they’re worried. The fifteenth time, you know whether it’s tactical worry or existential worry, and you know what usually comes next. That instinct isn’t mystical. It’s pattern-matching accelerated by volume of experience, but you have to be collecting the data.
The storms don’t stop. But your ability to see them coming should be dramatically better than it was. And that changes everything, because you can prepare for it. You’re not scrambling for a raincoat when the first drops fall. You checked the forecast. You’re already dressed.
But even modern forecasting gets it wrong. You will still, at times, find yourself caught on the water in a small boat under a storm you didn’t see coming. That’s when the clothing matters most: the calm, the presence, the ability to navigate without panicking. Forecasting reduces surprise. It doesn’t eliminate it.
10.8 Building Before the Storm
The best storm preparation happens long before the sky darkens.
This is the connection to everything else in this book. Political capital banked during calm times becomes the credibility that sustains you when pressure mounts. Momentum protected means teams that can absorb a shock without losing all their velocity. People developed and retained become the team that weathers crisis together rather than fragmenting under stress. Process that actually works, not theater but real operational discipline, provides the steady rhythm that continues even when everything else feels chaotic.
You can’t build these during the storm. The storm is the audit, not the preparation. By the time the exogenous shock arrives, you’re working with whatever you’ve already built.
When I took over that technical organization with performance issues, I had capital banked from my first six weeks. Small wins delivered, honest communication established, one critical decision made well. That capital was thin, but it was there. It bought me initial patience while we started fixing the problems. But I also actively managed the process to build capital as we went—structuring the fixes so each visible win replenished some of what the storm was draining. If I’d arrived without any capital, if my first six weeks had been missteps and confusion, I wouldn’t have gotten six months. I’d have gotten six weeks, maybe less, before confidence collapsed. The storm hit the same either way. But I could weather it because I’d banked something before it arrived and kept replenishing during.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: preparation costs political capital. The work you do in calm times, the documentation, the runbooks, the hard conversations, the structural fixes, often looks like waste to stakeholders who can’t see the value. You’re asking them to fund storm shutters in July. They’re looking at blue skies and wondering why you’re not shipping features.
Kotoku Wamura understood this. As mayor of Fudai, a small fishing village in Japan’s Iwate Prefecture, he’d witnessed the 1933 tsunami as a young man. He watched bodies pulled from the wreckage, saw 439 of his neighbors killed by that disaster and an earlier one in 1896. He made it his mission to ensure it never happened again. In 1967, he got the village to build a 51-foot seawall. But he wasn’t finished. He pushed for an even larger floodgate of the same height for the cove where most people lived.
The village council balked. They weren’t against floodgates, just the size. The project was criticized as wasteful throughout the 1970s, derided as a mayor’s expensive folly. Construction took twelve years and cost ¥3.56 billion, about $30 million. For a village of 3,000 people, it felt like extravagance bordering on embarrassment.
Wamura served ten terms, from 1947 to 1987, and died long before he was vindicated. On March 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake sent waves as high as 66 feet toward the coast. The neighboring town of Taro, which had built a double-layered 33-foot seawall spanning 1.6 miles, was devastated. Fudai’s floodgate held (Yamaguchi, 2011). Some water still spilled over the top. You can’t stop a 66-foot wave with a 51-foot wall. But the gate broke the tsunami’s main thrust. The village behind it survived.
The water that spilled over matters. Even strong preparation gets tested at the edges. You don’t build walls expecting perfection; you build them expecting survival. The goal isn’t to stop every drop. It’s to break the force that would otherwise destroy you.
Most of us won’t face that extreme. But we all face the smaller version: spending capital on work that won’t pay off visibly until something goes wrong. The leaders who coast aren’t always lazy. They’re often responding rationally to political pressure. It’s cheaper in the short term to skip the preparation. The documentation can wait. The refactor can wait. The difficult conversation can wait. Sometimes it should wait, you don’t spend capital on preparation when you’re in the middle of a crisis or when other priorities genuinely matter more. It’s all balance. But it can’t always wait. And in extended calm, nothing punishes you for waiting.
Until the storm comes. And then you discover whether you built the wall or not.
I’ve been both. The storms I survived best were the ones I walked into with capital banked, structure sound, and people strong. The storms that nearly broke me were the ones where I’d been coasting, where the audit exposed how little I’d actually built. That two and a half years of pain after my manager quit? I survived it. But I survived it depleted, having built almost nothing in the calm times before. I learned to build differently after.
10.9 The Peace of Acceptance
There’s a strange peace in no longer railing against weather.
When you accept that storms are normal, not signs of failure, not violations to be resented, just conditions to be navigated, something shifts. The energy you were spending on frustration becomes available for action. The question changes from “why is this happening?” to “what do I do now?”
The storms don’t stop. They never stop. But the relationship changes. You stop experiencing them as attacks and start experiencing them as terrain. You learn to dress for them. You learn to forecast them. You learn to navigate them without losing yourself.
And you learn to read them honestly. When the storm breaks something, you ask: was that the storm, or was that me? The answer isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes the storm really did deliver an unforeseeable blow. Sometimes the storm just exposed what you should have fixed long ago.
Both are survivable. But only the honest reading lets you build better for next time.
This is sobering. It means there is no arriving at calm waters. It means the job is permanent navigation, not reaching port.
But it’s also survivable. The veterans learned to dress for it. So can you.
Your CTO is in the middle of a crisis.
Ask yourself first: is this actually a storm, or exposed dysfunction? True exogenous shocks test resilience. Accumulated technical debt, structural problems, or burned political capital—that’s not weather. That’s accountability. And ask the harder question: did you create the conditions for it?
Decide based on how they respond, not how fast they fix it. A leader who stays steady, makes concrete decisions without waffling, and changes the temperature of the room, that’s someone you can rely on. A leader who panics, oscillates, or goes silent, that’s a problem that won’t resolve itself.
If it’s genuine weather, be a consistent presence. Don’t add chaos. Don’t demand instant fixes. If it’s exposed dysfunction, have the honest conversation about what should have been built before the pressure arrived. Watch what breaks. That tells you whether your CTO has been building during calm times, or coasting. It might also tell you whether you let them.