Momentum Is a Lie You Tell Yourself in Retrospect
I was rebuilding in 2021, not the kind of rebuilding that makes for a clean narrative at a conference: I sat in my home office at 7am with cold coffee and genuinely wondered whether the version of myself I was trying to recover was actually worth recovering.
The business pivot I had made the previous year had cost me more than I was prepared to admit publicly, or privately, for some time. The financial exposure was real but survivable. What surprised me, and I say this with the full awareness that I should have known better, was what the failure took from me that I had not put a value on: my confidence in my own judgment, time I will not get back, and a kind of professional identity I had worn for so long that I had mistaken it for my actual self.
I had spent two decades advising organisations on transformation, risk strategy, and resilience. Apparently, the curriculum did not include a module on what to do when my own plan unravels on schedule.
The Rule I Set Because I Had Nothing Else
Somewhere in early 2021, I made a decision that felt embarrassingly small at the time. I gave myself one rule: do one visible thing each day, not a strategy review, not a restructuring plan, not the ambitious Q2 roadmap I kept drafting and abandoning. One thing: an email sent, a conversation completed, a document closed and filed, something that existed in the world after I did it, that had not existed before.
I want to be honest about how that rule felt in practice. Some days, sending a single email was a genuine achievement. I would look at the rule, one visible thing, and think: this is a standard set for someone recovering from surgery, not someone who has run teams of several hundred people across multiple geographies. The bar was, objectively, on the floor.
I kept the rule anyway, partly because I had nothing better, partly because the alternative was producing nothing, and I had enough experience with organisations in freefall to know that zero output days compound in the wrong direction just as fast as progress days compound in the right one.
Ninety days in, I reviewed what I had produced, not to feel good about myself, I was not expecting to feel good about myself, but because I needed an honest read on whether the approach was working or whether I was simply managing a slow decline with better optics.
What I found genuinely surprised me. The volume of work was not the surprise. What stopped me was that I could not draw a straight line from where I had been to where I was. The distance had appeared gradually enough that I had not registered it. Momentum, it turned out, does not announce itself.
Three Things That Pivot Taught Me That No Strategy Course Ever Did
Progress made quietly does not feel like progress. This is the trap most capable people fall into when they are behind. They have succeeded visibly before, they know what it feels like when things are working, the energy in the room, the metrics ticking up, the sense of forward motion that others can see. When none of that is present, my instinct is to conclude that nothing is working. That instinct is usually wrong. The compound effect of consistent small action is not a motivational phrase, it is arithmetic. But arithmetic does not feel like anything while it is happening. The ledger is invisible until I run the numbers.
Waiting for readiness is a strategy for staying still. There is a version of professional discipline that looks like patience but is actually avoidance in good clothing. I have watched senior leaders wait for the right conditions, the right quarter, the right team configuration, and I have watched them wait themselves into irrelevance. In 2021, I was at risk of doing exactly that. The energy to do something significant does not precede action, it follows it. That sequencing matters. Getting it backwards is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes I have seen in executive careers, including my own.
Consistency is a decision, not a character trait. I used to believe, and I hear this belief echoed constantly in leadership conversation, that some people are naturally consistent and some are not. That consistency is something you either have or you develop through habit. I do not think that is right anymore. What I experienced in that ninety-day period was not the emergence of a new habit, it was a daily decision, made again every morning, often against my own inclination. Some mornings the decision took five minutes of sitting at the desk and arguing with myself. Consistency is not a trait I possess, it is a choice I make when nothing feels worth doing. That distinction matters because traits are fixed and choices are not.
What This Means If You Are Running Something Right Now
If I lead an organisation, a team, or a professional practice that is currently behind where it should be, and most are, in some dimension, at any given time, my instinct is to wait for the moment when I can make a significant move. Restructure properly, relaunch with conviction, come back strong.
I understand that instinct, I have acted on it, and I have watched others act on it, and I have seen what it produces. What it produces, mostly, is a longer period of stagnation with a more elaborate justification.
The organisations I have seen recover fastest from genuine difficulty were not the ones that waited for the transformational moment. They were the ones that kept producing output, imperfect, incremental, sometimes undistinguished output, on the days when producing nothing would have been entirely forgivable.
The compound effect is not selective, it does not care whether I am in a good quarter or a difficult one. It runs in both directions with equal indifference.
I do not find momentum, I discover, eventually, that it has been accumulating behind me the entire time I was sure it was not.