The Visible Anchor

What a 16-story cruise ship taught me about wayfinding during change

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

We were lost in Cádiz. Or we thought we were.

The streets in the old town don’t run in lines — they curl, narrow, double back on themselves, open suddenly onto a plaza and close just as fast into an alley barely wide enough for two people. Ten minutes in, my wife and I had no idea which direction we’d come from. No landmarks. No straight lines to follow back. Just the particular, low-grade panic of a city center that refuses to be read like a map.

And then we turned a corner, and there it was: our ship. Sixteen stories of white hull, towering over every rooftop in town, visible from almost any street we happened to be standing on. It was, without question, the biggest building in Cádiz. You couldn’t lose it if you tried.
We hadn’t been lost at all. We’d just forgotten to look up.

The concept: the visible anchor

That’s the moment I want to name, because I see its exact shape in almost every change program I’ve run: the visible anchor — a fixed, unmoving reference point that stays in view the entire time, even while everyone around it insists they’re lost.

Teams rarely lose their bearings because the anchor moved. They lose their bearings because they stopped looking up.

Michel Paquin

In a reorganization, the anchor might be the customer promise that hasn’t changed.

In a merger, it might be the handful of leaders who show up in every town hall saying the same thing they said six months ago.

In a system migration, it might be the one KPI that still means exactly what it always meant, no matter how many dashboards changed underneath it.

The anchor is almost always still there. What’s gone missing is the habit of checking.

1. Why “lost” and “off-course” aren’t the same thing

Being lost means you no longer know where anything is relative to you. Being off-course means the path changed, but the destination didn’t. Most organizations going through change are the second thing, and they describe it, exhaustively, as the first.

Disorientation and misdirection feel identical from the inside. They are not the same problem, and they don’t take the same medicine.

Michel Paquin

The distinction matters because the interventions are opposite. A team that’s genuinely lost needs new information — new landmarks, new maps, a guide. A team that’s merely disoriented needs someone to point at what hasn’t moved and say: there. Look. That’s still exactly where it was.

Executives tend to reach for the first cure — more comms, more town halls, more decks explaining the new direction — when what’s actually needed is the second: a reminder, not a revelation.

2. The cost of an anchor nobody points to

Here’s the uncomfortable part. In Cádiz, the ship was visible. Nobody had to tell us where it was. We just had to remember to look up.

Inside an organization, the anchor is rarely that generous. It doesn’t announce itself over the rooftops. Someone has to point to it, repeatedly, in the exact moments people feel most turned around — which are usually the moments leaders are busiest managing the change itself and least inclined to circle back to the obvious.

An anchor nobody names might as well not exist.

Michel Paquin

I’ve watched entire transformation budgets go toward correcting a direction that was never actually wrong, because nobody stopped to confirm the team could still see the one thing that hadn’t changed. The fix, when it finally lands, is almost anticlimactic: someone says the equivalent of “look up,” and the room visibly exhales.

When this doesn’t apply

Not every disorientation is a visible-anchor problem, and it’s worth being honest about where the metaphor runs out.

If the destination has genuinely changed — the strategy shifted, the market moved, the merger changed the org’s actual purpose — then pointing at an old anchor isn’t reassurance, it’s a lie dressed as comfort. In that case, the team isn’t wrong to feel lost. They’re right, and what they need is a new landmark, honestly named as new, not a stale one relabeled as constant.

Similarly, if the “anchor” you’re pointing to is really just a slogan — words on a wall nobody has tested against a real decision — it won’t hold anyone’s trust for long. A visible anchor has to be something people can actually verify is still there, not something they’re asked to take on faith.

What to do this week

Pick one change effort currently underway on your team, and ask one question out loud, in a meeting, this week: “What is the one thing about this that hasn’t changed — and does everyone still know it hasn’t?”

Don’t answer it yourself first. Let the room answer. If people converge quickly on the same answer, you likely have a visible-anchor problem worth naming explicitly — and naming it may do more for morale than any new communication plan. If the room gives you five different answers, or a long silence, you may have a genuine change of direction on your hands, and the honest move is to say so.

Either way, you’ll know a lot more about whether your team is lost, or just forgot to look up.