Snow Days Don't Need to be This Hard

What a Predictable Storm Reveals About Systems Under Stress

A major snowstorm arrived today, and with it came the familiar disruption—delays, confusion, and systems straining under pressure. None of this was surprising. We knew the snow was coming.

And yet, every time, it feels harder than it should.

One lesson I learned the by advising organizations in distress—is this:

Stress doesn’t create failure. It reveals it.

The snow didn’t break systems today. It exposed decisions that had already been made. Under pressure, fragile dependencies snapped, manual workarounds overwhelmed people, communications degraded, and decision-making slowed precisely when clarity mattered most.

This are the same issues that I describe in Escaping Delete. Once a complex project or system starts to fail, outcomes begin to feel inevitable—not because they are, but because leaders waited too long to confront reality.

A core Reality Check principle applies here:

If an event is predictable, the response should be boring.

Snowstorms, system cutovers, and peak loads shouldn’t surprise us. When they do, preparation had been replaced by optimism.

Snow isn’t the problem. Systems that can’t operate under stress are.

This often happens when testing covers sunny day scenarios and avoids the third standard deviation, stormy scenarios.

Winter storm Fern reveals who prepared properly and who didn't.

That’s the Reality Check.