Thriving When Your Company Is in Flux

A reader reached out with a dilemma almost everyone faces at least once:

"My company is in flux. Great product. New products coming in. One colleague retiring. Trying to figure out how to thrive in this environment."

That's the messy reality of work. Priorities shift. Knowledge walks out the door. New initiatives get piled on top of the daily job.

When flux hits, most people make the same mistake: they spin in the rumor mill. They spend their mental energy on things they can't control and hope the status quo will hold.

Keeping your head down feels safe. In a shifting company, it's how you get run over.

If you can read the system, flux is one of the best chances you'll ever get to speed up your career. Normal rules loosen. New work appears with no clear owner. People who step toward the mess get seen.

This module gives you three tools I've used across industries: one for spotting opportunity, one for running your day, and one for when a key person leaves.

The short version

• Stop spinning. Start auditing. Swap rumor-trading for a list of what you can control and what's sitting unused.
• Volunteer to be the "prime." The messy new system or process nobody wants is where the career leverage is.
• Run your day from one North Star outcome. Clear what's blocking others first, then protect your deep work.
• When a veteran leaves, do the work while they watch. Capture their corrections as a failure-modes checklist, not a wiki.
• Keep the line warm. The relationship with the person who left is your long-term safety net.

Look for underused assets, not answers

When COVID hit in early 2020, travel disappeared overnight. At Outdoorsy, an RV rental marketplace, we scaled down to a skeleton crew of five people. Zero revenue. No idea when, or if, it was coming back.

I didn't spin. I didn't trade rumors in Slack about whether we'd survive. I made a bet and spent the quiet months on two things:

1. Mapping available capacity in the market. Other companies were cutting customer service. That meant contact centers had trained, idle agents. I started building relationships with those providers.
2. Pre-building the playbook. I wrote the training plans, escalation paths and quality checks before demand returned, so we could plug people in the moment things turned.

When RV travel exploded as one of the safest ways to travel, we went from 20 to more than 160 customer operations staff in an eight-week window. We didn't recruit and train 140 people from scratch. We activated assets that already existed.

You don't need to be running a department to use this. In flux, ask: what's sitting idle that I could put to work? A tool your team pays for and barely uses. A teammate with skills nobody asks for. A process doc from two years ago. A relationship with another team that's gone quiet.

Volunteer to be the prime

Early in my career I worked in sales at TELUS, a major Canadian telecom. A huge technology migration was announced for our department. Most people stayed far away. It was going to break things.

I volunteered to be the "prime," the lead point person representing our department. Suddenly I was in rooms with engineers, operators and executives, solving problems far outside my day-to-day quota.

That's the move. When a messy new tool or process launches, put your hand up. It's where you meet people you'd never otherwise meet and learn things your peers won't.

Key idea: In flux, the people who win aren't the ones with the most information. They're the ones who step toward the work nobody owns yet.

The Black Book Method: one North Star a day

At TELUS we all had black books. Every morning I wrote down my main focus. Today I'd call it the North Star.

But I made a big mistake back then. I'd tackle my own complex, multi-hour projects first. Six hours of deep focus, while people around me sat blocked waiting on a simple sign-off, decision or reply from me. I was optimizing my own work and bottlenecking everyone else's.

You don't need to be a manager for this to apply. If a teammate is waiting on your data, your review or your answer, you're their blocker.

Here's the process I'd run now:

1. Ten-minute morning triage. Before Slack, email or meetings, open a notebook and write the one outcome that means today was a success. It must be an outcome, not a task. "Migration plan signed off by engineering," not "work on migration plan."
2. Split the page. Under your North Star, two columns. Unblockers: quick decisions, replies or sign-offs holding someone else up. Deep work: multi-hour tasks that need real focus.
3. Run the unblocker sprint. Spend 30 minutes clearing that first column. Send the reply, close the tab, move on. Don't get pulled into long conversations.
4. Protect the deep work block. Close Slack, put your phone in another room, and work only on the North Star.
5. Re-triage after lunch. Take a real lunch. Then check: is the North Star done? If yes, pick the next most valuable outcome. If not, protect another block.

In flux, everyone around you is distracted. One clear outcome a day is how you keep moving while others react.

The Shadow Audit: when a veteran leaves

When I joined WestJet, it was a new industry for me, and I was replacing a brilliant leader. We had a two-week crossover. Honestly, I didn't use it well, because I didn't know what I didn't know yet.

Most companies try one of two things, and both fail. "Write some documentation before you go" leaves the veteran staring at a blank page, because they can't write down what they don't realize is in their head. "Shadow them and take notes" means you nod along without the context to know which of the 200 things they do actually matter.

Here's what I'd do now. I call it the Shadow Audit.

1. You do the work. They watch. Open the systems and do the job while the veteran watches you fumble. Their job is to stop you every time you're about to make a mistake, miss a relationship, or take the slow path.
2. Capture every correction in one format. "When [situation], always [action] because [reason]."
3. Build a failure-modes checklist together. At the end of each session, boil it down to the top 10 things that will blow up if you don't know them. That one page is the artifact.
4. Keep the line warm. When they say "reach out if you need anything," actually do it. Buy them lunch. Stay in touch. If you have the influence, suggest the company pay them for a few hours a month during the first 90 days. It's cheap insurance.

What it looks like in practice

A composite example. Aisha is an accounts receivable clerk at a construction supply company. In one quarter, the company switches billing software and Ray, the 30-year veteran who knows every major customer, announces he's retiring.

Most of her team grumbles about the new software and speculates about layoffs. Aisha volunteers to be her team's prime for the software switch. She starts meeting people in IT and finance she'd never talked to.

She asks her manager if she can run a Shadow Audit with Ray. For three afternoons she handles collections calls and invoices while Ray watches. He keeps stopping her. "When the Henderson account is past 45 days, always call their site manager, not accounts payable, because AP just sits on it." By the end she has a one-page list of ten things that would have blown up.

Every morning she writes one North Star in a notebook and clears her teammates' questions about the new system before starting her own work.

Six months later Ray is retired, the software is live, and Aisha is the person everyone asks about both. That didn't happen by keeping her head down.

Common traps

• Trading rumors. It feels like staying informed. It's mostly lost hours. Fix: write down what you can control this week and work that list.
• Waiting for things to settle. They may not settle for a year. Fix: act on the current picture and adjust as it changes.
• Doing your deep work first while others wait on you. Fix: run the 30-minute unblocker sprint before anything else.
• Asking the departing veteran to "write it all down." Fix: run a Shadow Audit and build the failure-modes checklist with them.
• Avoiding the messy new project. Fix: volunteer to be the prime. That's where the visibility and learning are.

Do this this week

1. Write down every change happening at your company. Split it into "can control" and "can't control." Cross out the second column.
2. Run the Black Book Method for three days in a row. Use a real notebook.
3. Name one underused asset on your team and one messy initiative you could volunteer for. Tell your manager about one of them.
4. If someone with key knowledge is leaving, ask to book your first Shadow Audit session.

Your tool

CopyPART 1: BLACK BOOK DAILY PAGE

Date: __________
NORTH STAR (one outcome, not a task):
__________________________________________

UNBLOCKERS (30 min max)    | DEEP WORK
(who is waiting on me?)    | (needs real focus)
[ ] _______________        | [ ] _______________
[ ] _______________        | [ ] _______________
[ ] _______________        |
[ ] _______________        |

After lunch re-triage:
North Star done?  Y / N
If yes, next outcome: ______________________
If no, afternoon focus block: ____ to ____

PART 2: FLUX AUDIT (weekly, 15 min)
What's changing:
What I can control this week:
Underused assets I see (tools, people, docs, relationships):
Messy initiative I could be the prime for:

PART 3: SHADOW AUDIT
Veteran: __________   Sessions booked: __ / __ / __
Rule: I do the work. They watch and stop me.

Corrections log (one line each):
When [situation], always [action] because [reason].
1.
2.
3.
(keep going)

FAILURE-MODES CHECKLIST (top 10, built together)
#  | What blows up | Warning sign | Fix | Who to call
1  |               |              |     |
...
10 |               |              |     |

Keep the line warm:
Their preferred contact: __________
First check-in date after they leave: __________

Talk about it

1. Have you ever inherited a role from someone experienced? Did you get a clean handoff, or learn it the hard way?
2. What's one underused asset on your team right now that nobody is putting to work?
3. Who is waiting on you most often, and what would change if you cleared their blockers first every day?

— Evan