Hi Reader

( 3-minute read..but it's worth it 😊)

Have you ever been in a conversation or presentation with someone explaining their "change management strategy."?

They’ll have a detailed plan, Clear phases, Communication frameworks. It’s normally all very organised.

But then they’re hit with a bolt from the blue where a business suffers an unexpected drop or a sports team lose two of their best players.

So that strategy is now kinda useless. Because it was designed for planned change, not actual change. And actual change doesn't care about your plans and it doesn’t send advance warning.

We keep hearing leaders talk about "managing change" like it's this discrete event that happens occasionally and needs containing.

Except that's backwards.

Bill Walsh, a three-time Super Bowl winner, puts it differently:

Not a program, not a strategy, but a state of mind.

Which means the question isn't how to manage change when it arrives. It's how to build minds that expect instability as the default.

Adam Grant makes this point in "Think Again": adapting to changing environment isn't something a company does. It's something people do in the multitude of decisions they make every day.

That's the bit most leadership development misses entirely.

We build change management programs when what we need are people who make dozens of micro-adaptations daily without needing a program to tell them how.

So when things get particularly chaotic and every plan you made gets disrupted you just respond and…..adjust. No waiting for new plans or asking permission to pivot. See what shifts and moved accordingly.

Because the alternative is to become paralysed waiting for clarity that’s not coming.

And the difference isn't training or experience. It whether you treat change as deviation from normal or as normal itself.

Here’s an interesting quote from podcaster, angel investor and author Timothy Ferriss:

Note he doesn’t say the best plan. He focuses on the plan with the most options.

This goes against everything we're taught about strategic planning. We're supposed to analyse, decide, commit. Make the brave choice and stick to it.

But that only works if the future cooperates. And the future's not particularly cooperative lately.

So what if instead of planning for the most likely scenario, we planned for maximum flexibility?

What if the metric wasn't "is this the optimal choice?" but "how many options does this preserve?"

For example, I know one company who restructured their entire business model around this question. Instead of committing to one market strategy, they built three parallel approaches they could scale up or down based on what emerged.

Yes, at first glance it looks and sounds inefficient. But if you think about it, it actually gives them the ability to pivot when their direct competitors are probably locked into paths that have stopped working.

That said, it can get uncomfortable.

Most leaders say they value adaptability. Then they reward consistency. They punish course corrections and they foster cultures where changing your mind looks like weakness.

Ben Lyttleton's research on what creates "Edge" in elite sport found that adaptability, resilience, and composure under pressure matter more than technical skills. But how many performance reviews actually measure adaptability?

We measure outcomes. Which means people get punished for adapting if the adaptation doesn't immediately produce results. So, surprise surprise, they stop adapting.

Golf performance coach, Bob Rotella, studied champion athletes and found something that should change how we think about resilience:

But you can't develop that response pattern during the adversity. You develop it beforehand by deliberately practicing flexible thinking when stakes are low.

I saw it work well with a rugby performance director who started doing this with his coaching staff. Every strategy meeting, they'd present their plan then immediately discuss what would make them abandon it. Importantly, it wasn’t a devil's advocate exercise but a genuine pre-planning for when reality diverges from prediction.

That type of approach is so left-field that it does make people uncomfortable initially, and feel like they’re undermining their own ideas.

But when things inevitably shift at some point of the season, they’ve already rehearsed pivoting. They’ve created the mental pathway so all that’s left is to follow it.

Think about one of your last major decisions. Did you choose the option with the best projected outcome? Or the option that gave you the most ways to adjust if projections proved wrong?

Most leaders optimise for scenario A. Very few optimise for having options B and C ready when A doesn't cut it anymore.

Research from organisational psychology backs this up: it shows that teams given permission to modify plans in real-time outperform teams given detailed plans they're expected to follow. It’s not that the plans are worse but because reality's messier than any plan accounts for.

But giving people permission to modify requires trusting their judgment. Which means you can't micromanage. You can't require approval for every deviation. You can't punish course corrections.

You have to actually mean it when you say “adaptability matters”.

I'm increasingly convinced of one thing: the sports clubs, companies & organisations that navigate change well aren't doing it through better change management but through people who don't experience normal operations and change as different states.

They expect things to shift and build slack into systems so there's room to adjust. So they’re all the time making decisions that preserve options rather than burning them.

And when change arrives, which it always does, they don't trigger crisis mode. They just continue operating with slightly different parameters.

In your world it might look like this:

1. Check your calendar for next week.

2. How much of it would survive contact with unexpected reality?

If the answer's something like "most of it has to happen exactly as scheduled," you've built rigidity and called it planning.

Real planning accounts for the fact that up to half your week will get disrupted by things you can't predict. So that means building a buffer creating options and, ultimately, preserving flexibility.

When you read it first it might sound less efficient but it’s actually more effective.

The question isn't whether change will arrive. It's whether you'll be able to respond when it does?

Footnote: If you're recognising that your club, company or organisation treats change as an occasional crisis rather than a constant state, or if you suspect your planning process optimises for best-case scenarios at the expense of flexibility, that's worth examining. Maybe what you need isn't better change management? But perhaps a fundamental shift in how you think about stability and adaptation?

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