At the end of November 1974, a friend from Paris called and told me that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would probably die. I said that this must not be, not at this time… I took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag with the necessities… I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. [22]

The renowned German filmmaker Werner Herzog started walking from Munich to Paris in a bitterly cold northern European winter, believing that in doing so he could save his friend and film critic Lotte Eisner. I will not distort what Herzog wrote about so beautifully in his book Of Walking in Ice [22] but, for me, the most striking part of his journey remains its spontaneity. True, he had a strong motivation.

Herzog didn’t spend long nights reading endless reviews about tents or comparing brands of socks, but I did, and where he wrote, “where I’m going to sleep doesn’t worry me”, I used Google maps and other sources to plan my nights in advance. His spontaneity made me ponder the 2 years I had taken to embark on my own pilgrimage. Why wasn’t I able to ‘do a Herzog’, the pilgrim’s equivalent of Nike’s ‘Just do it’?

Comparing Herzog’s decisive action with my delayed start led to interesting insights that were surprisingly connected to organisational growth. Understanding how organisations grow provides clues into the amount of space they might need in the future, and in 2016, I was given the opportunity to go to the United States to study just that. A key conclusion which came out of that research was that as organisations grow, space needs not only to be bigger to accommodate extra people, but also that space needs to be different to help organisations overcome the challenges and capitalise on the opportunities that may come as they go through different growth and maturity stages [23].

The study involved many hours of interviews with people running start-up companies in the US, and once I got back, we did more interviews with similar entrepreneurial types in Australia. The interviews we did left a long-lasting impression on me. In particular, the way in which those we studied brought to life the nuanced difference between preparedness and readiness. A subtle difference, but an important one that helped me solve my Herzog enigma.

Readiness and preparedness both relate to personal attitudes towards an event. But where readiness is about feeling capable of taking immediate action, preparedness is the degree to which one feels able to deal with the consequence of an event, when or even if it ever happens. The entrepreneurs we met in our study exuded readiness in their willingness to do whatever was required of them to achieve their goals.

To me Herzog was an entrepreneurial pilgrim, while I on the other hand prepared for 2 years and then spent the early part of my pilgrimage feeling more prepared than ready to walk the next day. It was only after several good doses of repeated preparedness that I started to feel ready.

Herzog inspired me to think about preparedness and readiness in terms of execution, literally taking the first step. Mildred Norman who is better known as Peace Pilgrim [24] led me to ponder on what it takes to feel prepared, or ready. Peace Pilgrim walked across the US for 28 years covering more than 40,000 km carrying only a few grams of equipment. In contrast, I needed 15 kg of equipment to feel prepared to walk to Sydney.

If you are also someone who finds it unhelpful to have equipment described by its weight, rather than the purpose of the items themselves (I could have been carrying 15 kg of potatoes) then it’s likely you’ll share my confusion at the all-too-common practice of benchmarking workplaces by the amount of square metres per employee, rather than understanding how the environment supports the organisation in its journey.

Contrasting my experiences with both Herzog and Peace Pilgrim taught me an important lesson, not only about the difference between preparedness and readiness, but also about their subjectivity. At the outset of planning my walk I meticulously documented the items to be packed and the training required in order to include these details in an appendix for others interested in following a similar path. But you won’t find that appendix, I have changed my mind – after all, you would only be reading what it took to make me feel prepared.

However, to save my reputation, Fig. 8.1 shows part of what being prepared looked like for me – no 15 kg of potatoes. As for Peace Pilgrim it was a toothbrush, one set of clothes, a comb, and a pencil.

Fig. 8.1
figure 1

Getting prepared

Full size image

For the entrepreneurs in our organisational growth research, their list of what was necessary for their organisation also varied. Of relevance to our study was their perceived need of having, or not having, an office. We learnt that it wasn’t the number of employees or amount of revenue which would predict whether a start-up company would leave behind a home office or coworking space to move into their own offices.

There were those who move because of newly acquired obligations. For example, becoming a publicly listed company almost always imposes a move to comply with confidentiality of information requirements which has little to do with headcount.

But most start-ups moved into their offices to develop their own identity as an organisation, at remarkably different headcounts.

Combining the lessons from business and pilgrimage entrepreneurs revealed to me the subjectivity embedded in what we need to satisfy our personal setpoint to make us feel either prepared or ready. The fact that this setpoint varies so greatly in an activity which can be reduced to putting one step in front of the other, highlights the complexities of establishing setpoints for organisations with intrinsically more complex activities. Hence the next signpost:

figure a

I also learnt I don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in my body; nevertheless, a lot can be achieved by feeling prepared, including feeling ready… eventually.