Changing Course Midway Is Not a Verdict on the Start

The middle of a road is not a crossroads

At a crossroads, both roads lie ahead. Neither has been walked; both sit in the future, and the comparison, however hard, is between two unknowns. The middle of a road is a different place. One road is already half travelled: eight years on a finance track, the running of a company taken over from a parent, a turnaround role accepted for three years and now in its third. One morning the executive notices that the road no longer fits, and finds themselves facing the question of changing course midway.

The two situations are usually described in the same words: stay or go. Yet a decision made in the middle works differently from one made at a fork. Midway, one of the options is no longer an option but a past, and the past speaks louder than the future.

The voice of the half already walked

The walked road speaks from three places. The years went there, and leaving makes some of them look wasted. People came along: a team that followed the executive in, a board that backed the appointment, a family that carried the decision with them. And there is the story the executive has told themselves and others about why they chose this road, repeated for so long that it has become part of who they are.

None of these voices is unfair. They do add a weight that a crossroads does not carry, and the person usually mistakes that weight for the decision itself.

The question asked midway is usually a verdict on the past

When we talk with executives considering a change of course midway, the first sentences are rarely about the future. Was it a mistake to take this road. Have I wasted these years. Should I have decided differently back then. The question seems to look forward, but what it asks for is a verdict on the past.

A decision waiting on a verdict

Once the two are tied together, the decision locks from both sides. Either the executive cannot change course until they have proved to themselves that the first choice was wrong, or they keep walking to prove it was right. The first means declaring the past guilty, and few people are ready to. The second is quieter and lasts longer; the executive spends years walking a road to vindicate the person who once chose it.

A decision stuck in the middle of a road is usually not a question of direction but a wait for a verdict on the earlier choice. That verdict can never quite be reached, because the first choice was made with that day's information, and that information cannot be rebuilt now. Waiting for it is the most respectable-looking way to postpone indefinitely. The wait has its own cost: while the question stays open, the road is walked with half the executive's attention, and the road pays for that too.

The person who chose the road is not the person walking it

A more useful question can take the place of the unanswerable one: is the person who chose the road still the person walking it. A road changes whoever walks it. The executive who chose this one eight years ago did so by the criteria of who they were then, built on what they needed to prove, what they did not yet know, and what they wanted.

What the road did to the person

By the middle of the road, those criteria have usually shifted in three places:

• What the person is good at: the road strengthened skills that were weak at the start and turned the strong ones into routine.
• What they need to prove: what had to be proved at the outset has often been proved along the way and is no longer a goal.
• What they want: the road has shown them a want they did not know they had, sometimes a kind of work, sometimes a rhythm, sometimes the kind of people they work with.

These shifts are not a sign of failure. They are a sign that the road did its work and carried the person past the criteria they chose it by. The wish to change course midway usually shows not that the road was wrong but that the road changed the person. The difference looks small and changes the decision's tone: the past reads as preparation rather than as a mistake.

Not every wish to change course is of this kind. Sometimes the road really has got worse; a partnership has broken down, or a company has turned into something else. Sometimes the wish is only the tiredness of a hard stretch. To tell which, the criteria of the person who chose the road are written down first, then the criteria of the person today, and the two are read side by side. If the difference lies in the criteria, the question of direction is real. If it lies only in the weight of this quarter, waiting can also be an answer.

A change of course is made without disowning the road walked

Two separate sentences

The first step in changing course is to split past and future into two sentences. The first is about the past: on that day, with that information and those criteria, choosing this road was reasonable. The second is about now: with today's information and today's criteria, the rest of this road does not fit me. The two sentences do not contradict each other. An executive who can write the first does not have to condemn their past in order to say the second.

The split also shows that the walked road leaves less behind than it seems to. Skills acquired, relationships built, an industry known from the inside: all of it travels to the new road. What is left behind is not the road but its next stop. Leaving a road does not undo having walked it; the half already travelled becomes the first half of the next one.

Nor does changing course always mean leaving the road. Today's criteria sometimes point to a different role in the same company, a different scope in the same role, or simply an end date. Midway, executives tend to reduce the options to two, stay or go, because the verdict on the past is binary as well: right or wrong. Once the verdict is set aside, the options multiply. Finishing the three-year turnaround and then leaving is a different decision from leaving now, and the person best placed to know the difference is the executive.

The people who came along

The hardest conversation midway is with those who took the road alongside the executive: a team that followed them in, a partner who signed because of them, a family that moved city for this road. These people carry part of the cost of a change of course, and a decision made without naming that cost tends to be taken back at the first difficulty. The conversation is held not to justify the decision but to acknowledge who carries its cost.

Its timing matters as well. Held before the decision is settled, it turns into a consultation, and the other side hears a negotiation. Held after the announcement, it turns into a notice. It belongs after the decision is made and before it takes effect. We wrote about saying a decision aloud in the piece on settling the test before the options. Midway, that sentence gains an addition: what I take from this road, and what I owe to whom.

From the field

Most executives who come to us midway spend the first conversation on the story of their first decision rather than on reasons to stay or go: why they chose that road, who said what, what they did not know at the time. The story drifts on its own toward a verdict, and that is where we stop it.

What happens in the room

Our first task is to separate the two sentences. The one about the past is written down and set aside, and it is not argued again. Then the criteria of the person today are found, and the question of direction often turns out calmer than expected. For an executive who stops putting the past on trial, changing course midway is not a confession but an ordinary decision.

Whether the decision is to stay or to go, what follows is separate work. If it is to go, the departure has to be set up as a handover. How we work begins with that question, and our other pieces sit on the Perspective page.