Left of Bang: smart discipline or overengineering?

My brother spent his career trying to see threats coming before they happened.

He was a Marine first. Then a sheriff in Orange County. His specialty was counterterrorism. Somewhere in there, he got close with two guys named Patrick Van Horne and Jason Riley, who wrote a book called Left of Bang. The idea comes from combat — the "bang" is the moment it goes off. Everything before that is "left of bang."

Most training teaches you what to do after the bang. Left of bang teaches you to read the signals before it — the small things that don't add up, the cluster of cues that tell you it's coming. My brother taught it to his deputies. The point was never to react faster. It was to see it coming early enough that you didn't have to.

A lot of you have seen my ICM now, the place where my entire business lives. Client files, notes, the running log of who's doing what. And I keep noticing that the way I've built it, I only find out something's broken after it's already broken.

A client folder is missing something it should have had — and I find out when I go looking for it and it's not there. A log gets so long and cluttered it stops being useful — and I find out when I can't find anything in it. Things pile up in the inbox that should've been filed weeks ago — and I find out when I finally look. Every one of those is a small bang. And every one of them had a left side. There were signs before it broke. I just built a system that waits for the break instead of watching for the signs.

So I've been sketching the opposite. Something that checks the system's health on purpose — walks through and asks "what's missing that should be here? what's grown too big? what slipped?" — and tells me while it's still small. Four cluttered entries, not forty. A folder missing one piece, not a client meeting where I realize the whole thing was never set up.

Here's where I'm stuck, and I'd genuinely like the room's read:

Is this worth building — or is it overengineering? Is "check the health of your own system before it breaks" a real discipline, or does it just become another thing you build, run twice, and never look at again?

What are the bangs in how you run things — the stuff you only ever catch after it's already gone off?

28 comments