Kafka's Cautious Man and The Case for Preparedness vs. The Need for Control

I start looking for my keys three streets before I reach the door. I've only ever been locked out once or twice in my life because I forgot my keys. And I've never had an emergency that required me to have the keys already in my hand, ready to be inserted into the lock the second I reached the front door. Yet there I am. Three streets away, rummaging through my bag. The bag is deep, the walk from the gate to the door is about eleven seconds, and I would rather not spend those eleven seconds rummaging. So I rummage early.

I have done this since I was old enough to own keys. I assumed this was a private oddity until I read Meltem Gürle's essay Hazırlıklı Olmak (Being Prepared) in her collection Kırmızı Kazak (Red Sweater). And found my entire species catalogued on three pages.

Kafka's prepared, cautious man

Gürle opens with The Judgment, which Kafka wrote in one sleepless sitting in 1912. She reads it as the nucleus of everything that came after, and she isolates one thing in particular. It is the first appearance of the character who became his signature. She calls him ihtiyatlı adam. The cautious man.

Once she names him you cannot unsee him. Every Kafka protagonist from Gregor Samsa to Josef K. wants to take hold of his own life and steer it, and none of them manages it. All of them are cautious to the point of illness. They keep records of everything. They try to hold every detail in mind. They work at making their days perfectly predictable.

Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into an insect and his first thought is how to get his jacket on and make it to the office. What actually distresses him is that his routine has been broken. Josef K. is arrested by strangers who appear in his bedroom and carries on with his day exactly as before. Hopelessly, as Gürle says.

Georg Bendemann in The Judgment wants to be prepared for everything and to leave nothing to chance. Then his father, old and sick and ignored in the next room, stands up and accuses him. Georg backs into a corner. Kafka writes that Georg had resolved long ago to observe everything carefully so that nothing could surprise him, from the left or from behind, and that he remembered the resolution in that moment and forgot it again at once, the way a short thread slips through the eye of a needle.

Gürle calls it an unforgettable scene, especially for people who want to be prepared for everything. Then she writes: I am one of them.

The preparedness list

Gürle goes on to list her people, and she says she looks at them as kin. 

The ones searching the bag for keys three streets from home. 

The ones with the travel card out before the stop. 

The ones who set the table hours before the guests arrive. 

The ones who check the stove before leaving and then come back from the door of the building to check it once more.

I have never been described that precisely by someone who has never met me.

Then she takes it up a notch. Does the stress of coming home bring you out in a rash? What about travel, do you make yourself ill with the tension of it? She says the world is full of people like us and we are not alone. That is comforting for roughly one second, until you notice that being told you are not alone is a different thing from being told you are fine.

In my first year of high school in Istanbul, I rewrote a full notebook of notes because the first version had a coffee ring on the cover. A friend watched me do it and said, without any particular cruelty, that I get tired before the exam even starts. It sounded absurd at first but he was, of course, right. 

I thought of it as perfectionism, which, by the way, I was happy to defend. 

High standards. Attention to detail. Care. Thoroughness.

What I didn't understand then was how much energy I was spending trying to eliminate the possibility of something going wrong. The coffee ring wasn't going to affect my exam. But it had disrupted the version of things I had in my head. And apparently that was enough to make me rewrite the notes. There is a difference between wanting to do something well and needing everything to feel under control before you can relax. The first one is useful. The second one is exhausting. And, as I've realized over the years, they can look almost identical from the outside.

What preparedness it buys

I want to be fair to the cautious, because I am one of them and because the trait is not decorative.

Preparation is why I am the person with the document. Why the risk got flagged in week two. Why the contract was actually read. My clients know that if they send me something before a session, I will have read and worked through it before coming to the session, and that reliability is most of what a coaching relationship runs on.

I am the one who knows where the passports are. Who booked the restaurant for eight people in July because August would be impossible. Who noticed the visa expiry three months out. Who had every receipt in a folder when the accountant asked for them, sorted by month, because of course I did. When a friend's flight is cancelled at midnight, I am who they call, and I usually have the alternative routing before they have finished explaining the problem.

There is real authority in being the prepared one. People simply start bringing you things. You become the person who has thought about the thing nobody else has thought about yet.

At work, this quality is often called: Diligence. Leadership. Reliability. Strategic thinking.

What preparedness costs

Two weeks ago I could not check in for a flight. The airline's site said there had been a change to my booking and pointed me at the flight status page, where nothing had changed and the flight was on time. It took about twenty minutes to resolve.

Here is what those twenty minutes actually contained. I checked the booking reference against the confirmation email four times. I looked up the airport check-in desk opening hours. I calculated what time we would need to leave if the whole thing had to be fixed in person, and then recalculated it for a version where the traffic was bad. I did all of this before trying the obvious step of opening the app, which worked.

None of that was preparation. It was rehearsal. I was running the disaster in advance so that if it arrived I would already have lived through it.

That is the daily texture of it, and it is not dramatic enough to call a problem. It is just a low tax on every ordinary thing. You spend your attention twice, once on what is happening and once on the version that might go wrong, so nothing ever gets all of you. Not the meeting, not the dinner, not the person in front of you.

What the brain is actually doing

For a long time I read my own preparing as a personality trait, somewhere between a strength and a chronic inability to be blasé. 

The research reframes it as something more mechanical, and I have found the reframe useful in sessions because it takes the moral charge out of it.

Start with control itself. Leotti, Iyengar and Ochsner reviewed the evidence in Trends in Cognitive Sciences and concluded that the belief you can influence your environment is close to a biological necessity rather than a preference, and that the brain's reward circuitry activates simply at the prospect of getting to make a choice (Leotti et al., 2010). The opportunity to exercise control is rewarding before you have exercised it. Which means preparing is not only defensive. It also pays out.

Then look at what uncertainty does. Grupe and Nitschke's review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience sets out five processes that explain why not knowing is so hard to sit with. Inflated estimates of how likely and how costly a threat is. Heightened attention and hypervigilance. Deficient safety learning. Behavioral and cognitive avoidance. Increased reactivity to uncertainty itself (Grupe and Nitschke, 2013).

The third one on that list explains how deficient safety learning means the system does not update properly when things turn out fine. Every flight you have caught, every meeting that went well, every stove that was already off. None of it accumulates into evidence that you can relax, because your brain files the good outcome under 'and that is why we prepare.' The preparation takes the credit. So the loop can run for thirty years without ever producing the learning that would end it.

And David Rock's SCARF model, which I use with most of my clients, puts Certainty and Autonomy among the five social domains the brain treats as survival-relevant (Rock, 2008). A threat in either one consumes the same limited resources you need for good judgment. Which is why a reorganization announcement in September can make an otherwise excellent leader spend three weeks perfecting a deck nobody asked for.

Control is what people reach for when safety is missing

Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety describes what people do when they are not confident that speaking up is safe. They manage their own exposure. They stay quiet about the half-formed idea, raise the risk late or not at all, and arrive with things already finished (Edmondson, 1999).

Arriving with things already finished is exactly what over-preparation looks like from the outside. So low safety and high preparation are the same behavior described from two different distances. When people cannot control whether their contribution will be received well, they control the only thing available, which is how airtight it is when it arrives.

I see this in teams constantly. A team that over-prepares for meetings is almost never a team of anxious individuals who happened to end up together. It is a team that has learned, usually from a specific incident nobody talks about anymore, that showing up with a rough thought is expensive.

Shirzad Chamine's Positive Intelligence work names the individual version of this well. His Saboteurs include the Controller, the Stickler and the Hyper-Vigilant, and his central point is that each one presents itself as a virtue (Positive Intelligence). The Controller experiences itself as taking responsibility. The Hyper-Vigilant experiences itself as being the only realist in the room. That is why these patterns are so durable in senior people. The behavior keeps getting rewarded, and the story it tells about itself is flattering.

None of this is a diagnosis, and a preference for preparation is a normal trait sitting on a wide distribution. It is worth knowing the mechanism, though, because you cannot argue yourself out of something you think is just your personality.

It is a spectrum, and most people are not at either end

Gürle writes as though there are two kinds of people, and it makes for a better essay. In the room with actual leaders it does not hold. What I see is a long line, and almost everyone is somewhere in the middle of it, leaning.

At one end sit Kafka's people, Josef K. assembling a defense against a charge nobody will name. At the other end is Zorba, who dances when the whole structure collapses, because the collapse has at least ended the waiting. Don Quixote is the interesting case in between, thoroughly prepared and pointed entirely in the wrong direction, which is an outcome nobody plans for and plenty of leaders achieve.

Three things I have learned about where people actually sit on that line.

The position moves by domain. I coach a founder who will not sign a contract without three reads and a lawyer, and who hires senior people after one conversation because she trusts her instinct about humans. She is at opposite ends of the line depending on what is in front of her. Most people are like this and most cannot see it about themselves. Ask someone whether they are cautious or decisive and you get one answer, which is usually true of one part of their life.

The position moves under load. Amy Arnsten's work at Yale shows that even mild uncontrollable stress impairs prefrontal cortex function, the part doing your reflective thinking, and shifts control toward more habitual and reactive circuits (Arnsten, 2009). Under pressure people do not become more balanced versions of themselves. They become more themselves. The cautious prepare harder and the fast move faster, precisely when the situation calls for the opposite.

Neither end is a virtue. The cautious think of themselves as responsible and of the fast as reckless. The fast think of themselves as decisive and of the cautious as blockers. Both readings are self-serving and both are wrong often enough to be useless.

Which brings me to September

It is September, and everyone is buying notebooks.

I notice this in my inbox every year. The last week of August and the first two weeks of September bring more enquiries than any point in the calendar except January, and the messages have a particular quality to them. People do not tend to write to me in September because something has broken. They write because something is about to start and they want to meet it properly.

That is the preparedness reflex operating at scale, and September is built to set it off. New academic year. New performance cycle. Budget season opening. Teams coming back from leave and reforming slightly differently than they were in July. Children going back to school, which reactivates something in most of us no matter how long ago we left. Everything says the same thing at once, that a new period is starting and you should be ready for it.

I feel it as strongly as anyone. I have built a workshop around it, so I am not standing outside this.

And the impulse is sound. A list you can see beats a list you carry at eleven at night. September is a genuinely good moment to look at the shape of the coming months while there is still time to change it, which is more than can be said for January, when the year has usually started without you.

What I have changed is the question I open with.

For years I asked people what they wanted to prepare for. Now I ask what they are preparing against, and whether it has already happened.

The answers are more interesting and a good deal more uncomfortable. A team that let someone down in 2019. A launch that went badly and was never properly discussed. A manager two jobs ago who read a first draft as a final answer. A household where you learned early to watch the door and read the room. The vigilance made sense where it was formed. It is still running. It is now being funded by whatever is in front of you.

That question is most of what my September work is. Not building a better system for the autumn. Working out which of the systems you already have are defending you against something that finished years ago, and what becomes available if you put one of them down.

I am not going to stop looking for my keys three streets from home. That would be a lie and it would not survive past Tuesday.

What I am attempting this autumn is smaller. Noticing when the preparing has stopped being useful and turned into a way of not being here. Putting the phone face down at dinner. Letting one thing be unplanned. Being ready for the one thing instead of braced against all of them.

A few questions worth asking yourself this week

• What are you currently preparing against, and when did it actually happen?

• Where do you sit on that line in one part of your life, and where do you sit in another? The gap between those two answers is usually where the useful conversation starts.

• Which problem did you solve last week before your team ever saw it, and what did that teach them?

I would like to know where you land on the first one. Leave a comment or send me a message, I read all of them.

If you recognize yourself in this and you want a thinking partner rather than another system to feel behind on, follow me Merve K. Hokamp for more on leading under real pressure, or get in touch to talk about working together.

And if September feels like a good moment to pause, reflect and be more intentional about how you want to spend the final 100 days of the year, I'm running my Last Hundred Days workshop on September 14th.

We'll step back from the noise, look at what's happened so far, decide what still matters, and get intentional about how you want to use the final stretch of the year.

Early bird pricing is still available here.