Against the Pivot
Why I dislike these managerial “turns”
This morning on the news a Government minister told us that they were now pivoting the economy ‘from growth to resilience’. It’s meant to offer us a reassuring image of nimbleness in the face of an unpredictable world. But it makes me feel cross.
The word itself is a good one with a clear meaning. A pivot is simply a point around which something turns. In business it’s become the moment when a strategy is abandoned and replaced with another, in response to market feedback. It shows that we are agile, responsive and smart.
But my discomfort is about the metaphysics hidden inside the metaphor.
A pivot assumes a fixed centre and a stable axis and controllable object that can be rotated at will. It is part of a mechanical imagination: there is the thing, and there is the powerful hand that turns it.
When someone proposes a pivot in organisational life, what I think they mean is: “Let us change direction quickly so that we can secure a better result.” The logic is strategic, instrumental and forward-facing. The world is a ground to be navigated efficiently and if one plan fails, we simply ‘turn’ to another and make the world a better place.
But, who exactly, is doing the turning, what is being left behind and does anything really get any better?
From a process perspective there is no solid centre around which we neatly turn. We are not fixed objects capable of swivelling neatly into new alignments. We are more like ongoing patterns of relationship. There is no ‘pivot’ or hinge, only an emergent becoming.
When someone calls for a pivot, I think what is happening is much more complex, fragile and morally ambiguous than the language of the pivot suggests.
Rarely is it a clean decision taken by an autonomous agent. It is the culmination of pressures, disappointments, anxieties, shifting loyalties, economic threats and reputational fears. The word “pivot” sanitises this transforming messy turbulence into a pretence of technique and the projection of power.
It denies the grief that every genuine change of direction involves as we come to terms with relegating something we once believed to be important and replacing it with something which we have previously chosen to ignore. Something we once believed and invested time, trust, imagination in is lost. A whole narrative about who we were is replaced by a new idea of who we will become. The pivot makes this sound trivial and tactical, but for those who gave themselves to the previous direction, it will feel like a betrayal. No wonder ‘engagement’ becomes another problem to solve.
If we draw on the ethic of care then our moral life begins with an attentiveness to vulnerability. A shift in direction, ethically understood, should arise not from strategic impatience but from our deepened awareness of who or what is at risk. A pivot, in its managerial use, rarely names the vulnerable. Instead it names the market, massages the optics and promises an uptick in the growth curve.
“Let’s pivot” often means: let us protect our viability and deny our vulnerability. It hardly ever means let us respond more faithfully to those who depend upon us.
Of course, organisations must adapt and individuals must change. I am not arguing for stubbornness here! But the language matters because it shapes our collective moral imagination. It shapes what we attend to (the jam that is promised tomorrow if we abandon what once promised us jam today).
When I hear “pivot”, I hear speed, but when I think of real transformation, I think of turning. Turning is slower and it implies a recognition of gravity and inertia, forces to be overcome. In religious traditions, a turning, conversion or repentance, is not an opportunistic adjustment but a significant reorientation of allegiance. It involves humility: we were wrong, or at least partial. We did not see fully.
In process terms change is not imposed from outside but emerges from within a relational field. We are shaped by what we encounter. It shifts our attention and what we value is reprioritised. The pivot is less an act of control and more a response to what we can no longer ignore.
This is why I get peeved. Because to claim a “pivot” suggests that we remain in charge. It denies the humility, fallibility and the deep learning that must have been happening. Unless of course our pivot is a facile piece of opportunism in which we plough on, unchanged, regardless.
Much of the most significant change in my own life has felt like defeat, or at least a surrender. Moments when I could not continue as before, not because a spreadsheet suggested a better option, but because something in the pattern of my relationships had altered irreversibly. What I took to be certainties dissolved, and my long standing ambitions felt hollow. The story I was telling myself no longer rang true.
That is not a pivot. It is a complete collapse followed by a turning. And perhaps the discomfort I feel when I hear the P word is that it too easily converts a moral and existential reorientation into a pretence of managerial dexterity. It flatters us with the illusion that we are simply being agile, when in truth we may be avoiding a much deeper reckoning.
There are even darker pivots. Politicians that pivot towards power and away from meaning. Corporations that pivot towards profitable harm and individuals who pivot away from accountability to themselves and relegate their responsibility to an accountability to others, “I was just following orders”. The language maybe neutral but the ethics are not.
So I find myself asking, whenever the P word is uttered:
What are we turning towards?
And what are we turning away from?
Who benefits from this shift?
Who bears its cost?
What grief is being bypassed?
What vulnerability is finally being acknowledged, or silenced?
Perhaps we need a different vocabulary. Not pivot, but attunement, not recalibration, but repentance, and not optimisation, but fidelity. We do not pivot a living body without consequence. We do not pivot a community without loss. We do not pivot a life without relinquishing something that once felt essential.
If there is to be change then let’s describe it honestly. Let it carry the weight of its moral implications, and acknowledge the field of relationships within which it occurs.
Otherwise, the pivot becomes one more artefact of a culture that believes everything can be rotated into place without cost. And that, I suspect, is what my discomfort has been trying to tell me all along.