The Bow Wave

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

The story

I was standing on the upper deck of the ship, coffee in hand, watching nothing in particular, when I noticed them. Four birds, hanging just off the bow, riding the air pushed up by the boat’s own hull. Their wings weren’t moving. Not a flap, not a flutter. Just the occasional tilt of a wingtip, a degree or two, enough to drift a foot left or right and settle back into place.

They weren’t fighting anything. They’d found the lift the boat was already generating, and they were simply staying inside it.

I watched them for a long time. Long enough to realize I was looking at a picture of something I try to explain to executives all the time, and usually fail to explain well.

The exhausting version of change

Most change efforts I walk into look like birds flapping hard against open air. Leaders pushing initiatives with visible, constant effort — town halls, memos, one-on-ones, dashboards, more meetings to explain the meetings. It’s not that the effort is wrong. It’s that it’s all thrust and no lift. Every foot of altitude is paid for, in full, every single time.

Finding the wave that’s already there

Organizations generate their own bow waves constantly, whether anyone’s steering into them or not. A leadership change creates one. A near-miss with a competitor creates one. A hard quarter, a merger rumor, a departing star employee — these all push air. Somewhere in the organization, there is already lift being generated by events, by anxiety, by ambition, by relief.

The skilled change leader doesn’t ignore this and build their own current from scratch. They go find the wave and position themselves inside it.

I’ve seen this work spectacularly. A CFO I worked with wanted to overhaul the budgeting process — a notoriously bloody fight in most companies. Instead of announcing a new process and defending it for six months, she waited. A brutal quarter had just left every VP privately furious at how blind the old forecasting had left them. She didn’t create urgency. She found it, already circling the ship, and stepped into it with one well-timed proposal.

“The best-timed interventions,” I often say, “look like luck to everyone except the person who was patient enough to wait for the wave.”

Tiny corrections, not constant motion

What struck me most about the birds wasn’t the stillness. It was how small the corrections were. A wingtip tilt. Not a maneuver. Not a decision announced in advance. Just a tiny, continuous read of the air, adjusted in real time.

This is the part leaders get wrong most often. They think steady course means no correction at all — set the strategy, defend it, don’t waver. But the birds weren’t rigid. They were making adjustments constantly. They were just so small, and so well-timed, that from the deck it looked like nothing was happening.

Good change leadership often looks the same way from a distance: calm, almost inactive. Up close, it’s a stream of small, precise course corrections, made early enough that none of them ever needed to be dramatic.

When this doesn’t apply

Not every situation has a bow wave to ride. Sometimes there genuinely is no existing momentum — no anxious quarter, no leadership shift, no external pressure — and someone has to generate the first current from a standing start. In that case, the bird metaphor breaks down: you need thrust, not patience, and pretending otherwise just delays the inevitable flapping. This approach also isn’t an excuse for passivity dressed up as wisdom — “waiting for the wave” can become a permanent excuse for never acting at all. If you’ve been waiting for the perfect current for eighteen months, you’re not a bird riding a bow wave. You’re just standing still.

What to do this week

Before your next change initiative, spend thirty minutes doing nothing but listening for the wave that already exists. Ask three people, informally, what’s already got the organization’s attention — not what you want them to care about, but what they’re already quietly anxious, excited, or frustrated about. Then ask yourself: does my initiative ride that current, or am I asking people to generate lift from nothing, on my timeline, for my reasons? If it’s the latter, it’s not wrong — but budget for the flapping.

Michel Paquin

Michel Paquin is a Senior Commerce Transformation Leader and Senior Lead Consultant in Commerce Strategy at Valtech, based in Montreal. He helps organizations improve transformation execution through clearer governance, operating models, decision frameworks, and measurable outcomes. He writes about decision velocity, commerce transformation, AI adoption, and the systems that make change stick.

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* Please note that I am unable to accept mandates outside of my engagement with Valtech.