Preparation Is the Process

By Scott Rechler

As we move toward the end of the year, there’s a natural tendency to look at our goals and ask a simple question: What worked?

But I think there’s another question that matters just as much: What didn’t work, and why?

When I reflect on the decisions we’ve made at RXR, I try to separate the outcome from the process that led to it. You can’t always control whether something works. You can control how you evaluate an investment, how much homework you do, who you listen to, and how thoughtfully you make the decision.

That distinction matters.

Sometimes you can do all the right work and still get the wrong outcome. We couldn’t have predicted COVID. We couldn’t have fully anticipated the rapid surge in interest rates and inflation. External conditions can change, and an investment that made sense based on the information available at the time can underperform.

The opposite can happen too. You can make the wrong decision and get lucky.

If you only evaluate yourself based on the outcome, you risk learning the wrong lesson from both situations.

That’s why preparation has always been so important to me. I’ve often said that preparation breeds confidence, and confidence breeds success. But preparation does something else too: it gives you the ability to understand what happened.

When you’ve done the homework, studied the landscape, challenged your assumptions, and listened to different perspectives, you have a framework for evaluating the result. You can identify whether the process failed or whether circumstances simply changed.

Then you can recalibrate.

That ability becomes even more important when conditions are moving quickly. When something unexpected happens, the goal shouldn’t be to abandon the playbook every time. It should be to understand what changed, adjust to the new environment, and determine how to perform as well as possible under those conditions.

Preparation also matters at an organizational level.

At RXR, we operate in what I often call the “messy middle.” We’re not making widgets. Our work is complex, entrepreneurial, and often requires people across different disciplines to solve problems together.

That makes communication, collaboration, and preparation especially important.

The challenge is creating enough structure to keep people aligned without eliminating the entrepreneurial thinking that allows an organization to innovate.

Early in a process, I want flexibility. During ideation, exploration, and formation, people should have room to think creatively, challenge assumptions, and pursue different possibilities.

But as you move toward making a decision or an investment, the process needs to become more structured. Collaboration becomes a prerequisite. The right people need to be involved, the assumptions need to be tested, and everyone needs clarity around what is being decided and why.

Preparation becomes something you do together.

Of course, you can’t prepare for everything with the same intensity. There are only so many hours in the day. Part of leadership is knowing which moments require deep preparation and which can rely on processes and experience you’ve already built.

Over time, that creates a flywheel.

The more you prepare, the better your processes become. Better processes make future preparation more efficient. Experience gives you a stronger foundation, allowing you to focus your time and attention on the decisions where they can have the greatest impact.

That’s why I think of preparation less as something you do before an important moment and more as a lifestyle.

You continually learn. You continually refine the process. You stay humble enough to recognize when something didn’t work and disciplined enough to understand why.

Because you won’t always control the outcome.

But you can keep improving the way you get there.