Systems Are Weakest At Their Joints
How Information Sharing Prevents Organizational Fracture
"Look for the joints and links, the things that connect the people in a group or connect one group to another. Division is weakness, and the joints are the weakest part of any structure."
— Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War
Throughout history, militaries have often sought to attack the places where teams, people, and systems connect. By targeting the "joints" of an organization, you can isolate one component from its support, undermine its source of collective strength, and dismantle it from within.
While many organizations today aren’t in the business of attacking others, the businesses, nonprofit organizations, and local governments that make up our communities do spend considerable time, money, and effort protecting themselves: their people, resources, and operations.
They aim to safeguard against competition, criminals, and disruptions so they can stay focused on their core missions, whether that means educating children, delivering products and services to customers and constituents, maintaining public safety, or ensuring critical infrastructure keeps running. Whatever the mission, the ability to stay operational and succeed often depends on something easy to overlook: the health of your organization’s joints.
Knowing where your people, resources, and systems come together gives you the opportunity to strengthen your organization's points of connection before they become failure points.
In my work with clients—both public and private sector organizations—developing capabilities to prevent violence or prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters, I continually find that the most fragile joints are where information is supposed to flow between departments, teams, and decision-makers.
In today’s fast-moving world, when that flow of information breaks down—whether by intent or by accident—it opens cracks where division takes root.
Sometimes, this is just a frustration. When the organization is political, people hold information because they see it as power. By controlling what others know, they control decisions, outcomes, and even perception.
But just as often, the gap is unintentional when someone simply doesn’t realize that what they know could be valuable to someone else.
And sometimes, the failure lies in the system itself: there is no sustainable, repeatable process for making sure information reaches the people who need it, when they need it.
Regardless of the reason, the outcome is the same: part of your team is operating without a clear understanding of the environment they’re in. And that’s a vulnerability no leader can afford.
The Watch Office Solution | Push Information & Prevent Fracture
When the joints of your organization are strained by fragile information flow, the solution isn't just to work harder. It's to step back and diagnose the reason why it’s happening. That’s not only central to getting left of bang—it’s also what led us to create the emails from The CP Journal's Watch Office.
The Watch Office was designed to reinforce one of the most vulnerable connections in any organization: the systems and routines that support information sharing. Too often, these routines rely on informal processes, heroic effort, or simply hoping someone remembers to pass along a detail that might matter. We knew we needed to build something better—something that could push information forward, reduce friction, and strengthen the organization's ability to operate as one.
That led us to two key goals as we designed the service.
1. Push, Don’t Pull. People are busy. The most valuable insights in the world don’t matter if they’re locked behind a login screen, buried in a dashboard, or sitting in meeting notes waiting to be asked for. That’s why the Watch Office was designed as a push system—delivering insights straight to your inbox on a weekly schedule.
This simple shift addresses one of the most persistent system failures we see: when information flow depends on someone making the first move to ask or search for it.
By delivering a weekly situation report by email, we remove that barrier and instead provide:
A spark—the activation energy—to get off the starting line to size up your environment each week.
A prompt to think about your operations for the week ahead.
A predictable moment each week to review emerging risks—early enough to adjust for the weekend or the following week, but not dumped on your desk Monday morning when you're still catching up.
It’s not just about knowing what’s happening. It’s about receiving that information when you still have time to do something about it.
2. Create Conversations That Matter: While no weekly update can cover everything, our situation reports are built to be conversation-starters. The goal is to anchor leaders in a shared understanding and give them the momentum to go deeper.
Instead of vague check-ins like “Anything I should know?”, teams can jump into more focused, productive discussions: “Tell me more about [topic].” “How could this affect us?” “What are we doing about it?”
Information isn’t the end goal. Momentum is. When everyone begins the week with the same baseline awareness:
Conversations move faster.
Gaps get filled more naturally.
People are more likely to share what they know, even if they aren’t sure it is worth mentioning on its own.
That’s how you build a culture of proactive, left of bang, information sharing—where not sharing stands out as obviously intentional, and forwarding an email becomes a fast, informal way to bring others into the loop.
And yes, we designed it as an email on purpose. It’s meant to be shareable. We expect it to be forwarded, discussed, and referenced. In fact, we built it that way because we know we couldn’t stop it if we tried—and we wouldn’t want to. The more it gets shared, the stronger your organization’s connective tissue becomes.
Get Left of Bang
Leaders today face no shortage of external threats—economic instability, public scrutiny, physical violence, cyber risks, natural disasters, pandemics, supply chain disruptions, and on and on—all of which can impact staff, operations, and finances. Self-induced internal fractures, caused by inconsistent information flow, shouldn't be another risk you have to manage.
By giving your team a shared frame of reference for what's happening each week, our Watch Office emails provide one small but powerful part of resilient organizations’ needs: a system for making informed decisions at the speed today's world demands.
Weekly situation reports help you stay left of bang, not just by tracking the threats outside your walls but by reinforcing the structures that keep your team aligned, connected, and ready for what's next.
Ready to strengthen your team’s joints before they become vulnerabilities?
Learn more and subscribe to receive our weekly Watch Office emails or reach out to explore how they can be tailored to your organization’s needs.