Alberto Terol

Fasten your seatbelts, today we will be escaping gravity🚀

To put a rocket into orbit, thrust alone is not enough, it must overcome gravity, friction, inertia, and doubt, all at once. If the initial impulse is insufficient, the rocket doesn’t fail slowly but never leaves the ground. For planet Earth, escape velocity is 11.186 km/s.

Projects behave the same way. In change initiatives, there is always a gravitational pull trying to keep things exactly as they are: legacy habits, comfort, skepticism, the typical “we’ll see how it goes”. If that gravity is stronger than the initial impulse, the project stalls inside the atmosphere of the old system.

That’s why some change projects require irreversibility. Hernán Cortés understood it brutally well when he burned the ships. No return. No Plan B. No psychological escape hatch. The message to his team was not motivational, it was structural: success was the only remaining option.

I saw this very clearly in a large global rollout of a corporate expense management tool I worked on. At some point, someone from my team asked: “what’s the plan if users don’t adopt it?”. The answer was uncomfortable, but deliberate: there can’t be one.

We couldn’t even allow users to sense that an alternative future existed. The moment people believe there is a way back, gravity wins, adoption becomes optional therefore commitment weakens and energy disperses.

Change needs a point of no return. Not recklessness but inevitability.

In change management, gravitational forces take many forms:

Lack of Vision → confusion
Lack of Skills → anxiety
Lack of Incentives → resistance
Lack of Resources → frustration
Lack of an Action Plan → false starts

If any of these forces dominates, the project never reaches escape velocity.

Great teams don’t just execute plans. They generate enough collective thrust to break free from the old orbit. And once they do, there is no turning back. Because real change doesn’t ask whether it will happen. It makes every other outcome impossible.

#ChangeManagement # ChangePills #Transformation #EscapeVelocity #Inertia