Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:

A deviation only tells us something when there is a consistent baseline against which to recognise it. Before trying to correct what has gone wrong, it is worth asking whether a reliable standard, rhythm or way of working ever existed in the first place.

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Dr Howard Luks wrote recently about the routines that shape his life.

He goes to bed and wakes at roughly the same times, exercises consistently, eats many of the same foods daily and rarely drinks alcohol.

Much of what supports his health has become deliberately boring.

What interested me was his distinction between the routine and the exceptions. Travel, late nights, great meals and missed workouts all happen, but they are deviations from a consistent baseline rather than the baseline itself.

The distinction is key… far beyond health, because a deviation is only recognizable when something relatively stable exists against which it can be compared.

Without a baseline, we have no real way of knowing whether something is unusual, whether performance has deteriorated, whether behaviour has changed, or whether a problem is temporary or structural.

Consider a business where client follow-up happens inconsistently.

One week everyone responds quickly. Another week messages sit unanswered. Someone creates a spreadsheet, someone else keeps notes in WhatsApp, and every so often the team has a burst of activity and catches up.

When a client complains that nobody followed up, what exactly has gone wrong?

If there is an established way of working, the organisation can identify the deviation. If there is no established way of working, there is nothing to deviate from. The problem is not that the system failed. There may never have been a system.

The same applies to leadership, finances, communication, decision-making, relationships and even our own behaviour.

We often focus attention on the event that has gone wrong without first asking what normally happens. What is the expected rhythm? What does good look like? What should happen consistently enough that we would notice when it does not?

This is one reason consistency is more strategically useful than it sometimes appears. Consistency produces information because it gives us something to compare. It makes variation visible, and once variation becomes visible, we can begin asking much better questions about what caused it.

A missed workout inside a long-standing exercise routine is very different from exercising occasionally and hoping to become healthier.

One is a deviation from an established baseline. The other is the absence of one.

Organisations make the same mistake when they interpret sporadic good performance as evidence that something is working.

A brilliant month does not necessarily mean the organisation has built a reliable capability. One excellent employee compensating for a broken process does not make the process functional. A leader remembering to follow up most of the time is not a follow-up system.

A few successful outcomes scattered across inconsistent behaviour can easily disguise the fact that no dependable baseline exists.

Before trying to correct a deviation, we need to know whether we are actually looking at one.

Sometimes the intervention is about restoring performance to an established standard. Sometimes the more fundamental work is creating the standard – period.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

What needs to become your consistent baseline so that the occasional deviation can remain just that, a deviation?

About Giselle

Most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.

I’m Giselle Hudson — The Pre-Fixer. I help leaders see the real problem before they act, in my writing and in my work. I don’t fix; I pre-fix. Most advisers jump to solutions before they’ve found the real problem. I find it first — the part that isn’t fully visible yet. Once we see that clearly, everything else falls into place, and confident, right action can follow.

Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations — helping leaders make sense of complexity before they commit significant time and money to the wrong thing.

What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?