The sextant: why change is a matter of course correction

Before satellite navigation, a ship’s captain crossing an ocean could not see the destination for almost the entire voyage. What they had was a sextant, a horizon, and a set of stars. Several times a day they would take a reading, compare it to where they intended to be, and adjust — a few degrees, rarely more. No single correction was dramatic. The crossing succeeded because the corrections were frequent, small, and timely.

This is the idea Epignosis is built on, and it is worth stating plainly because it runs against how a lot of training and consulting is sold.

The assumption we start from

Most people we work with — a first-time manager, a head of school, a student, a leadership team — are not missing information. They have read the book, attended the workshop, heard the advice. What is missing is not knowledge. It is the habit of noticing, in the moment, that a small adjustment is available, and the willingness to make it.

So we do not begin by adding content. We begin by listening for where someone is slightly off the course they themselves want to be on, and we work on the mechanism of correction: seeing the gap sooner, and closing it before it compounds.

Why small and timely beats large and late

A one-degree error, uncorrected, puts you many kilometres off course by the end of a long crossing. Caught early, it costs a moment at the wheel.

Behaviour works the same way. The manager who avoids one difficult conversation is not in crisis. But the pattern, repeated across a year, becomes a team that does not trust them. The correction — learning to open that conversation well — is small in itself. Its value is entirely in the timing.

Large, late interventions — the reorganisation, the turnaround, the crisis-driven training budget — are what you need when the small corrections did not happen. They are more expensive, more disruptive, and less likely to hold.

What this looks like in practice

• In coaching: we are not trying to rebuild a person. We are helping them find the two or three adjustments that change the most, and practise them until they are automatic.
• In corporate training: programmes are designed around real situations and spaced over time, so the correction is applied on the job, reviewed, and adjusted again — not delivered once and hoped for.
• In education management: a school that is drifting rarely needs to be torn down. It needs an honest reading of where it is versus where the trust intended it to be, and a sequence of timely corrections to staffing, systems and academics.

The discipline underneath

Course correction sounds gentle, and it is. But it is not passive. It depends on taking the reading in the first place — regularly, honestly, even when the news is that you are off course. That habit, more than any single technique, is what we try to leave behind.