Your Change Effort Is a Mess. I’m Not Surprised, and You Shouldn’t Be Either.
Early in my career as a project manager, I made a catastrophic mistake: I didn't anticipate a volcanic eruption.
Okay, not my mistake exactly. But when Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010 and shut down European airspace for weeks, my international project timeline and budget went with it. And I was furious—at myself. I felt incompetent. I'd failed to see it coming, failed to plan for it, failed to protect my team and stakeholders from the disruption. By all the standards I'd internalized about what good project management looked like, I'd done my job badly.
It wasn't until years later, as I moved into organizational change work and learned agile methods, that I recognized how absurd this was. Not the volcano part. The guilt.
What Leadership in Change Actually Is (and Isn't)
For years, I operated under a belief about what my job was:
Make a plan
Execute the plan
Prevent surprises
This framework works fine when you're delivering something that's been done many times before. If you're building the same bridge using the same methods with the same team structure, surprises are genuinely a sign that something went wrong in your planning or execution.
But here's the thing: change is not that kind of work.
When you're leading people through something you've never done before—a process redesign, a cultural shift, a new operating model—you're in fundamentally unpredictable territory. You don't know how people will respond. You don't know which assumptions will hold and which will crumble. You don't know what you don't know.
So what happens when leaders apply the "no surprises" standard to change work? I see the same patterns over and over:
We get angry. Someone must be doing something wrong—maybe even on purpose. We blame others for not following the plan, or we blame ourselves for not anticipating this outcome. The anger feels justified because, by our internal standards, we've failed.
We freeze. Doubt creeps in. If we didn't see this coming, what else have we missed? Can we trust our judgment? We get stuck in analysis paralysis, second-guessing decisions and hesitating to move forward.
We put on a mask. We project confidence to our team and stakeholders while getting eaten alive by stress and self-doubt internally. The gap between the face we show and what we actually feel becomes exhausting.
None of these reactions help us lead through uncertainty. In fact, they do the opposite. They pull our focus away from the actual work: dealing with the surprise.
So What Is the Job, Actually?
Here's what I learned: The job of leading change is not to prevent surprises. The job is to expect them and be ready to adapt when they arrive.
More specifically, your job has three parts:
1. Expect Surprises (And Plan Accordingly)
This isn't about being pessimistic. It's about being realistic.
When you're leading change, surprises are guaranteed. Not maybe. Not probably. Guaranteed. Someone will resist in a way you didn't anticipate. A process redesign will have an unforeseen ripple effect. A key stakeholder will disengage. Technology will behave unexpectedly. Human behavior will be more complex than your change model assumed.
The first part of your job is to accept this as a given and stop treating surprises as evidence of failure.
The second part is to plan with this reality in mind. That doesn't mean creating a massive risk register and trying to anticipate every possible disaster (that's the old, broken approach). It means building slack into your plans so you have room to maneuver when something unexpected happens.
2. Build in the Capacity to Adapt
This is where your planning actually gets practical.
If you're expecting surprises, you need structures that let you respond to them without everything falling apart. For me, that usually means three things:
Schedule buffer. Don't plan your change initiative so tightly that one delay or detour throws everything off. Build in time to learn, adjust, and course-correct. Yes, this feels inefficient if you're thinking in traditional project management terms. But you're not in traditional project management anymore.
Robust communication. Create channels where surprises can surface quickly and be addressed openly. The worst-case scenario isn't that something unexpected happens—it's that something unexpected happens and nobody talks about it until it's a crisis. Regular check-ins, feedback loops, and psychological safety matter more in change work than in traditional delivery because you're counting on people to flag the things you didn't anticipate.
Solid relationships. When surprises hit, you need people who trust you and who you trust. Relationships are how you weather the unexpected without everything becoming adversarial. They're how you can have a hard conversation about something going sideways without it feeling like blame. Build them before you need them.
3. Manage Your Own Reaction
Here's the part that doesn't get nearly enough attention: managing your emotions and mindset isn’t a nice-to-have on your leadership to-do list. It's central to the job.
When something unexpected happens, you have maybe a few seconds before your nervous system kicks into fight, flight, or freeze. In that moment, the quality of your leadership hinges on what you do with that reaction.
If you let anger drive your response, you'll blame people (which erodes trust and psychological safety). If you let fear drive your response, you'll freeze or over-control (which stifles the adaptation you actually need). If you pretend you're fine when you're not, you'll burn out and your team will lose confidence in you anyway (because people can sense incongruence).
So the work is to catch your reaction before it goes sideways. Notice the anger, the fear, the self-doubt. Get grounded. Take a breath. Then decide how you want to show up—not from your nervous system's emergency response, but from what the situation actually needs.
This is what I mean by managing yourself. It's not about being calm or confident all the time. It's about being aware of your internal state and choosing your response rather than being hijacked by it.
And here's the truth that took me years to learn: you can't change other people through the force of your leadership. You can only change yourself. When you get your own reactions and mindset handled, responding to others becomes so much easier. Your team can feel that you're grounded. They can trust that you're not spiraling. And that gives them permission to do the same.
What This Means in Practice
So what does this actually look like when you're in the middle of a change initiative and something goes wrong?
You notice the surprise. You feel the reaction—maybe anger, maybe fear, maybe both. You pause. You name what you're feeling (internally or out loud, depending on context). You take a breath.
Then you ask: What does this actually require of me right now?
Not "How did this happen?" Not "Who messed up?" Not "What does this mean about my competence?"
Just: What does this moment require?
Maybe it requires you to gather more information. Maybe it requires you to communicate quickly to stakeholders. Maybe it requires you to adjust the timeline or the approach. Maybe it requires you to have a hard conversation with someone. Maybe it requires you to admit you don't have an answer yet.
None of those things are failures. They're just the work of leading change.
The Real Surprise
Here's the real surprise I didn't see coming back when I was distraught about a volcano: the mess of change isn't something to overcome or eliminate. It's the terrain. And the job of a leader in that terrain isn't to make it disappear. It's to navigate it skillfully.
That means expecting the mess, preparing to adapt, and managing yourself so you can respond rather than react.
It also means giving yourself some grace. You're going to surprise yourself. You're going to make decisions that don't land the way you hoped. You're going to miss things. That's not a bug in your leadership—it's a feature of the work.
The volcanic eruption taught me that my job wasn't to prevent the impossible. My job was to deal with what actually happened. That shift—from trying to eliminate uncertainty to learning how to navigate it—changed everything about how I show up as a leader.
Your change effort is a mess. So what? That's not a reflection on you. That's the nature of the work. And it's your job to lead through it anyway.
