It’s rarely smooth isn’t it? We may have our nice plans, our well thought out steps, but there’s always something unexpected – a surprise on the way, something behaving differently than we thought.

Change often happens in a 2 steps forward, 1 step back, stepping sideways for a few steps, some zigs and an occasional zag. Sometimes we even need to go backwards, retreat for a bit, to find a way around the block – a new path.

We know this intellectually, so we try to plan it away by having sessions on identifying ‘barriers’, ‘blockers’, ‘challenges’, which misses the point as this is our desire for control in disguise.

Perhaps we need to embrace and expect the unknown to happen and consider how we will deal with the unexpected when it occurs and help ourselves and our teams ‘see’ it when it is happening.

Change is rarely smooth in the short term; it’s more of a stuttering forward, yet the more distance we have from it, the smoother it looks. It’s why most roads on maps look pristinely straight even though they are full of curves when we drive them.