Move One Position at a Time
Mountain climbers learn one rule first: only ever move one of your four points of contact at a time. The other three are your safety system. Bernhard Kerres applies the same rule to change management — career transitions, organizational restructures, leadership succession — and argues that the most common failure mode in change is the urge to move too many positions at once.
Published 2020-11-23 by Bernhard Kerres
When you are mountain climbing, you quickly learn one golden rule: only change one of the four positions you hold when moving forward. You move one hand or one foot. The other three remain in place — two hands, one foot, or two feet, one hand. The three positions you keep are your safety and support system. Even if you slip, you have three other points of contact to save yourself.
In life, change works the same way. Whenever you are going through a transition, hold on to as many positions as possible and only move one. When you are thinking about a career change, change your function, your industry, your geography, or your network — but never more than one at a time. That allows you to reach for the next thing without losing your hold on what you already have.
This is one of the simplest rules I know in change management. It is also one of the most often violated.
When the support system itself is moving
Most discussions of change assume that the rest of life stays still while you reach for one new hold. In ordinary times that is mostly true. But there are stretches in any career — and in any organization — when several of the supports start moving at once. The team you trusted reorganizes. Your manager leaves. The market you thought you understood shifts under you. The strategy you have been executing is replaced. The technology in your sector changes faster than your skills can absorb.
When that happens, the climbing rule tells you something specific: do not also change function, geography, or industry on top of it. You are already moving more than one position. Stabilize what you can stabilize. Make the changes that are forced on you well, and resist adding voluntary ones.
This is harder than it sounds. There is a particular kind of restless impulse that hits leaders mid-transition — the urge to also take this opportunity to fix the team structure, redo the operating model, switch suppliers, replace the office. Don't. Three holds is the safety system. Move one foot at a time.
Building support systems where they don't yet exist
In organizations that have been through significant change, leaders often discover that some of the support systems they used to rely on have quietly disappeared. The casual conversations at the watercooler. The five-minute corridor briefing. The unstructured time with the boss. The reading-between-the-lines that comes from physical proximity. In many companies — especially after the shift to distributed and hybrid work — these have not come back, or they have come back in degraded form.
Leaders need to acknowledge this and build new support systems deliberately. Even if those systems are small. Even if they are temporary.
In my work with leadership teams, one structure that consistently helps is what I call groups — and these need to be distinguished sharply from teams. Teams work together regularly on a shared task with formal accountability. Groups don't. Groups are made up of people from across an organization who do not share department, manager, or task — meeting regularly, every week or every two weeks, with no agenda except mutual support.
The focus of a group is not work. The focus is each other.
In times of high change, when the formal support systems are in flux, these informal groups become essential. They restore something the team structure can no longer provide on its own: a stable point of contact, a place where the conversation is allowed to be about how things actually feel, not what is on the project plan.
For individuals, the principle is the same. When the climb is genuinely difficult, find your three holds. Cultivate the people, the routines, and the personal practices that stay still while one part of your life moves. The rule is not glamorous. It is not "lean in" or "embrace the chaos."
It is just: move one position at a time.
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If your organization is in a period of multi-position change — strategy, structure, technology, and people moving simultaneously — and you are looking for a thinking partner on how to sequence that without losing the team in the process, that is a conversation I have often. Reach me at bernhardkerres.com (https://book.bernhardkerres.com/meetings/).
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About the author
Bernhard Kerres trained as an opera singer before joining Booz Allen Hamilton as a strategy consultant, then moved into CFO and CEO roles at two listed European technology companies, and served from 2007 to 2013 as CEO and Artistic Director (Intendant) of the Wiener Konzerthaus. Today he works as a leadership coach, executive advisor, and keynote speaker. He is a PCC-certified ICF coach, holds an MBA from London Business School, and was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art. He is the founder of RolePlays.ai, an AI platform for practicing high-stakes leadership conversations.