The Whiplash Is The Point
#Another Monday. Another email about a new AI tool the company is testing. It lands in your inbox right next to the calendar invite for a “strategy refresh” town hall. Last quarter it was a reorg. The quarter before that, a pivot in priorities.
The ground keeps moving. Your team feels it. You feel it. That low-grade disorientation, the sense that just as you get your footing, the floor shifts again. It has a name. It’s organizational whiplash.
It’s the feeling of being perpetually in-between, of running hard but never settling into a rhythm. It’s the hidden tax on every change, every new initiative. It’s what burns out your best people. Not the work itself, but the frantic, reactive thrash of the work never holding still long enough for anyone to get good at it.
We talk about leading through change as if it’s a special event. A project with a start and a finish. It’s not. This is the job now. The whiplash isn’t a bug; it’s the permanent condition. The real question is what you do about it.
The Vision Trap
#Here’s where the standard advice sends you wrong. It tells you to sell a bold vision. To be the charismatic leader who paints a vivid picture of the north star, inspiring the team to row harder toward it.
Vision is fine. It’s probably the easiest part of your job. But it doesn’t solve whiplash.
A team doesn’t fail to navigate a reorg because they forgot the mission statement. They fail because their informal networks were just vaporized and they don’t know who to ask for help. They don’t resist a new tool because they lack ambition. They resist it because they haven’t been given the space to become competent, and looking incompetent in front of your peers is a terrifying prospect.
Vision without a steady rhythm is just whiplash with a mission statement. It’s asking people to run toward a distant mountain peak during a rolling earthquake. The problem isn’t the direction. The problem is the ground is not safe. Your job is not just to point at the mountain. Your job is to make the ground feel as solid as possible, step by step.
The Boring, Steady Work of Capability
#The real answer to leading through change is unglamorous. It doesn’t make for a great conference keynote. It’s the slow, repetitive, essential work of creating stability where there is none.
It breaks down into four practices.
Rhythm. When everything is in flux, you have to create things that are not. Your weekly one-on-one. Your monthly team meeting. A cadence people can set their watch to. These aren’t just meetings. They are anchors. They are the fixed points in a spinning world that say, “no matter what else changes, this will happen.”
Candor. In the absence of information, people will invent their own, and it will always be the worst-case scenario. Your job is to tell people the truth, as much of it as you can, as soon as you can. Even if the truth is, “I don’t know yet, but here is what I do know, and here is when I will tell you more.” Honest signal is the most valuable currency in a chaotic system.
Micro-milestones. The grand vision is too far away to be useful day-to-day. People need to feel a sense of progress now. Your job is to break the journey down into the smallest possible, achievable wins. What can we get done by Friday that we can all look at and say, “we did that”? A small win proves the new way is possible. It’s a tangible piece of evidence that counters the feeling of spinning wheels.
Capability. This is the one everyone misses. You can’t just announce a new destination. You have to ensure people have what they need to make the journey. Capability is not a download. When you change a tool, a process, or a team structure, you create a capability gap. You have made people less able to do their job, temporarily. Your most urgent work is to close that gap. It’s training, yes, but it’s also psychological safety, slack in the system, and permission to be a beginner again. And psychological safety, in Amy Edmondson’s research, is not comfort or harmony; it is whether people feel safe enough to say “I can’t do this yet” and ask for help.
That’s it. It’s not a hack. It’s not magic. It’s just the work.
How Stable Systems Stay Stable
#I’m a recovering scientist. I spent years getting a PhD in bioengineering, studying how massive, complex networks in the brain coordinate under noisy, changing conditions. Later, I co-founded an AI company called RoadBotics. We used computer vision to inspect roads for governments. We grew fast, sold the company to Michelin, and then I had the job of integrating our small, fast-moving startup team with a massive, global corporation. Talk about whiplash.
Across all those experiences, one lesson holds. Stable systems don’t work by predicting the future. They work by correcting against a clear, frequent signal.
Think of a thermostat. It doesn’t have a five-year plan for the room’s temperature. It has one job. It measures the current temperature (signal), compares it to the target (the goal), and if there’s a gap, it acts (turns on the heat or AC). It’s a simple control loop. It’s constant, small, boring adjustments.
Leading through change is a control loop, not a prophecy. Your job isn’t to predict the next disruption. Your job is to build a team that can sense and respond to any disruption, smoothly. When we sold to Michelin, the acquisition itself was the ultimate whiplash. Overnight, a new parent company, new processes, new colleagues in France, and a deep uncertainty for everyone about their role.
The thing that worked wasn’t a grand vision deck about synergy. It was the boring stuff. A religious commitment to the weekly team cadence. Brutal honesty about what we knew and what we didn’t. Focusing the team on a single, achievable technical milestone we could ship in the first 90 days. And carving out time for people to just learn the new systems without the pressure of being instantly productive.
We held the team together by providing a steady rhythm and a clear, immediate signal when the rest of the world was noise.
What to Do on Monday
#This all might feel abstract. It’s not. You can put this into practice tomorrow morning. Instead of thinking about the vision, ask yourself four questions.
What is my cadence? Look at your calendar. What is the one recurring meeting or touchpoint that your team can count on, no matter what? Protect it. Make it the most valuable, reliable hour of their week.
What is the true thing I need to say? What is the uncertainty your team is feeling most acutely? Name it. Even if you can’t resolve it, acknowledging the reality creates trust. Stop performing certainty and start practicing candor.
What is the next small win? Forget the quarterly goals for a moment. What is the most important thing your team can accomplish by the end of this week? Define it, clear the path for it, and then celebrate it when it’s done.
Where is the capability gap? What can my people no longer do well because of the most recent change? What skill, process, or piece of knowledge do they now need? Your first job is to help them get it.
This is the work. It’s not about being a visionary. It’s about being a shock absorber. It’s about being the steady hand that helps good people stay capable when the work won’t hold still.
The Work Continues
#There is no final state. There is only the practice. Keeping a team steady and capable through permanent disruption is the defining challenge of modern leadership.
This essay is the starting point for a series on that challenge. We’ll go deeper into the practical, unglamorous work of leading people through change without burning them out.
If you want to follow along with the real, in-progress version of this work, I share lessons from my own journey building a new company on LinkedIn. The work goes better when you let it go smooth.