Hope Is Not a Strategy
Preparing for change before it happens
There’s an old mental exercise that appears across multiple traditions. The samurai in Japan practised it. So did the Stoic philosophers in Greece and Rome. Others have arrived at it independently.
It’s a meditation on death.
Not in a dramatic sense, but in a practical one.
For the Stoics, the point was to recognise that some things are beyond your control. Death is one of them. Once you accept that, the focus shifts to what you can control. How you live. What you do today. What actually matters.
For the samurai, the exercise was more direct. They would visualise the many ways they might die in battle. Not to dwell on it, but to remove hesitation. If you’ve already faced the outcome in your mind, you’re less likely to freeze when something goes wrong.
Different approaches. Same underlying idea. Prepare for the inevitable.
So what does this have to do with subversive management?
At the extreme end, someone in your team could die. You could die. It’s not a comfortable thought, but it’s real.
More commonly, people leave. They resign. They’re moved on. They burn out. Occasionally, they win the lottery and disappear.
The specifics don’t matter.
The constant is change.
And not the kind of change that gets announced neatly in a strategy deck. It’s the kind that disrupts your plans, your timelines, and your assumptions about who will be there tomorrow.
If your team relies on one person for critical knowledge, what happens when they’re gone?
If your culture depends on a few key individuals, what happens when they leave?
If you’re the one holding everything together, what happens when you can’t?
These aren’t hypothetical questions, they’re problems delayed.
As a subversive manager, your job is to prepare for them before they arrive.
Share knowledge. Remove single points of failure. Build capability across the team. Create systems that don’t rely on any one person, including you.
And have the conversations that people tend to avoid. About succession. About coverage. About what happens when things don’t go to plan.
Not because you expect the worst, you do it so the team can absorb it when it happens.
Because it will.
The Stoics would tell you to focus on what you can control. The samurai would tell you to be ready. Both would probably agree on this.
Hope things work out.
Plan for when they don’t.