Leading Through Change When the Plan Stops Working

Leading through change comes down to staying out of reaction mode. Pause long enough to read what is actually happening, deal with the one thing that must be stopped right now, then pick the adjusted route. Panic narrows your options to fight or flight, and neither of those gets a team where it needs to go.

I spent my entire career either overcoming chaos or creating it for somebody else. Twenty-four years in Special Forces will do that.

The thing I learned is that chaos is not an event. It is a state of mind, and once you understand that, leading through change stops being about surviving disruption and starts being about how fast you can get calm and choose.

Here is how I run it, from the first five minutes through the months afterward when you are living with a decision that did not go your way.

Is chaos an event or a choice?

It is a choice, and it sits entirely in your perception of the environment.

I love the feeling of chaos. Not because I want to feel out of control, but because I love recognizing I am in a chaotic state and then shifting out of it. When I see chaos, I see opportunity. It is not chaotic to me, because I choose to be calm in the moment everyone else is calling a crisis.

Green Berets thrive in chaos. Not because they are operating in it, because they are the calm inside it. They can hold that in the most dynamic situations because they have spent years training for a variety of them and they know that every action has second, third and fourth-order effects.

Let me be direct about the guy who tells you he thrives in crisis mode. He is a liar and a terrible planner. He lives in reaction mode, and reaction mode limits your choices. Embracing chaos is the opposite of that. It is saying: I see your chaos, and I raise you calm, cool and collected. Your chaos will not make me react out of control. I will be the calm that leads us out of it.

Camden writes about the crisis moment itself in how to lead in a crisis. This page is about the preparation that decides how you behave when it hits.

Why does reaction mode cost you the good options?

Because panic shrinks your field of view down to the thing directly in front of you.

I remember a lesson from learning to drive: look through the turn, at where you are going. Driving straight, you look straight ahead, which is still where you are going. Try to keep looking straight ahead through a turn and you will not make the turn. You will crash.

The car that hits a telephone pole in the middle of nowhere usually gets there because the driver panicked at the last second and fixed on the thing in front of him instead of all the open space around it. That moment of panic costs the driver his life. In panic we lose the ability to see options. The view goes from an open road with lines to guide you down to one tree, and the only available outcome is hitting it.

Panic sends the mind to survival: fight, flight or freeze. None of the three gets you where you want to go. We cannot avoid the instinct. We can learn to overcome it.

There is a Ranger rule for this: face out, take a knee, drink water, change your socks, then move out again. It is a forced pause that returns your field of view.

And when you jump out of an airplane you carry a reserve parachute for when the main fails. The reserve does the jumper no good if he panics and never pulls it. When the main fails, you have the rest of your life to make the decision to pull the reserve.

What do you do in the first five minutes?

Assess before you move. Taking action against chaos does not mean running in a random direction.

When things go haywire I get a hit of adrenaline, because I get to fix something. I fall straight into wanting to take action immediately. I also know better than to take off running into the gunfire.

So I pause and read the indicators. What is happening right now? What has to stop immediately? If the basement is flooding because a water line ruptured, the first thing is to shut off the water. If the building is on fire, get out. We have to see where to run and how far, and whether we are leaving everything and everyone behind.

1. Pause. Ten seconds is often enough to get out of the instinctive response.
2. Name what is actually happening, out loud, to whoever is with you. Naming it stops the room from filling in worse versions.
3. Find the one thing that has to be stopped right now, and only that one. Shut off the water.
4. Check the second and third-order effects before the next move. Most bad decisions under pressure are correct decisions taken one layer too shallow.
5. Tell the team the adjusted route, even if it is partial. Silence from the top is what turns a problem into a panic.
6. Set the time you will reassess. A decision made in the first five minutes is not supposed to survive the next five hours unexamined.

The team does not need you to have the answer in minute one. They need you to be the person who is not spinning.

What do you do when the road is simply closed?

You take the detour and you stop treating it as a loss.

The road into town from our neighborhood has been closed as a throughway for months. The first two months it added a whopping five minutes to the drive to the interstate and the grocery store. Ms. Suzanne and I complained about it and talked about how tough it was and how frustrated we were.

We still went to the grocery store. We still got to the interstate. There is a detour to reach the pub too, another two minutes on a twelve-minute trip. The closure never stopped us going anywhere we wanted to go. What it did was show us the neighborhood from a different angle and give us one more thing to talk about with the neighbors.

After a month the detour was a habit and no big deal, because we chose to do it that way. There is a difference between avoiding something hard and avoiding the thing that actually stops you. Most of what leaders call a crisis is a five-minute detour they have decided to be angry about.

Before you throw up your hands and say this way is blocked so I am turning around, ask what other paths are open. The route to the mountain top is varied and difficult. That is what makes it a mountain top.

What do you do when the decision is already made and it was wrong?

You move out of the being-pissed phase and into the how-do-I-make-the-best-of-this phase, as fast as you can manage.

I make a product called Pocket Litter, and building a product is a different and harder animal than teaching leadership. A while back I spoke with one of my vendors, the one who is terrible about returning calls, and they had the material I wanted in stock. I was thrilled. He told me it was the same material they had sent me a year and a half earlier.

I jumped through the hoops on payment and shipping and the box arrived. Eighty yards of Dyneema. I put it in the garage and started planning the week's production. Then I opened it. It was white. Nobody wants a white Pocket Litter. What in the world am I going to do with eighty yards of white Dyneema?

I emailed them about the mistake in the shipment. There was no mistake. It was the exact stuff they had sent before. I let the box sit. I took a trip, did a demo, came home and compared the roll to the material I already had. Same stuff. This is not Amazon, so there is no return, and there was a lot of capital sitting in my garage collecting dust.

By then I had moved out of being pissed and into figuring it out. What is the worst that can happen? I pulled out a can of black spray paint and did a test shot. It did not explode or melt. When the paint dried it was smooth, not sticky, and it did not come off on my hand. That sent me to the research, and yes, spray paint is a recognized method of changing the color of Dyneema. Not the best, not the worst. I had a way ahead.

I could have stayed angry at the company. I could have felt sorry for myself and decided I was an idiot. What changed things was the shift in attitude, because the shift in attitude is what opened my mind up to a solution that still gets customers the outcome they want. Never wallow in failure. It only brings more failure.

How do you tell what to learn from and what to let go?

By separating the decisions you made from the conditions you never controlled.

We had a year where the poppies came up like a field in April and the corn crop, the money maker, came in hundreds of pounds under projection. The poppies are beautiful and they signal a rebirth of the field, which is what you want. Across the road the corn is not growing. Was it the weather? The wrong seed or fertilizer? Was the planter set too shallow so the crows got most of the seed?

I do not know. What I can do is learn from the parts I decided, and accept the parts I can never change or predict, like the weather and the market price.

Poppies do not make money. They are something to look at. They also tell you it is spring and the ground is revitalized, and that gives you a path to a different approach next time around. A bad corn crop is not the end of the world. It hurts like hell. If I learn from the decisions and I am willing to see what the poppies represent, I can build on what is working and cut away what is not.

The opportunity is always there. The question is whether you are willing to see it or would rather feel sorry for yourself.

What do you do with the worry?

Convert it into risk assessment, then put it down.

My grandmother Mimi was a worrier. She worried I would get hurt climbing trees, riding the tractor, running in the backyard. That was how she showed love. She never stopped me doing any of it, she just made sure I knew she was concerned.

Worry is a heavy thing to spend time on when there is nothing you can do about the thing itself. It has one good use. Worry can identify a risk so you can put something in place to mitigate it.

When I had shoulder surgery, one of the things everybody jokes about is making sure they operate on the right one. Yes, the thought crossed my mind. So the surgeon signed the correct shoulder before any narcotics went into my system. Could he still have operated on the wrong one? Yes. It would have been a lot harder.

That is the whole discipline. When you catch yourself worrying, ask what you can do about it. If there is something, do that thing and stop worrying. If there is nothing, or you have already done everything available, stop worrying and be present. Stuck in the worry cycle, you can miss the moment you needed to seize to prevent the very thing you are worried about.

When the change is a real loss

Sometimes it is not a detour. Sometimes it is a flood, a tornado, or losing the contract that carried eighty percent of your revenue.

Bad things happen and they are bad. They feel bad and they hurt. In the moment your emotions land on you no matter how tough you think you are. That is being human.

The good news is also being human, because we get to choose something different. It is bad in the moment. It does not have to stay bad. That is the difference between living inside an event that has already happened and moving forward to make the best of where you are now.

When we focus on how terrible it is, there is no drive to move and no drive to change. Action changes everything. It does not remove the pain. Some pain stays for good. Pain cannot stop you from moving forward, and it is a signal to do something different going forward. Do not let the bad situation and the pain it made limit who you can be.

If you want the other half of this, Camden writes about why the adjustment itself is so hard in why is change so hard.

Where to start

You do not get calm in the moment by deciding to be calm in the moment. You get it from the preparation you did before, which is the part nobody schedules.

Run the pause drill on something small this week, the next time a meeting goes sideways or a client comes in hot. Ten seconds, name it, find the one thing that has to stop now.

The Green Beret Leadership Program builds this into the leaders underneath you, so the calm does not depend on you being in the room when it happens. If you want a clear read on how your team behaves when the plan breaks, that is what Executive Offsites are built to surface.

Frequently asked questions