Inflection points create pressure for visible action precisely when leaders have the least information on which to act.

A funding cliff. A leadership transition. A merger. A mandate that no longer fits the world it was written for. These moments invite big gestures: radically reduce overhead, reorganize everything at once, replace the plan wholesale, project certainty while the path is still being worked out.

Decisive action may be necessary. But decisiveness and the speed or size of change are not the same thing.

The harder discipline is discernment: knowing what must change, what must be protected, and what you do not yet know enough to decide.

Diagnose before you redesign

I joined Pact in 2022 to lead its Programs division and inherited a reorganization designed before my arrival. Legal entities were being dismantled, and country teams, regional leadership and global technical teams had recently been combined. On paper they were one unit. They were not yet operating as one.

This was more than a lack of cohesion.

People were afraid to report being over or under budget, so problems surfaced late. Senior professionals had been required to rehearse internal presentations before delivering them and were mired in process rather than content. Technical vice presidents ran their functions, regional directors ran their regions, and neither consistently wore an organizational hat. There was internal competition for resources and acknowledgement. The main monthly Programs meeting, about sixty people, included no country leaders.

The available conclusion was that the structure was wrong.

I left it alone.

I spent my first months asking every direct report, every global team and every country lead the same three questions: what is working, what is hard, where is the opportunity.

Then I changed behavior inside the structure, in sequence rather than at once. I stopped requiring rehearsals. I opened the Programs meeting to country leads. I built a weekly forum of regional managing directors and technical vice presidents whose purpose was not simply information sharing but shared ownership of problems that crossed regions and functions. I removed sectoral targets and encouraged collaborative bids. I based budget allocations on planning and forecasted need rather than the sexiness of the sector.

A few colleagues objected that they could not speak candidly about country offices with country leaders in the room.

The objection was the diagnosis.

The structure did not need to change first. The expectations about who owned the organization, who had access to information, and what could safely be said did.

An inflection point can make every existing arrangement look suspect. The leadership task is to distinguish what is genuinely broken from what is simply carrying the consequences of something deeper.

Resistance is sometimes information

That distinction matters just as much when organizations are combining.

When Abt Associates, now Abt Global, merged its International Economic Growth (IEG) division with its International Health Division (IHD) in 2018, IHD was four to five times larger in revenue and headcount. It could simply have absorbed the smaller group.

A long-time IEGer, I applied for a regional managing director role in the new structure and was selected. In addition to leading the region, I became the corporate leadership liaison for the integration of the two divisions.

Much of that second job involved separating resistance to change from legitimate concern about what stood to be lost.

The concerns ran both ways. IEG feared losing its culture and the flexibility of being small and technically diverse. IHD feared being weakened by what it was absorbing. Treating all of it simply as resistance would have been faster. It also would have discarded useful information.

Early on, practices and people remained siloed. Within my region, I needed project management leadership for new work. Following an open call and interviews, I selected a seasoned portfolio manager from the Health side, already running a project in Jordan, to take on a newly awarded agriculture project in Egypt as well. It was not a popular decision. Some in IEG felt the role should have gone to one of their own. I made similar assignments in the other direction.

The point was not to prove that people were interchangeable. They are not. It was to start building an organization in which talent could cross the boundaries the merger was supposed to remove.

What Abt got wrong was quieter.

The company settled the regional structure and left open how technical brainstorming and thought leadership would actually happen. Cost pressure filled the vacuum, because staff had to be billable or working on new business.

An integration can decide its structure and forget to decide how the thinking gets done. The work nobody is assigned is the work that disappears.

That mattered because some of what the smaller division was trying to protect was not nostalgia.

It was capability.

Abt's agriculture portfolio had been struggling, but a small group of us developed an approach combining market-based agriculture with nutrition, climate adaptation and behavior change. That approach helped win four major programs worth more than $100 million. The cross-sectoral range that could easily have been treated as an artifact of the smaller division became part of what made the combined organization not only more competitive, but more importantly, better at meeting complex stakeholder needs.

At an inflection point, people often defend familiar structures when what they are really trying to protect is a capability, a relationship, a way of working or a source of value they fear the new model will erase. Good leadership does not preserve all of it. But it tries to understand what the resistance is carrying before deciding what to discard.

Protect the capacity to recover

The test becomes much harder when the inflection point is not an organizational choice but an external shock.

On January 20, 2025, an executive order stopped funding from flowing. Four days later, teams were told to stop work, minimize expenses and stand ready to restart. By late February, most of what had been paused was terminated. Pact lost about 45 of 65 projects. USAID was shut down, and the surviving health work was narrowed and moved to the State Department.

Our CEO had been in the job five months, our COO two, and our CHRO had started that month. I was the senior executive who knew the projects, knew the clients, and was known by the teams.

In the first days following the executive order, I sent interim guidance to every project team and said more was coming. Once the stop-work order landed, the COO and I immediately wrote internal guidance, drawing on department expertise, and I took it to all 65 project teams. We kept the guidance and FAQ as live documents that changed as we learned. We added in regular virtual Q&A sessions to accommodate all time zones. When terminations arrived, we began closeouts while still arguing the case with funders for individual programs. Most did not come back. One of our largest health programs did.

We had already budgeted down from $185 million to $160 million for the year, expecting a slowdown that generally follows a change in administration. With the terminations, anticipated revenue was expected to be $60 million.

The hardest decisions were about what capability to preserve. And capability, of course, meant people. That was heartbreaking. There was no "good" answer.

There was understandable pressure to maximize the number of jobs retained by cutting more highly compensated senior staff and keeping more junior staff. The near-term arithmetic was compelling.

But we were not only managing the organization we had suddenly become. We also had to preserve enough capacity to build whatever came next.

My judgment was that we needed people who could operate across levels and functions: take on work below or adjacent to their previous scope when necessary, make decisions with incomplete information, carry institutional and client knowledge, develop new business, rebuild teams and help less experienced colleagues navigate unfamiliar terrain. In a sector where every peer organization would be trying to recover at the same time, those capabilities would be difficult to reconstruct later.

The call was criticized by some. As I said before, there was no good answer, but I would make it again.

The principle was not that seniority should be protected for its own sake. It was that cutting for today's emergency can destroy tomorrow's options. At an inflection point, efficiency matters, but so does optionality. Some capabilities are expensive to retain and much more expensive to rebuild.

The question is not only what you can afford to keep. It is what you cannot afford to lose.

Trust is built before you need it

None of that worked because of what I did in 2025.

It worked because of 2022.

In 2022 people would not tell me they were off budget. In 2025 sixty-five teams sent me accurate information in real time, in the worst month any of us had worked. They looked at scenarios with clear eyes and considered what was needed to deliver assistance at that moment and in the future.

That is the return on three years of making it safe to surface a problem early. And on building joint ownership.

Trust is often discussed as though it were an attribute of culture: important, but intangible. At an inflection point, it becomes operating infrastructure. Leaders cannot make good decisions quickly if information is being softened on its way upward, if people hide bad news until they have a solution, or if teams believe candor will be punished.

But I also learned that trust is not built by transparency alone.

I communicated constantly during the crisis and assumed that frequency combined with openness would reassure people. For many it did. For others, what they needed was firmer ground: what was decided, what remained unresolved, and when they could expect greater clarity.

Sometimes that clarity simply wasn't available because the decisions themselves had not yet been made. But I could have been more explicit about that boundary: what we knew, what we did not yet know, and what still had to be decided.

That distinction matters. Leaders rarely have certainty at an inflection point, and pretending otherwise eventually costs credibility. But uncertainty does not excuse vagueness. People can absorb a great deal of ambiguity when they understand its boundaries.

The discipline of the inflection point

These were three very different moments: an inherited reorganization, a merger and an abrupt funding collapse.

The temptation in each was similar: to demonstrate leadership by moving quickly toward a finished answer.

The better decisions came from something less visible.

  • Learn what is true before deciding what is broken.
  • Distinguish resistance to change from information about what creates value.
  • Protect the capabilities that are easiest to lose and hardest to rebuild.
  • Preserve options when the facts do not yet justify an irreversible choice.
  • And when certainty is impossible, be precise about what is known, what is not, and what remains to be decided.

Leading through an inflection point is not about resisting change. Nor is it about moving slowly or quickly.

It is about refusing to let uncertainty make the decision for you.

The leader's job is not to eliminate uncertainty before acting. It is to see the organization clearly enough to know what must change now, what must survive the transition, and what can remain undecided until there is enough information to decide it well.

People can live with uncertainty longer than leaders sometimes assume.

What they need is reason to believe that the people making the decisions can tell the difference.

© 2026 Michele Laird. All rights reserved.