Part 1 of Navigation & Drift
Course Drift
How organizations slowly lose alignment over time.
Video source: Pixabay“It’s easier to set a course than to correct one.”
It’s a cliché. But it’s also an aphorism – the kind of phrase that survives because it expresses something true.
In Project Management, we learn that “the cost of change increases with time.”
There are two reasons why:
First, the longer you stay off course, the further you drift from your goal. The path back gets longer, slower, and more expensive.
Second, every month spent on the wrong priorities burns resources: time, capital, attention.
R&D teams drift for all kinds of reasons:
Markets shift. Requirements change. Early assumptions prove false.
Some shiny new discovery opens a door, but no one stops to ask “should we walk through it?”
One of the biggest traps is programs that keep going because of “sunk cost”.
Over time, the system gets harder to steer.
That’s why I recommend quarterly alignment checks across teams – R&D, operations, commercial, finance, and leadership.
The first one is usually the hardest. It takes time, tradeoffs, and difficult conversations. But once you establish a baseline, maintaining alignment becomes easier.
Drift tends to show up in one of three ways:
1. Teams struggling to prioritize across competing R&D efforts
2. Teams executing but not hitting commercial milestones
3. Teams navigating complex systems under external constraints
From the outside, these can look like technical problems.
Often, they’re alignment problems.
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