Do You Have an Eagle Eye?

Last weekend, I found myself standing near a bald eagle nest with my husband, watching one of nature’s most capable hunters do what it does best. My husband has photographed eagles across the country, and over time we’ve noticed something that goes beyond the drama of the dive — it’s the quality of attention these birds bring to every moment before it.

The eagle doesn’t rush. It surveys. It takes in a wide, commanding view of everything below — water, land, competitors — before it ever commits to a target. From a remarkable distance, it locks in with precision. And even mid-dive, fully committed, it never fully loses awareness of the other eagle that may have spotted the same fish.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what that looks like in the context of organizational transformation. Because the eagle’s sequence — wide scan, precise commitment, peripheral awareness, grip through resistance — maps almost exactly onto the disciplines that separate transformation programs that succeed from those that don’t.

There’s also research that supports what the eagle seems to know instinctively. Let me take each behavior in turn.

The Wide Scan: Don’t Narrow Your Focus Too Soon

The eagle’s first move isn’t the dive. It’s the broad survey — holding the full landscape in view before deciding where to commit. Fast-moving transformations have a way of collapsing that survey phase. The pressure to ship, to prototype, to show progress pushes teams into a narrow focus before they’ve truly assessed the terrain.

What gets missed in that compression? Regulatory signals. Downstream consequences. Stakeholder concerns that surface late — and expensively. And perhaps most critically: the things no one on the team even knows they don’t know.

This is where the framework of known knowns and unknown unknowns becomes useful — a model originally developed by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in the 1950s as the Johari Window, and later brought into broader organizational awareness by Donald Rumsfeld’s 2002 formulation. The categories matter: known knowns are manageable, known unknowns can be planned for, but unknown unknowns — the risks we don’t yet know we’re facing — are what sink transformations. And the only way to surface them is to look hard before you leap.

Here’s the part most teams don’t want to hear: you cannot outrun bad data. No matter how elegant the technology, how strong the team, or how compelling the business case — if your data foundation is compromised, your transformation is compromised. Data literacy and data hygiene aren’t implementation details to sort out later. They are the terrain. And if you haven’t mapped them honestly before you commit, you’re not scanning — you’re guessing.

The most resilient teams I’ve seen treat the wide scan as non-negotiable, even when the timeline is tight. Especially when the timeline is tight. They’re not just asking “are we ready to move” — they’re asking: What are we not looking at yet? What are we assuming that we haven’t proven? What would we need to know to be truly confident in what we’re about to build?

If you can’t answer those questions, you’re not ready to dive.

Precision from a Distance: Risk Assessment Belongs Upstream

Once the eagle has identified its opportunity, it doesn’t drift closer gradually, hoping things become clearer. It has already done the calculus — assessed distance, angle, competition, conditions — before committing to the descent. And yet the commitment doesn’t mean the thinking stops. The eagle recalibrates mid-flight, adjusting for wind and movement. Refinement is continuous — but in service of a direction already chosen with clear eyes.

This maps to how Dr. Mica Endsley, former Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force, describes situational awareness in dynamic systems. Her model defines three levels: perception (seeing the relevant elements), comprehension (understanding what they mean), and projection (anticipating what comes next). The key insight is that these aren’t stages to be completed once — they operate continuously, with each level feeding the others in a loop. Teams operating at only Level 1 — perceiving signals without comprehending their significance or projecting their consequences — are flying without seeing.

The organizational parallel is direct. The big questions about dependencies, stakeholder impact, technology behavior at the edges, and auditability are far cheaper to ask before you’re deep in execution than after. Risk assessment belongs upstream, not as a gate to slow things down, but as the foundation that makes speed safe. Get those answers early. Then, once you’re in motion, refine relentlessly — adjusting your approach as the picture sharpens, without mistaking iteration for the absence of a plan.

The dive looks effortless and fast because the preparation was thorough. The precision is what continuous refinement looks like when it starts from a strong foundation.

Peripheral Awareness Mid-Dive: Execution Isn’t the Time to Go Blind

Even in the committed, high-speed descent, the eagle is still tracking the other eagle. It hasn’t narrowed to a single point of focus so completely that it’s lost awareness of what else is in motion.

Endsley’s model speaks to this directly: the highest level of situational awareness — projection — requires maintaining awareness of the broader environment even as you’re acting within it. Stress and high workload narrow attentional bandwidth, which is exactly why execution phases are so vulnerable to the loss of peripheral awareness. The cognitive demands of delivery compete directly with the capacity to keep watching the wider landscape.

In transformations, this is the hardest discipline to maintain. Once teams are deep in execution, it’s tempting — and organizationally normal — to go heads-down. But transformations unfold in a shifting environment: a competitor moves, a regulator speaks, market conditions change, organizational priorities shift. Teams that miss these signals mid-execution often find themselves having to resurface, reorient, and re-explain — which costs far more than maintaining that peripheral awareness would have.

The practical question isn’t whether to maintain awareness — it’s how to do it without disrupting execution rhythm. The answer is usually structural: a designated person or cadence whose job is explicitly to watch what’s changing in the environment while the rest of the team delivers. Not a distraction from the work. A condition for the work landing well.

You don’t need to stop the dive. You just can’t afford to go blind during it.

Holding On Through Resistance: The Work Doesn’t End at Launch

The eagle has the fish. But that’s not the end of the story. As it climbs, the fish is fighting back. Other birds — who were watching the whole time — now make their move. The eagle’s focus doesn’t relax at the moment of capture. If anything, the demands intensify. It has to hold its grip, navigate the resistance, and keep moving forward — all at the same time.

John Kotter, in his study of more than 100 transformation efforts, identified premature victory celebration as one of the most consistent failure patterns he observed. Teams declare success too early, momentum dissipates, and the changes that were made begin to erode. The hard-won gains slip not because the approach was wrong, but because the grip was released before the work was complete.

Launch is the moment many transformation teams exhale. That instinct is understandable — the dive was long, the preparation was hard, and hitting go feels like the finish line. But in practice, it’s often where the real pressure begins. Users push back. Processes that looked clean in design get complicated by reality. Stakeholders who were quiet during build suddenly have opinions when they were nowhere to be found at sprint reviews and demos. And others — competitors, detractors, alternative initiatives — see an opening the moment your focus appears to soften.

The teams that protect what they’ve built treat launch as a transition, not a conclusion. They stay focused on the outcomes that matter, stay alert to the resistance that’s coming, and are deliberate about not letting hard-won progress slip in the noise of what comes next. In Kotter’s language, this is the work of embedding change in culture — the step most organizations shortchange because they’ve confused launching with landing.

Speed Is the Product of Prior Caution

The reason the eagle’s dive is so decisive isn’t despite its careful attention — it’s because of it. The speed is earned. The commitment is possible precisely because the survey was thorough, the risk was assessed upstream, awareness was maintained through motion, and the grip held through resistance.

This is the reframe that matters most for leaders navigating transformation right now. Risk management isn’t a brake on velocity. When it’s done well — upstream, with a wide scan, maintained through execution, and sustained through launch — it’s what makes the decisive move possible in the first place. The organizations that move fastest in transformation are usually the ones that slowed down at exactly the right moments before committing.

Endsley’s situational awareness research, Luft and Ingham’s framework for surfacing what we don’t know we don’t know, and Kotter’s hard-won observations about where transformation efforts fail — all three bodies of work point in the same direction: disciplined attention, maintained across all phases, is what enables confident action.

So the question worth asking your team: Are we surveying broadly enough before we commit? Are we assessing risk early enough to act on it? Are we staying aware while we’re in motion? And when we’ve landed, are we holding on?

Do you have an eagle eye?