Roadmaps Are for Machines but a Sense of Direction is for Living Systems
I've been noticing something at the sustainability conferences and gatherings I've attended over the last eighteen months. When participants are asked how they're feeling about their work, the same words keep showing up in the word cloud. Exhausted. Tired. Frustrated. Burnt out.
A friend recently asked me whether exhaustion should be considered part of climate change itself. It's a provocative question, and one worth sitting with. Anecdotally, I'm seeing more people around me — colleagues, clients, friends doing some of the most important work of our time — take multi-month breaks, sometimes six to nine months, just to recover their energy.
I don't think this tiredness is a personal failing. I think it's a signal. Something needs to change. And what needs to change isn't what we're doing, but the way we're trying to do it.
When the Map Stops Matching the Territory
For most of us, the way we plan and coordinate change still looks like a roadmap. A linear sequence. Fixed milestones. Predetermined outcomes. A strategic plan that tells us where we'll be in three years and how we'll get there.
This way of working has deep roots. It's heavily influenced by mechanistic, industrial-era thinking — the worldview that the universe operates like a clock, predictable, knowable, fixable. If something breaks, you find the broken part, replace it, and the clock works again. Change is done to the system.
I love this approach when someone is building a bridge or a dam. I want certainty there. But the work most of us are doing — shifting cultures, regenerating landscapes, building community resilience, transforming organisations — isn't happening in a clockwork system. It's happening in a living system.
And living systems don't follow roadmaps.
How Children Actually Play
Picture a small group of children in a playground. There's no blueprint telling them how to play. They respond to each other, to the equipment, to the weather, to what just happened a moment ago. They make stuff up as they go. They experiment. They learn. They change.
That's how change happens in living systems. It emerges from within. It can't be imposed from outside without the system resisting, distorting, or quietly collapsing the effort.
The research has been telling us this for decades. Estimates in organisational change research often put failure or underperformance rates in the 60–70% range (see, for example, the early work of Beer and Nohria, and later reviews that have rightly challenged the simplistic "70% of change fails" claim while still finding most efforts under-deliver). Notice that phrase — intended results. That itself is a clue. It assumes we can specify end-states in advance, when in complex systems the most important outcomes are frequently second-order and only visible in hindsight.
Direction is Different From Destination
Here's the distinction I want to offer. A roadmap assumes you know where you're going and how to get there. A sense of direction is something quite different. It's a clear orientation — a Southern Cross — combined with the willingness to make iterative experiments, learn from what happens, and adjust.
Direction holds the why. It holds the values. It holds the larger purpose we're moving toward. But it stays open about the how, because the how can only be discovered by engaging with the actual system — its feedback, its surprises, its resistance, its gifts.
This isn't woolly thinking. It's actually more rigorous than a roadmap, because it demands short feedback cycles, explicit hypotheses, clear signals of progress, and decision rules for when to pivot. In practice, it might look like this on a Monday morning: write a one-sentence direction, define two or three leading indicators, run a two-week experiment, and review it against pre-set pivot or stop criteria. It asks us to stay present to what's really happening rather than defending a plan we made before we knew what we now know.
Why This Matters for Our Energy
I think this is where the exhaustion comes from. When we treat a roadmap as the truth — rather than a provisional guess — we end up pushing the system to comply with it. We use willpower to keep things on track. We try to convince, persuade, manage resistance. That's depleting work.
When we hold a direction of travel instead, something shifts. We stop trying to drag the system somewhere it doesn't want to go. We start working with the values, the strengths, the energy already present in the system. The camaraderie that emerges around a shared direction becomes a kind of renewable energy source — for us, and for everyone we're working with.
A Reflection to Take With You
If you're holding a current initiative in mind, I'd invite you to ask yourself a few questions:
Where am I holding a roadmap when I could be holding a direction?
What's my actual direction of travel here — the deeper purpose that doesn't depend on a specific outcome being achieved by a specific date?
What small, safe-to-fail experiments could I run to learn what the system is ready for, rather than imposing what I think should happen?
Where is my energy being depleted by defending a plan, and where might it be regenerated by engaging more honestly with what's actually emerging?
Roadmaps make sense when you're navigating a known landscape with stable conditions. But the landscapes most of us are working in now are anything but stable. In volatility, replace plan and execute with orient and learn. In a living system, the goal isn't to stay on track — it's to stay in relationship with reality.
And that's what we need, too.
If this article rings true for you, you might be interested in joining my Systemic Change program.