When To Pivot and When To Persevere

Something Isn’t Working

Progress is slow. The results you hoped for aren't showing up. And you're stuck asking yourself a question that doesn't come with an easy answer.

Do I change direction or do I stay the course?

Get it wrong and the consequences are real. Pivot too early and you abandon something that just needed more time. Hold on too long and you waste years and resources on something that was never going to work the way you hoped.

I've been on both sides of this. And I've learned that knowing which one you're facing is one of the most important skills a leader can develop.

When It Was Time to Pivot

Early in the life of The Hope Effect, we were committed to a model of orphan care that made sense on paper. Governments were slow to approve family-based care, so we learned from a partner a way to bridge the gap. We would buy or build a house, hire a family to live in it, and place orphaned children in the home. They would stay there until the government resolved their legal situation or they aged out. Ideally, the family caring for them would adopt them.

It was an orphanage and foster care hybrid. We owned the house and hired the staff so technically it was an institution, but we ran it like a family.

There were two big problems. One was theoretical. Since the parents were hired, it was still a job. What happens when performance is an issue? What if we needed to fire them? The family dynamic was always at risk of being undermined by the employer and employee relationship.

The other was practical. We could not scale it. The costs were enormous and the number of orphaned children worldwide is staggering. We could not see a pathway for this model to make a global difference.

So we pivoted.

We shifted to working directly with governments to accelerate their transition from institutional care to family-based care. Different model. Same mission.

It was the right call. But it was not an easy one. We had invested time, money, and heart into that original approach. Walking away from something you believe in is never simple.

Since that decision, we have helped 481 children get out of orphanages and into families. We could have never afforded the overhead to buy or rent that many houses and hire that many staff members. The pivot made the mission possible at a scale the original model never could have reached.

Stay true to your mission. Be flexible with your model.

I am so glad we pivoted.

When It Was Time to Persevere

Not long after, we opened our third location in Mexico. We had seen success in our first two locations and jumped at the opportunity to expand. We signed a contract and moved fast.

Too fast.

The government in that state was not ready. We had not done the groundwork to understand what we were walking into. We ended up terminating the contract early. We were helpful but far less than we could have been.

It would have been easy to look at that experience and conclude the whole strategy of working with state governments doesn't work. One bad partnership and you start questioning everything. But the failure wasn't in the direction. It was in the execution.

So we persevered.

We didn't abandon the commitment to work with governments to move children from institutions into families. That was and still is the right strategy. Instead we built stronger systems. We created a framework for how we enter a new state. We tried to understand better what must be uncovered before we sign a contract.

Right direction. Wrong execution. Fix the execution, not the direction.

Alex Hormozi said it well. "Success and failure are on the same road. Failure is just an earlier exit ramp."

In November we signed a contract with the second largest metro area in Mexico covering four delegations. It was our biggest contract to date. We are ready for it. What we learned in that early failure helped us persevere into something with far greater impact and reach than we could have imagined.

Experience without evaluation is wasted.

I’m so glad we persevered.

How to Know Which One You're Facing

So how do you tell the difference? How do you know if you're holding onto something that needs to go or pushing through something that just needs more time?

I've found it comes down to three things.

Get outside perspective. You are too close to it. You need someone who isn't emotionally invested to look at the situation with fresh eyes. That might be a board member, an advisor, or an experienced leader who has no connection to your organization. Ask them what they see. Give them permission to be honest. And then actually listen.

Do an inside gut check. After you've heard from others, check in with yourself. Not your fear. Not your pride. Your honest conviction. Ask yourself this: am I holding on because I believe in this, or because I'm afraid of what letting go means? There's a difference between fear based retreat and wisdom based conviction. Name which one is at the wheel.

Let the facts speak. Pull together the real data. The numbers. The outcomes. The trends. Not the story you want to tell. The story the facts are actually telling. Lay them out without defending yourself and let them speak. Sometimes the facts confirm what your gut already knew. Sometimes they surprise you. Either way they'll tell you the truth if you let them.

The Tension Never Goes Away

Here's the thing few will tell you. This tension between pivoting and persevering never fully resolves. You will face it over and over throughout the life of your organization. The goal isn't to eliminate the tension. The goal is to get better at navigating it.

Persistence without wisdom becomes stubbornness. Flexibility without conviction becomes instability. The best leaders I know hold both at the same time. Deeply committed to their mission. Willing to change almost anything about how they get there.

If you're facing this question right now, take a deep breath. You got this. Get outside perspective. Do the gut check. Look at the facts. And then make the best call you can with what you know.

I'm cheering for you.