Course Correction¶
Definition¶
A course correction is a small, frequent adjustment made in response to observed drift from a target, rather than a wholesale re-plan or a rigid refusal to deviate from the original plan. The book's claim is that this isn't a failure of planning — it's the only way plans of any real duration actually succeed: "Course corrections are not project management failures, nor do they suggest a loss of control — quite the opposite in fact. Rigid plans with fixed definitions of success limit our options and invite failure."
In the Book¶
Chapter 7 grounds the idea in NASA's New Horizons probe, launched in 2006 toward a wildly irregular target — Pluto's distance from Earth varies by roughly 2 billion kilometers depending on where it sits in its elliptical orbit. Reaching it required a mid-flight correction of about one mile per hour: tiny relative to the mission, but the difference between success and missing the target by 80,000 kilometers after a decade of travel and $650 million in cost. The book pairs this with an everyday parallel — driving a car, where you make "minute course corrections every second" without ever perceiving it as losing control — to argue that the mechanism is the same whether the stakes are interplanetary or domestic. It then returns to Carl (the recurring example of a father saving for his daughter's education) to show reprioritization as a constant, low-visibility background process: every choice, from a lunch decision to a project's scope, trades one option against another, and treating a written plan as etched in stone only guarantees a bigger, costlier correction later.
Why It Matters¶
The alternative to frequent small corrections isn't "sticking to the plan" — it's deferring all correction to a single, much more expensive moment when drift has compounded past the point of a cheap fix. This concept reframes reprioritization as evidence a system is working, not evidence it failed, and it applies wherever a plan has to survive contact with a changing environment: a spacecraft trajectory, a product roadmap, a diet, a relationship. The practical implication is to build in the visibility needed to detect drift early and the flexibility to act on it immediately, rather than judging a plan's soundness by how rarely it changes.