Busy but going nowhere, or stuck in planning? The two ways change efforts stall.

In his book Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales describes two bad approaches to surviving life-or-death situations. Some people stay so attached to their original plan that it kills them. Others make no plan at all, become paralyzed by their circumstances, and die too. The survivors are the ones who update their mental model as conditions change, make new plans, and, in Gonzales’s words, “break down large jobs into small manageable tasks.”

That survivor approach is the essence of effective change leadership. The best change leaders have plans but hold them lightly. They keep moving instead of getting stuck in cycles of planning. They show real fortitude, and they can still laugh at themselves and find moments of wonder and humor along the way. They balance vision, process, relationships, and problem solving. This is what we call navigational leadership. We didn’t coin the term, but we hold a passionate belief in the kind of leadership it describes.

Just as Gonzales found patterns in who doesn’t make it off the mountain, we see two patterns that keep leaders and teams from leading change well. We call them “do stuff and hope” and “plantasizing.”

Do stuff and hope

Some teams are extremely busy in pursuit of the change they want. They spend tremendous energy doing, doing, doing. But they have no real idea whether all that activity is taking them toward the vision. Often they have a vague, or not so vague, sense that it isn’t, and they keep going anyway, hoping that if they just keep doing stuff they’ll get there. They look a lot like Gonzales’s first profile: the hiker who won’t give up on the summit they’re sure they’ll reach if they just keep at it.

Plantasizing

Other teams are stuck. They’re afraid to leave the port. They analyze and study, and sometimes write beautiful plans about a journey they’re scared to begin and may have no real intention of taking. It can feel much safer to stay with the status quo and plantasize about a different future. We call it plantasizing because it mixes planning and fantasizing without much doing. These teams look like Gonzales’s second profile: the hiker who curls up and waits to be rescued.

The navigational path

The better path is the navigational one. You have a vision for where you’re going, and you pause regularly to evaluate progress. You test hypotheses and break big challenges into smaller tasks. You keep taking action, focused on the next thing. As one of our clients likes to say, you “slice the apple.” And along the way, you purposefully stop, look around, and ask whether you’re on course or need to adjust. You interrogate progress honestly and learn together, holding nothing sacred.

Navigational leadership can be built into a team’s mindsets, behaviors, expectations, and processes. It can be taught and it can be learned, but it’s best learned by doing.

How to get your team on the navigational path

There are simple steps that keep a team from wandering into the wilderness hoping to hit its destination, or sitting on the mountain plantasizing about what it should do.

Cultivate the mindsets

Courage, curiosity, inclusivity, ownership, and stamina. Together they carry a team through hard journeys.

Remember your why

Let it keep motivating you, and keep it as the north star you’re moving toward.

Stay curious

Stop regularly to assess honestly where you are. Have the courage to admit when you’re off track, and adjust.

Celebrate progress

Small wins build morale and momentum. Winning teams are created by winning.

Strive for balance

Hold the tensions: vision and process, technical and adaptive, moving and measuring.

Like wilderness survival, navigational leadership is a set of mindsets, skills, and instincts developed over time. Training helps with many of the building blocks, but there’s no substitute for learning by doing. One of our mantras is “action over analysis”: get into the work according to the plan, while keeping your eyes and ears open for signals that a shift is needed.

Build in moments to take stock

Navigational teams put purposeful points in time on the calendar to come together, interrogate progress honestly, and make the next plan. These are the checkpoints on the navigational path above, and they matter most when you’re on the journey together. Without them, even if the leader is navigating, others will drift off on either side.

Many organizations underinvest in these moments. Others turn them into events that sell the plan instead of making space to question it. There’s little value in gathering people to convince them of something no one can know.

Truly navigational teams use these moments to take stock and agree on the next bend in the road for everyone to hike toward, and maybe to celebrate progress, or laugh at how far off course they found themselves when they stopped to check. The more consistently organizations hold these moments, the better they get at using them. People learn what’s expected, prepare more rigorously, and engage more honestly. We’ve written about how to structure them in change cycles.

Coming through it together

Organizational change isn’t a life-or-death matter, but the analogy helps. Too many organizations end up doing stuff and hoping, or plantasizing. In both cases, teams invest enormous energy of mind, body, and spirit, just not in a way that moves them toward the vision.

Navigational leadership gives teams a fighting chance: seeing challenges and opportunities clearly, testing and learning from hypotheses, adjusting the plan, and doing it all together.