Imagine you are on a flight. Turbulence hits, wind currents shift, and the plane veers slightly off track. Would you panic?
In reality, it is unlikely you would even know that this had occurred. The pilot would make the necessary adjustments and you would arrive at your destination without any fanfare.
Veering off course is not failure, it is a natural part of flying. However, this mindset is rarely applied to business leadership. Here, a deviation from the plan is seen as something to apologise for. But what if - just like with flying - it was understood as an essential as part of the journey?
In business, uncertainty is not the enemy. It is a companion. And when leaders embrace that, they build more agile, confident, and forward-thinking organisations.
Why we fear going off course
For many senior leaders, there is a deeply ingrained belief that a good strategy is a straight line. They set the destination, create a detailed roadmap, and follow it to the letter. Any deviation is viewed with suspicion or worse, guilt.
But even the best-laid plans rarely survive first contact with execution. Markets shift; customers evolve; new data emerges. The idea of a perfect plan is comforting, but ultimately a myth. Just like a pilot flying through unpredictable skies, leaders must be ready to course-correct. And yet, unlike pilots, many leaders feel the need to explain or justify every shift.
Why?
In an age of instant communication, Red-Amber-Green (RAG) reports, and 24/7 updates, businesses have developed a culture of hyper-accountability, where transparency gets confused with perfection. Every issue is flagged, every risk over-communicated. As a result, normal course corrections are experienced as signs of failure rather than an indication of responsiveness. Yet responsiveness is exactly what modern leadership demands.
Traditional vs. Agile thinking: a shift in mindset
A fear of course correction is particularly prevalent in project management. Traditional project management is often built around fixed plans and long-term milestones. It assumes it is possible to know everything at the start and that success will come from sticking to the blueprint. But that approach can backfire when the landscape changes.
Agile methodologies flip this on its head. By breaking work into smaller sprints, they create natural pause points to assess, reflect, and adjust. These moments of recalibration are not seen as delays or errors. They are strategic necessities.
Consider the Mars Rover mission. Engineers knew they were in unchartered territory and would not have all the information upfront. They designed their plan to include frequent recalculations as new data emerged. Without this adaptive mindset, the mission might have failed.
Leadership should work the same way.
Ask: are you actually adapting?
Many business leaders now have a solid understanding of the value of agility, adaptability and psychological safety. Confronted with this theory, most will say, “we already do this”.
But it is worth pausing to reflect:
- Do your teams feel safe to raise a red flag without blame?
- Are your KPIs flexible enough to shift mid-flight?
- How often do you stop and reassess assumptions?
- Are you genuinely listening or just reporting progress?
These questions are not just theoretical, they are diagnostic. They reveal whether a culture truly supports strategic course correction, or just pays it lip service.
Case study: when the destination changes mid-flight
OnTrack International worked with an organisation facing a dramatic shift in its funding model. How it responded provides a powerful example of how to change destination mid-flight. With new competition and market changes, the leadership team quickly understood they needed to pivot their entire strategy. But internally, the old mindset lingered. Teams continued to push forward with legacy L&D plans that no longer fit the business model.
To overcome this legacy mindset, OnTrack helped the leadership do three, transformative things:
- Pause and reassess what problem they were now actually trying to solve
- Reframe success by defining what the new destination looked like
- Embrace ‘not knowing’ by creating space for cultural exploration before driving toward delivery
This openness to uncertainty and recalibration was not weakness. For this organization it was the key to a new trajectory.
The emotional skill of course correction
Course correction is not just a strategic move, it’s an emotional discipline. Just like a seasoned pilot, leaders need to model calm under pressure. When the course changes, an ability to remain centered, composed, and curious has a ripple effect.
Ask: what has changed? Why does it matter? What do we still know for sure? What can flex, and what must stay firm?
This approach frames uncertainty as manageable, and fosters psychological safety for the whole team. The more predictable a leader’s presence is, the more freedom their team has to surface issues and co-create solutions.
Remember, clarity doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means knowing how to move forward when you don’t. Course correction is not only acceptable, it’s leadership in motion.
