I've carried a phrase for years that I picked up somewhere between the cockpit and the conference room: have a plan, not a script. It's the kind of thing you say when the briefing falls apart at first contact, when the customer changes the requirement mid-build, when the regulation you planned around gets rewritten. The military calls this commander's intent and most have heard the Mike Tyson quote about everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

I always knew what I meant by it. What I didn't have was a way to draw it. Then I came across Dave Snowden's concept of estuarine mapping, written up clearly by Andi Roberts, and I realized someone had already built the picture.

The idea is this. Instead of one grand plan with milestones and dependencies, you map what's shaping your situation along two axes: how much energy it takes to change a thing, and how long that change takes to land. When you do that, three zones fall out.
Some things are fixed. The bedrock. Your airport's location. The FAA's certification structure. The physical limitations of your facility. You can't move these. You design around them.

Some things are volatile. The mudflats. Fuel prices. Interest rates. A customer's internal politics. A policy exemption that could disappear with an executive order. These shift constantly. You do not build on them. Leaders who built their operation on a volatile condition got caught when it moved.

And then there's the middle. The liminal zone. The zone of flux where the bedrock meets the mudflats. Where things are not fixed but not shapeless either. Where real movement is possible if you put energy in the right place. This is where strategy actually lives.

Aviation makes this concrete. The terrain is bedrock. The mountains don't move. The runway doesn't get longer because you want it to. You design around those constraints during planning, and then you stop thinking about them.

The weather is volatile. You checked it before departure. It changed anyway. The ceiling dropped. The wind shifted. The convective activity built faster than the models predicted. You do not script the flight around weather because weather does not read the script.

The liminal zone is where you actually fly. The air between the terrain and the weather. You brought a plan: altitude, routing, fuel reserve, alternates. When the conditions shift, you fly the aircraft you have in the air you are in. The plan tells you what you're trying to accomplish. The liminal zone tells you where you can actually accomplish it right now.

I see aviation business owners and leaders burn enormous energy in the wrong zones. They fight fixed constraints. The owner who spends a year trying to change a lease structure the airport authority will never renegotiate. The association leader pushing a regulatory change that requires congressional action while ignoring the three membership initiatives that could move this quarter.

Or they build on volatile ground. Operators who treated a tariff exemption as a permanent market. Leaders who built their revenue model around fuel price assumptions. Organizations that staffed for a demand signal that turned out to be a policy condition someone else controlled.

The leaders who get results are the ones spending energy in the liminal zone. The middle band where things are movable but not moving on their own. Where a focused sprint, two or three parallel experiments over 90 days, can shift a condition that matters. That's where strategy stops being a document and starts being work.

KEY TAKEAWAY: A plan is not a smaller script. It is a map of where you can actually move, and the discipline to spend your energy only there.

Take one change you've been stuck on. An operational problem, a leadership challenge, a strategic decision you keep studying instead of making.

Split what's in your way into three piles.

Fixed: what can't be moved regardless of how much energy you put into it. The regulation. The facility. The market structure. Name these, accept them, design around them. Every minute you spend trying to change bedrock is a minute you're not spending where movement is possible.

Volatile: what shifts regardless of what you do. The conditions you can't control and shouldn't build on. Name these too, and stop investing in them. If it can change overnight without your input, it's not a foundation.

Movable this cycle: what's in the liminal zone. What could actually shift in the next 60 to 90 days if you put focused energy there. This is your sprint. Two or three small parallel experiments, not one grand plan. Test. Learn. Adjust. Spend your energy here and only here.

The estuarine map, a concept from Dave Snowden's complexity work and laid out well by Andi Roberts, gave me the picture for something I've been saying without drawing.

Have a plan, not a script. The plan isn't a smaller, less detailed script. It's a map of where movement is possible and the discipline to spend your energy only in that zone.

The leaders who redraw the map when the wind shifts beat the ones still flying the briefing. You do not script the flight. You fly the aircraft you have in the air you are in.

What's the one thing you've been stuck on that belongs in the liminal zone? Reply to this email. I read every response.

Written by Travis Wright | ETL Advisory

Leadership and strategy for the people who lead aviation and the organizations that serve it.

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