My wife was managing two high-profile meetings today and spent a good deal of time last week preparing for exigencies. Double check the room reservation. Allow extra time in the morning. Plan for backup tech support. Check to see how long the laptop can go before the screensaver locks out a critical user and requires re-authentication. And so on.

Meanwhile, my students are designing and building model bridges. As part of this month-long project, they test individual components under load and are told that their final design should include a factor of safety of 2.0. I.e. the design should support twice as much weight as we expect the bridge to actually experience.

If I were Malcolm Gladwell, I would write a book called “Overbuilt,” which would be about the many advantages of…not worst-case-scenario planning, exactly, but bad-case-scenario planning. It would be about the virtues of paranoia. The world throws low-probability events at us all the time: not only is the IT guy sick, but the projector has a burnt-out bulb and the post-it note that had our room reservation on it came unstuck from the monitor and fell to the floor, where it was missed because yada yada.

Planning for such things isn’t just prudent. It’s a shared characteristic of the punctual, the effective, the reliable in every domain. Even in the realm of pure idea, we expect critical thinkers to consider objections to their claims, to anticipate counterarguments, and to systematically eliminate, minimize, or otherwise contain those oppositions.

Our imaginations are rarely as creative as Murphy’s forces. The second law of thermodynamics wants you to fail. To ensure that your project is successful, you need a plan that will work when the shit comes down. And if it doesn’t come down today, it probably will tomorrow.

Thus, one of my favorite mottos: Semper paratus. Always ready.