Setting the Azimuth takes a fair degree of hard work, and keeping it alive is a discipline that goes on every quarter after. Speaking of hard work, here’s an example of true dedication in leadership:
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition ship Endurance became trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea in January 1915, and despite everyone’s best efforts, it never broke free. For nearly ten months, the crew lived aboard the drifting ship slowly being crushed, hoping the ice would eventually release her. It didn’t. In October 1915, the pressure finally compromised the hull, and by November the Endurance sank. Shackleton’s 28 men were now stranded on the ice itself, with no ship, no radio, and no hope of rescue coming to them.
What followed was basically a masterclass in adaptive leadership under pressure. Shackleton reset the entire mission’s Azimuth on the spot, survival became the objective rather than exploration, and he held the group together through months of camping on drifting ice floes, dragging lifeboats behind them when the ice became unlivable. Eventually the floe they were on broke apart, forcing them into the three small lifeboats they’d salvaged from the ship. They sailed and rowed through brutal seas to reach Elephant Island, a barren speck of rock with little chance of anyone finding them.
From there, Shackleton made the call that defines the whole story: he took five men and the sturdiest lifeboat and sailed 720 nautical miles of open Southern Ocean to South Georgia Island to find help, a remarkable voyage for its navigation alone. They landed on the wrong side of the island, so Shackleton and two others then crossed uncharted, glaciated mountains on foot, with no real climbing gear, to reach the whaling station on the other side. Finding help there, they returned to rescue the rest of the crew.
I tell Shackleton’s story in We’re All In as a study in leadership through uncertainty. But there is a detail in it that I keep returning to: the drift itself. Through all those months on the floe, no one felt the movement on any given day. The ice moved a little at a time while every man’s attention was on the work in front of him. Drift never announces itself. It accumulates quietly, a little at a time, until someone finally notices.
Organizations drift exactly the same way. Over the last four articles, I have walked through the four components of Set the Azimuth, the first of the Big 6 Leadership Principles®: Mission, Intent, Values, and Cultural Behaviors. Collectively, they form your Azimuth.
But the Azimuth you set in January is not automatically the Azimuth you are living in by October. The daily pressure of expedience moves an organization a few feet at a time, and no one in the building feels it move. The best defense I know against this drift is a structured process. I call it the Quarterly Azimuth Review.
What Drifts When No One Is Checking
Each component drifts in its own way. The Mission drifts as people join and leave, and the answers to who we are, what we do, and why we do it stop aligning, not because anyone rejected the Mission but because no one has said it out loud in months.
Intent goes next, as the urgent quietly replaces the important and the Key Tasks you named as load-bearing walls give way to whatever caught fire this week. The End State becomes less likely as the Key Tasks aren’t measured.
Values drift differently, becoming decoration. A Value that ruled out a tempting choice in the Spring gets quietly waived under pressure in the Fall, and everyone watching learns the real rule. Cultural Behaviors erode fastest of all, because behavior responds to what leaders tolerate this week rather than to what they published last year.
None of this happens because people are careless. It happens because drift is the default condition. Shackleton’s crew was disciplined, busy, and brave, but the pack ice moved them anyway.
No one feels drift in time to correct it by instinct. It has to be measured.
A Standing Event, Not a Good Intention
In We’re All In, I describe how All-In Adaptive Leaders conduct quarterly reviews of their strategic plan.
First, identify where we are now. Review the milestones, outcomes, and metrics against what they set out to accomplish. Recognize shortcomings and fixes, because in the Culture of Commitment, change is OK.
This review lives on the calendar as a fixed event, every quarter, protected like a commitment to your most important customer. A review that gets scheduled only when things calm down will not happen, because things don’t calm down. Culture responds to rhythm far more than it responds to good intentions, and a quarterly rhythm is frequent enough to catch drift while it is still small enough to adjust within the existing Azimuth. This is detailed work and often unglamorous. But that is precisely why it works.
In my experience, the teams that keep their “True North” intact are the ones that back sincerity with structure.
Below, I walk through how to conduct the quarterly Azimuth Review meeting itself, the scorecard I use to measure progress on the Key Tasks, and the cadence discipline that keeps the review honest quarter after quarter. To read the rest of this article, visit this link.
Enjoy the journey!
