5 The Conservation of Momentum
This chapter is currently in draft form.
You think you’re being agile. You’re responding to market signals, seizing opportunities, keeping the organization nimble. Every direction change feels like the right call—and often it is. What you don’t see is the cost.
Momentum isn’t renewable. It’s conserved. Every pivot, every interruption, every strategic redirect doesn’t pause your team’s velocity—it destroys it. The energy your people spent building speed doesn’t bank for later use. It vanishes. And rebuilding exceeds maintaining by a margin most leaders never calculate.
This chapter is about that invisible cost. Not because pivoting is wrong—sometimes it’s essential—but because leaders who treat direction changes as free slowly grind their organizations to a halt. They wonder why their teams never reach full speed. The physics explains it. They’re just not listening.
Here’s the irony: the language of agility gets weaponized to justify the very behaviors that destroy momentum. Real agility emerges from the speed of the feedback loop, not the frequency of the pivot—small batches, protected focus, completed iterations that generate learning. You move fast because you finish things and learn from them. Fake agility uses the vocabulary of movement to mask a lack of progress: constant reprioritization, strategy-of-the-week, “pivoting” every time an executive has a new idea. The team never builds speed because they’re never moving in one direction long enough to accelerate. Calling that agile doesn’t make it so.
5.1 The Physics of Organizational Momentum
In physics, momentum equals mass times velocity. A body in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by external forces. In a vacuum, momentum is conserved perfectly—set something moving and it continues forever.
Teams don’t operate in a vacuum. They operate in atmosphere, where friction never stops and external forces strike constantly. The physics still applies, but the implications shift: momentum must be actively maintained. Once lost, rebuilding costs more than maintaining ever did.
The physics also reveals something critical about direction changes. Momentum is a vector—it has magnitude and direction. When you change direction ninety degrees, you don’t redirect your momentum. You zero it out. All the velocity you built moving east contributes nothing when you pivot north. You’re starting from standstill, facing static friction—which is always higher than kinetic friction. Starting is harder than continuing.
This is what leaders miss. They see the team moving. They assume motion can be redirected like a cursor on a screen. It can’t. Direction changes don’t redirect energy. They dissipate it.
5.2 Two Ways to Destroy Momentum
I’ve watched it die in two distinct patterns, and understanding both matters because they require different fixes.
Death by pivot. At one company, leadership followed a predictable cycle. Someone would have an idea. The idea would become a priority. The team would mobilize, start building, gain speed. Then leadership would have a different idea. The new idea would become the new priority. The team would stop, pivot, start over. Weeks of accumulated velocity—gone. Not paused. Gone.
I never found a way to fix this. What I found were mitigation strategies: keep projects small, so less momentum bleeds out when the inevitable pivot comes. When a project was days from completion and the next pivot arrived, I’d argue to finish it—not because the deliverable mattered more than the new direction, but because the momentum cost of stopping exceeded the cost of those final days. Completing something, anything, preserves energy in the system. Abandoning work at the finish line converts all that kinetic energy to waste heat: frustration, cynicism, learned helplessness (Seligman and Maier, 1967).
Waste heat isn’t neutral—it raises the temperature of the entire environment, making every future effort harder. The cynicism from abandoned projects doesn’t dissipate. It accumulates.
After enough pivots, something worse happens. The team stops accelerating fully. They learn, correctly, that investing energy in building speed is a losing bet when they’ll be stopped again anyway. They trudge. They protect themselves by never fully committing to velocity. You don’t just lose momentum once; you impair the team’s willingness to build it ever again.
Death by drift. At another organization, projects were completely open-ended. Work expanded without boundaries. Nothing ever finished because nothing was defined as finishable. The teams trudged along, work accumulating forever, no sense of progress because progress requires a destination.
Momentum requires both mass and velocity toward something. If the target keeps receding, or if there’s no target at all, you’re on a treadmill. The motion is real but the progress is illusory. Teams know the difference. They feel it. They respond rationally by withdrawing the discretionary energy that transforms adequate work into exceptional work.
The fix was structural: make projects discrete, define “done” before starting, refuse to add scope once work begins. New scope becomes a new project. Finish things.
The effect was substantial. Not because celebration is motivational theater, but because completion is proof that velocity was real. The team moved, and something happened. The energy they invested produced a result they could see and touch. That experience—the memory of momentum actually working—becomes fuel for the next effort.
Both patterns share a root cause: leaders treating momentum as free. In the first case, they assume they can redirect it at will. In the second, they assume it exists without a destination. Both assumptions violate the physics. Both grind teams down.
When you shift priorities, you’re not pausing momentum—you’re destroying it. Your team rebuilds velocity from zero while also recovering from the psychological cost of abandoned work.
Before changing direction, ask: Is this new priority worth not just the direct cost of the pivot, but also the momentum we’ll destroy and must rebuild? Sometimes it is. Often it isn’t.
If you must pivot frequently, keep project scopes small. Shorter timelines mean less momentum to lose when direction changes. And if a project is days from completion when the pivot comes, finish it. The momentum preserved outweighs those few days of work toward the new direction.
5.3 What Protecting Momentum Actually Looks Like
Understanding the cost of destroying momentum is only half the job. The other half is knowing what protection looks like in practice.
Every organization has friction—context switching, meetings that fragment deep work, coordination overhead, competing priorities, natural entropy. This friction never stops. Momentum isn’t free; inertia helps, but inertia alone won’t overcome constant drag.
Protection means making deliberate choices that preserve what you’ve built. Don’t interrupt a team that’s moving well. Don’t inject new priorities into a sprint that’s working. Don’t pull people off for “quick” tasks that shatter their context. Every interruption has a physics cost, and most leaders dramatically underestimate it.
Protection also means completing things. A team that finishes projects builds momentum memory—the felt experience of velocity actually paying off. That memory is the antidote to learned helplessness. Every completion proves that effort leads to outcomes, that acceleration is worth the investment. A team that constantly abandons work near the finish line learns the opposite lesson: that effort doesn’t matter, that commitment is punished. They stop trying. Completion isn’t celebration theater. It’s how you rebuild a team’s willingness to accelerate.
But the most important form of protection is also the least obvious: laying track ahead of the team.
5.4 Laying Track
I once coached a new manager struggling to get her team moving. Smart, capable, destined to become excellent—but stuck. She couldn’t figure out how to create forward motion. I took her to a whiteboard and we mapped every step in the current project. Then I pointed: do this, then this, then this, then this. Have runway. Have the work mapped out ahead of where the team is now.
It was a revelation. She became one of the most effective leaders I’ve worked with. What she learned: momentum requires track.
Teams are like trains. They need rails laid in front of them. When you reach the end of a project with no next project defined, you stop. Not because the team is lazy or unmotivated. Because there’s nowhere to go.
Here’s the critical insight: planning is stopping. When the team finishes and waits while you figure out what’s next, that’s not a planning phase. That’s a stop. You’ve converted their kinetic energy to nothing while they sit idle.
This is the difference between a gapped workflow and a continuous one. In a gapped workflow, the team completes a project, then waits while leadership figures out what’s next. The planning happens in the gap. In a continuous workflow, the planning happens during the current project—the next destination is defined while the team is still moving. When they finish, the track is already there. No gap. No stop. No static friction.
Track-laying isn’t strategic planning. Strategic planning is deciding where the railroad goes. Track-laying is having the next mile of rail ready before the train arrives. It’s not micromanagement—it’s removing the decision fatigue that hits a team the moment they ship. If they have to ask “what now?” the momentum is already dead.
The leader’s job is to stay ahead of the train, laying track. If you’re laying track while the train waits, you’ve already failed.
This doesn’t mean having six months of work planned in detail. For most teams, two weeks of clear runway is enough. What matters is that the team never hits the end of the track and waits. That wait is a stop. That stop triggers static friction. That static friction costs you days of productivity you’ll never recover.
The flywheel works like this: Complete a project. Celebrate briefly. The team feels the momentum. They carry that energy into the next project, which is already defined and waiting. They accelerate faster because they remember what velocity feels like. They complete again. The memory strengthens. Each cycle builds on the last (Collins, 2001).
But the flywheel only spins if the track is laid. Miss that, and momentum dies at the moment of completion—the exact moment it should be feeding the next cycle.
You don’t need physics equations to sense momentum. Ask yourself: Does this team ship things, or just work on things? When I announce a new priority, do I see energy or resignation? After disruptions, how long until they’re moving again? Are projects getting done, or getting bigger?
For a quantitative signal, watch cycle time—how long from starting work to completing it. When cycle time trends upward over quarters while scope stays constant, momentum is eroding. The team is pushing through thicker mud.
If the answers trouble you, your team has a momentum problem. The fix isn’t motivation—it’s physics. Smaller projects. Fewer direction changes. Protected focus time. Completed work.
5.5 The Decision Rule
All of this reduces to a single question you can ask before any action that affects your team’s velocity: Am I adding energy to the system or extracting it?
A new priority extracts energy—all the momentum built toward the old priority converts to heat. A scope expansion extracts energy—the destination recedes and the team feels it. A “quick question” that pulls someone out of deep work extracts energy—context switching has real costs. A planning gap at project completion extracts energy—the flywheel stops spinning.
Clear priorities add energy. Defined endpoints add energy. Protected focus time adds energy. Track laid ahead of the team adds energy.
Most leaders dramatically underestimate how much energy they extract through small interruptions and how little they add through grand strategic pronouncements. The team doesn’t need another all-hands about vision. They need you to stop treating their momentum as infinitely renewable.
The physics is not optional. Respect it or watch your teams trudge.
You control more of your team’s momentum than you realize. Every priority change, every “quick question” that pulls someone off deep work, every strategic pivot—these aren’t free. They have physics costs.
Your job is to decide direction and hold it. Give your engineering leader room to lay track and protect momentum. When you must change direction, acknowledge the cost and help rebuild. When you see a team completing work consistently, recognize that the flywheel is spinning—and resist the urge to interrupt it.
The single most valuable thing you can do for your team’s momentum is also the hardest: stop changing direction unless the cost of not changing exceeds the cost of the momentum you’ll destroy. Make that calculation explicitly. Most leaders don’t, and their teams pay the price.