Leadership Like Water: What The Art of War Taught Me About Navigating Change
You do not always get to choose the terrain. You do get to choose how intelligently you move through it.
By Eric J. Dalton · · 9 min read
Every leader has written a plan that reality declined to honor.
You build it carefully. You pressure-test the assumptions. You socialize it with your team, align the budget, set the milestones, and start moving. And then something outside your control shifts (a regulation, a market, a technology, a virus) and the plan you spent months building becomes a document describing a world that no longer exists.
What separates leaders in that moment is not the quality of the original plan. It is how quickly they are willing to admit that the ground has moved.
Sun Tzu was not writing a business book
The Art of War has been quoted, mined, and occasionally abused by the business world for decades. I want to be careful here, because the version of Sun Tzu that shows up in leadership seminars is usually the shallow one, the one that treats competitors as enemies and employees as troops and turns strategy into a series of aggressive metaphors.
That is not what I take from it.
What makes Sun Tzu useful is that he was obsessed with conditions. Terrain. Weather. Distance. Supply. The psychological state of the people involved. He wrote at length about the intelligence work that has to happen before anyone commits to a course of action, and about the discipline of refusing to fight on ground that does not favor you.
One of his most enduring images is water. Sun Tzu used flowing water as an analogy for strategy: water has no fixed shape of its own. It takes the shape of the ground it moves across, avoiding what is solid and finding what gives way. His point was that a strategy should be formed by the conditions it encounters, not imposed on them.
I want to flag something, because the distinction matters. The modern phrase "be like water" is popularly associated with Bruce Lee, not Sun Tzu. The underlying principle (adapt your approach to the terrain in front of you) is authentically Sun Tzu's. The catchphrase is not. Leaders should be as careful with attribution as they are with data.
But the principle itself has been one of the most useful things I have carried into executive work.
The terrain does not care about your business plan.
March 2020 changed the ground under all of us
I have spent my career in homecare, an industry where the work happens in people's houses, delivered by a distributed workforce, under significant regulatory oversight, for a population that is by definition medically vulnerable.
When COVID-19 arrived, essentially every variable in that sentence became unstable at once.
State requirements were evolving faster than any of us could operationalize them. Testing obligations appeared and then changed. Compliance expectations shifted. Our caregivers were spread across roughly eight counties in New York, which meant that a seemingly simple instruction (get tested regularly) was not simple at all. Where, exactly? How often? How do we verify it? How do we track it across a workforce that does not report to a central building?
At the same time, families were frightened. Some paused or stopped services entirely because the idea of anyone entering the home felt dangerous. That is not an unreasonable response, and I did not treat it as one. But it meant that demand became unpredictable in ways our staffing models had never contemplated. We had caregivers we wanted to retain and cases that had gone quiet, and we had to figure out how to hold the organization together while the ground kept moving.
And then the workforce shortage, already a chronic issue in our field, intensified.
I want to describe that period honestly without turning this into a pandemic chronology. The specifics of 2020 matter less than the structural situation, which is one every leader will face eventually in some form: the environment changed faster than our operating model was designed to change.
The choice every leader faces on unfamiliar ground
When the terrain shifts, there are really only two responses available.
The first is to wait. To treat the disruption as a temporary deviation from normal, hold the existing model in place, absorb the losses, and plan for the return of the conditions you built for.
The second is to accept that the conditions have changed and redesign around what is actually in front of you.
The first response is more common than most leaders would like to admit, because it feels responsible. It sounds like discipline. It sounds like not overreacting. But often it is just a refusal to update, dressed in the language of steadiness.
We chose to redesign. Not perfectly, and not without argument, but we chose it.
That meant building compliance and tracking systems for requirements that had not existed weeks earlier. It meant communicating more frequently and more plainly than we ever had, because uncertainty expands to fill any silence leadership leaves behind. It meant making real decisions about how to retain and redeploy people while still meeting the needs of the patients who did want care.
Build around the obstacle
The clearest example of adaptation in that period had nothing to do with the virus directly.
As the workforce shortage deepened, we kept encountering the same problem: many of the newly trained caregivers entering the field did not arrive with the level of practical preparation we wanted for the kind of care we were trying to deliver. This was not a complaint about individuals. It was an observation about a pipeline.
We had two options. We could keep competing for a limited supply of talent produced by a system we did not control, and keep being frustrated by the results. Or we could build our own pipeline.
We built our own. The organization created its own PCA training school so that we could develop caregivers to our own standard rather than waiting for the external market to produce them.
That decision was not a pandemic decision. It was a terrain decision. The environment had made something clear that had been true for a long time, and we finally stopped arguing with it.
Adaptability is not abandoning the mission. It is refusing to stay loyal to a route that no longer works.
What adaptation costs
I want to be careful not to make this sound clean, because it was not.
Adapting quickly has a price, and leaders who talk about agility without naming that price are describing something they have not actually done. Every change we made landed on people who were already carrying more than they had signed up for. New tracking requirements meant new work for administrators. Redeployment meant caregivers driving further and working with clients they did not know. Frequent communication meant that our staff heard from leadership constantly during a period when every message carried the possibility of more bad news.
There is also a version of adaptability that is genuinely destructive: change for its own sake, pivot after pivot, an organization that never lets anything stabilize long enough to work. From the inside, that looks identical to responsiveness. It is not. The difference is whether the change is driven by an actual shift in conditions or by leadership anxiety looking for an outlet.
The discipline is knowing which one you are doing. I asked myself a version of the same question repeatedly during that period: Has the ground actually moved, or am I just uncomfortable? Those require completely different responses, and confusing them is how leaders exhaust their teams while accomplishing nothing.
What I actually learned
Looking back, the lessons are less dramatic than the period that produced them. They are also more transferable.
Study the terrain as it is. A significant amount of executive energy gets spent describing the environment as leaders wish it were. The market should reward this. Regulators should understand that. Workers should want this job. None of those sentences change anything. Assessment has to come before strategy, and honest assessment is harder than it sounds, because it usually costs you a plan you were emotionally invested in.
Direction is fixed; the route is not. Flexibility is dangerous when it has no anchor. Adapting is not the same as drifting. Throughout that period, what we were trying to accomplish never changed: keep people safe at home, support our caregivers, keep the organization intact. How we did it changed constantly. Leaders who cannot tell the difference between their mission and their method will either become rigid or become directionless, and both are fatal.
Preparation creates speed. This is the point most people miss about adaptability. The organizations that pivoted quickly in 2020 were not the loosest ones. They were the ones with functioning communication channels, real compliance infrastructure, defined roles, and leadership discipline already in place. You cannot improvise your way through a crisis if you have nothing to improvise from. Agility is downstream of structure.
Calm is a strategic asset. Teams take their emotional temperature from leadership, especially when the facts are frightening and incomplete. I could not eliminate uncertainty for our staff. What I could do was refuse to add to it. Clarity is not the same as certainty. You can say honestly that you do not know how long something will last while being completely clear about what the organization is doing this week and why.
Force is not the same as strength. Sun Tzu wrote as much about restraint and positioning as about engagement, about not fighting battles that do not need to be fought. Some problems in a crisis genuinely require confrontation. Many do not. Part of leadership is deciding which is which, and that decision is made more often through observation and patience than through volume.
The discipline underneath it
Most organizations do not fail because they lacked a strategy. They fail because they kept executing one after the conditions that justified it disappeared.
I think adaptability gets misunderstood as a personality trait, something flexible people have and rigid people do not. In practice it is a discipline, and a difficult one, because it requires a leader to keep separating two things that feel identical from the inside: commitment to a goal and attachment to a plan.
Commitment is a virtue. Attachment is a risk.
The organizations I admire most are the ones that built themselves to survive changing conditions rather than optimal ones, that designed their systems, their culture, and their leadership expectations around the assumption that the terrain would eventually move. Because it will. It always does.
You do not get to choose the ground. You only get to choose how intelligently you move across it.
