Many of the leaders I’ve worked with who have navigated significant transformations successfully have told me some version of the same thing: the moment they almost gave up was the moment just before the whole thing turned.
Not metaphorically. Operationally. The team was fracturing. Momentum was gone. The pressure bearing down on the initiative had become almost impossible to hold. And the instinct was to scrap everything and start again.
This is the moment leaders typically direct their focus to the constraints. The budget is insufficient. The timeline is unrealistic. The political environment is hostile. These are real. But the pressure is doing something worth looking at.
There is a physics demonstration that captures this precisely.
Set a tippy top spinning. From the moment it leaves your hand, three forces are working on it. Angular momentum holds it upright. Gravity pulls its center of mass toward the ground. And at the point where the top meets the surface, friction is doing something the other two aren’t.
It’s acting off-center, creating a twisting force — a torque — that works against the top’s current orientation. For a while the top wobbles hard, resisting the torque, spinning fast and unable to stabilize. And then something unexpected happens. Instead of falling, it starts to flip. Its center of mass climbs upward. It settles onto its stem, spinning more smoothly than it did before, with its balance reorganized around a new configuration.
What makes it worth paying attention to is not the flip itself. It’s what the flip reveals about what is acting upon it.
The forces acting on the top weren’t problems to survive. They were the reason it could move at all. A top spinning in a frictionless environment never reorganizes. It just spins in place until it runs out of energy. The forces aren’t what’s working against the top. They are what’s keeping it alive.
When the Team Stops Moving
I was recently working with a senior leader overseeing a complex, multi-sector initiative — government ministries, major organizations, international partners, all aligned around a national development vision. A major summit was on the horizon, designed to showcase the initiative’s findings to the country’s most influential leaders and demonstrate alignment with the national plan.
The pressure was significant and real. The timeline was fixed. The stakes were high. And the team was fracturing.
As the complexity mounted, the project’s core leaders began to disengage. Progress stalled. The senior leader, someone with a strong propensity for action, was focused on the constraints. And reached the conclusion that the pressure was too great, the team wasn’t holding, and the solution was to disband them and start fresh with people who could handle it.
She called me ready to reboot. I’ve heard that call before — the particular flatness in the voice of a leader who has concluded the people are the problem, who has moved past frustration into the calm, managerial certainty that comes just before a decision that can’t be undone.
What surfaced in the conversation was that the assumptions she had been making about her team had not been verified directly with them. She had been reading the fracture as a capacity problem. A constraints problem. A personnel problem. She hadn’t yet considered what was actually going on.
When she met with the team directly, what they shared was different from what had been assumed. They weren’t disengaged because they couldn’t handle the pressure. They were stalling because they hadn’t yet been given the chance to genuinely own the work rather than simply execute it. The trust between them and the senior leader hadn’t been built to the depth the pressure required. The voices that needed to be heard hadn’t been heard.
The fracture wasn’t a constraints problem. It was about what had never been built between the leader and her team — and it was solvable.
Once the team could voice where they actually were, the trust began to rebuild. Ownership started to distribute. The same pressure that had been causing fragmentation became the force that unified the team around something worth holding together for.
The constraints didn’t change.
The summit didn’t move. The national vision didn’t adjust. The complexity bearing down on the initiative remained exactly what it was.
The team’s relationship to them did.
What the Leaders Who Last Understand
The leaders who build transformations that last are not the ones who find ways to reduce the forces bearing down on their initiatives. They are the ones who learn to keep re-solving under those forces — who understand that the friction is not the enemy of the work.
It is the work.