Leading Through Change

Another Monday. Another email about a new AI tool the company is “evaluating,” sitting right next to the 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 where just as everyone finds their footing, the floor shifts again. It has a name. It’s organizational whiplash, and it is the hidden tax on every change you announce. It’s also what burns out your best people, not the work itself but the frantic, reactive thrash of work that never holds still long enough for anyone to get good at it.

We talk about leading through change like it’s an event, a project with a start and a finish. It isn’t. This is the job now. The whiplash isn’t a bug to be fixed; it’s the permanent condition. The only real question is what you do about it.

Here’s where the standard advice sends you wrong. It tells you to sell a bold vision, to be the charismatic leader painting a vivid picture of the north star so the team rows harder toward it.

Vision is fine. It’s probably the easiest part of your job. It also does almost nothing for whiplash.

A team doesn’t fumble a reorg because they forgot the mission statement. They fumble it because their informal networks just got vaporized and they don’t know who to ask for help anymore. They don’t drag their feet on a new tool because they lack ambition. They drag because they haven’t been given room to get competent, and looking incompetent in front of your peers is a genuinely terrifying thing.

Vision without a steady rhythm is just whiplash with a mission statement. You’re asking people to sprint toward a distant peak during a rolling earthquake. The problem was never the direction. Your job isn’t to point at the mountain. It’s to make the ground feel solid enough to take the next step.

The real answer is unglamorous. It doesn’t make for a great keynote. It’s the slow, repetitive work of manufacturing stability where there isn’t any, and it comes down to four things.

Rhythm. When everything is in flux, build the things that aren’t. The weekly one-on-one. The monthly team meeting. A cadence people can set their watch to. These aren’t just meetings, they’re anchors, the fixed points in a spinning room that say no matter what else changes, this still happens.

Candor. In the absence of information, people invent their own, and it is always the worst-case version. So tell them the truth, as much as you have, as early as you can, even when the truth is “I don’t know yet, but here’s what I do know and here’s when I’ll tell you more.” Honest signal is the most valuable currency in a noisy system.

Small wins. The grand vision is too far away to steer by day to day. People need to feel progress now. Break the journey into the smallest reachable win: what can we finish by Friday and point at and say we did that? A small win is tangible evidence that the new way is possible. It’s the antidote to the feeling of spinning wheels.

Capability. This is the one almost everyone misses. You can’t just announce a new destination and expect people to arrive. Every time you change a tool, a process, or a structure, you open a capability gap. You have made your people temporarily worse at their jobs, on purpose. That gap is not a side effect of the change; it is the change, from where they sit. Your most urgent work is closing it, and that’s more than a training module. It’s psychological safety, it’s slack in the system, it’s permission to be a beginner again in front of people who used to see you as the expert. Most leaders fund the announcement and starve the gap, then wonder why the rollout stalled.

I’m a recovering brain scientist. I spent years on a bioengineering PhD studying how huge networks of neurons coordinate under noisy, shifting conditions. Later I co-founded an AI company, RoadBotics, ran it as CEO, and we used computer vision to inspect roads for governments. We grew fast, sold to Michelin in 2022, and then I had to integrate our small, quick startup team into a massive global corporation across the US and France.

Across all of it, one lesson holds: stable systems don’t survive by predicting the future. They survive by correcting fast against a clear signal.

A thermostat has no five-year plan for the room. It measures the temperature, compares it to the target, and if there’s a gap, it acts. Constant, small, boring corrections. Leading through change is that control loop, not a prophecy. The goal isn’t to forecast the next disruption. It’s to build a team that can sense one and respond smoothly, every time.

When we sold to Michelin, the acquisition was whiplash at full intensity: overnight a new parent company, new processes, new colleagues, and deep uncertainty for everyone about whether they were still needed. What held the team together wasn’t a vision deck about synergy. It was a near-religious commitment to the weekly cadence, blunt honesty about what we knew and didn’t, one shippable technical milestone in the first ninety days, and protected time for people to learn the new systems without being expected to be instantly productive. A steady rhythm and a clear signal while the rest of the world was noise.

And it costs the leader something to be that fixed point. You’re absorbing the same whiplash from above, usually without permission to show it. Being the steady hand is quiet, lonely work, and nobody sends a thank-you note for the panic that didn’t happen. Worth knowing going in.

Tomorrow morning, before you think about the vision, four questions.

1. What is my cadence? Find the one recurring touchpoint your team can count on no matter what. Protect it like it’s load-bearing, because it is.
2. What is the true thing I need to say? Name the uncertainty your team feels most. You don’t have to resolve it. Acknowledging it builds more trust than performing certainty ever will.
3. What is the next small win? Forget the quarterly goals for a second. What can the team finish this week, see, and feel good about?
4. Where is the capability gap? What can my people no longer do well because of the last change, and what do they need to get it back? That’s your first job, not your eventual one.

That’s the work. Not being a visionary. Being a shock absorber, the steady hand that keeps good people capable when the work won’t hold still.

This is the first piece in a series on that, the unglamorous craft of leading people through change without burning them out. I write the in-progress version most days on LinkedIn. The essays below go deeper.

• Organizational whiplash
• Leadership Transitions
• The New Manager’s Guide to Leading a Team Through Constant Change
• Team Capability
• The Company That Grew Out of My Head