Some concepts stay with you because they keep proving themselves to be true.
For me, that applies to Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s observation that everything can look like a failure in the middle1. I first heard her talk about this concept many years ago, and it makes perfect sense.
Beginnings carry energy. There’s excitement, momentum and possibility. With endings, when they go well, they offer the satisfaction of progress and achieving goals. Both the start and the finish feel really good. What tests you is the middle.
If you have ever led a significant change initiative, launched a new product, or tried to shift the way your team works, you’ll know this is true.
It’s when the work starts that reality sets in. The challenges pile up, and the obstacles that looked manageable at the starting line prove more stubborn than expected. Progress slows, tension builds, and doubt creeps in.
You start questioning whether you’re reading the situation correctly, whether you have the right support, whether the original plan still holds and whether you’re equipped for what the work now demands.
What you do next will shape the outcome. At this point, we often think the critical skills are toughness and determination, and while they play a part, there is one skill that’s more important. And that’s situational awareness.
Why Awareness Matters Most
Think about what happens to many of us when we face the messy middle. Pressed for results, we feel pressured to move faster. We focus on outputs, and so we don’t pause the work for long enough to determine what is really going on.
The problem with this approach is that we decide what to do next based on the plan we drew at the start, even as the terrain has shifted under our feet.
This is where the research on situational awareness is useful.
In 1995, researcher Dr Mica R. Endsley published foundational work in Human Factors that helped shape the modern understanding of situation awareness in dynamic, high-stakes environments2.
Note: this concept is now more broadly referred to as situational awareness.
Her model is built around three levels: perceiving what is happening, comprehending what it means and projecting what is likely to happen next.
For leaders, this matters because the messy middle is a sense-making problem.
The pressure you’re feeling to move faster isn’t helpful when faster action is based on an outdated reading of the current reality. Rather than the hard work leading to better outcomes, it usually means you work harder on the wrong problem.
When the Map No Longer Matches the Terrain
Early in my career, I was part of a large, multi-year transformation program. The kind of program where the business case took months to build, the executive sponsors had put their reputations behind it, and the first phase had landed well enough to generate real momentum.
Then the product timeline started to slip.
Not dramatically or in a way that triggered an immediate alarm. Just enough that the gap between what we had committed and what we could realistically deliver began to widen.
The project team knew the original commitments were no longer realistic. But we were twelve months into a program that was supposed to run for years, and the thought of walking into a room full of senior stakeholders and telling them we needed to reset expectations felt deeply uncomfortable.
So we kept pushing, telling ourselves we could close the gap. We took on more rather than less and worked harder at the original plan’s pace, even as it no longer matched reality.
What we needed to do at this point was ask the hard questions: What does it actually mean that we are in this position, and what do we need to do differently?
Author Umberto Eco captured something essential about this moment in his book The Name of the Rose. Writing about the mental models we build to navigate complexity, he observed: “The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.”3
In my situation, the ladder we had built, our original commitments, sequencing, and confidence that the plan would hold had been useful in getting us to this point. But the messy middle was telling us it was time to put that plan down and look clearly at where we actually were. Our current situation demanded an analysis of where things actually stood, not where the plan said they should be.
In situations like the one I encountered, what helps at this point is a deliberate practice I call SCAN.
The SCAN Framework
SCAN is a four-part situational awareness practice designed to help you navigate through the messy middle.
Don’t think of it as a project management tool, but as a leadership discipline that helps you stay connected to reality when the pressure to keep going is at its strongest.
S: Stop and Observe
Before you can act wisely, you need to see clearly.
That sounds simple. In practice, it is often the first thing leaders lose when pressure rises. When momentum stalls, the instinct is to move faster, fix quickly and direct more firmly. Yet action taken without an accurate read of the situation often treats symptoms rather than causes.
Stopping does not mean slowing everything down or losing urgency. It means creating deliberate moments to notice what is really happening.
That might be a ten-minute walk between meetings. A standing question at the start of the week. A conversation with someone whose perspective you have not yet heard. A short pause before committing to the next decision.
The aim is to interrupt your brain’s autopilot.
Ask yourself:
- What am I not seeing because I am moving too fast?
- What signals are emerging from the team’s behaviour, not just their words?
- Which assumptions from the start of the work may no longer hold?
- Where is friction showing up, and what might be causing it?
This is the first level of situational awareness: perception. You are gathering a more accurate picture of the terrain you are in now, not the terrain you hoped to be in.
C: Comprehend What It Means
Perception without interpretation is just information. So, the second step is to make sense of what you are observing, and without the filter of what you hoped would be true.
In the messy middle, information is rarely neat. You may have shifting data, mixed messages, changing stakeholder expectations, and team members and stakeholders who say one thing in meetings but behave differently in practice.
The leadership task is to interpret the pattern.
This is the step many leaders skip because they feel they do not have time. Yet skipping it is costly. When you misread the situation, you can find yourself solving the wrong problem with speed and growing frustration because the outcomes aren’t what you intend or need.
Ask yourself:
- What is this pattern telling us about the work?
- Is this a delivery issue, a capability issue, a decision-making issue or a trust issue?
- What does the data show that the conversations are not revealing?
- What are people avoiding saying out loud?
Comprehension also requires you to look at your own role in the system. Are you creating clarity or adding noise? Are you helping the team focus or fuelling urgency without direction? Are you protecting progress or protecting your reputation?
The leaders who navigate the messy middle well are willing to examine the system and themselves as part of it.
A: Adapt Your Approach
Once you have a clearer read of the terrain, the next move is to adapt.
This is where the work can feel uncomfortable. The plan you built at the start may have been sensible. It may have helped create momentum, secure resources, and align stakeholders. But the messy middle often reveals information that was not available at the beginning.
That does not mean the plan was wrong or that you have failed. It means you are learning and paying attention, and consequently, the wise course is adapting.
You may need to adjust timelines, reset expectations, clarify accountabilities, change the sequence of work, remove unnecessary complexity or provide more support to the team. You may need to stop doing work that once seemed important but is now consuming energy without creating value.
Ask yourself:
- What needs to change because of what we now know?
- Where will effort make the biggest difference right now?
- What can we stop, simplify or sequence differently?
- What support does the team need to make progress from here?
This is where the 80/20 principle becomes useful. In the messy middle, not all effort carries equal weight. The task is to identify the work that will create meaningful movement and stop spreading energy and resources too thinly across everything.
Remember, influential leadership in uncertain conditions does not mean having all the answers. It does, however, mean being clear and decisive about the next useful step.
N: Navigate Forward, Together
The final step is to navigate forward with your team and stakeholders. This matters because the messy middle is not only a technical challenge. It is also an emotional and relational one. People are watching for signs. They want to know whether the work still matters, whether the plan is credible, whether you (and other leaders) are being honest and whether their concerns will be heard.
This is where transparency builds trust.
You do not need to pretend everything is fine. Nor do you need to share every uncertainty in a way that creates confusion. What the people around you need is a clear, honest and steady read of where things stand and what happens next.
That might sound like:
- Here is what we know.
- Here is what has changed.
- Here is what we are still working through.
- Here is the next decision we need to make.
- Here is where I need your input.
When you involve the team and stakeholders in making sense of the situation, you shift the energy. People are less likely to blame from the sidelines and more likely to help find the way forward. They are more committed to moving forward with you.
Ask yourself:
- Who needs to be brought into the conversation now?
- What do people need to understand so they can stay engaged?
- Where do we need more honesty, not more spin?
- What progress can we acknowledge, even if the work is not yet complete?
Navigating forward together requires psychological safety. People need to feel able to raise concerns, surface risks, and suggest different options without being punished for speaking up.
In the messy middle, silence is dangerous, while honest conversations equal progress. Creating the conditions where people feel safe enough to have those conversations is a leadership practice worth building before you need it.
Your Next Messy Middle
Over the years, I have found Kanter’s Law incredibly helpful because it normalises the fact that the middle is messy.
When you know that the middle is where things will get hard, you can prepare for it. You can build the habits that keep you grounded in reality when the pressure to just keep moving is at its loudest.
So next time you find yourself in the messy middle, take the time to apply the SCAN framework: Stop and observe; comprehend what it means; adapt your approach, and lastly, navigate forward, together.
These four steps will help you stay clear, connected, and focused when leading through the complexity inherent in every meaningful change.
Getting you ready for tomorrow, today®
Award-winning author and global workplace expert, Dr Michelle Gibbings, helps leaders, teams and organisations unlock strategic influence to accelerate progress.
References
- Kanter, R. M. (2009, August 12). Change is hardest in the middle. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2009/08/change-is-hardest-in-the-middl
- Endsley, M. R. (1995). Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 32–64. https://doi.org/10.1518/001872095779049543
- Eco, U. (1983). The name of the rose (W. Weaver, Trans.). Harcourt. (Original work published 1980)