Symptoms
Most organisations say they want change in the same way some people say they want a puppy. They imagine the interesting parts. The energy. The charm. The applause. They do not always picture the chewed shoes, the puddles, the shredded cushions, and the mysterious smell in the corridor.
That is how many businesses approach transformation.
They like the idea of innovation. They enjoy the language of reinvention. They can even tolerate the occasional pilot, provided it arrives in a neat little PowerPoint with manageable milestones and a timeline that behaves itself. What they do not love is the squiggle. The bit where progress doubles back, where the first answer turns out to be wrong, where the defect list gets longer before it gets shorter, where you follow one clue only to discover it has three untidy cousins and a grudge.
This is usually the point where the room starts losing its nerve. The squiggle is not aesthetically pleasing. It does not flatter leadership. It does not make a dashboard look disciplined and mature. It looks messy. Uneven. Slightly embarrassing. It produces false starts, awkward pauses, conflicting signals, and the deeply offensive suggestion that perhaps the original plan was not as clever as everyone hoped.
So people begin reaching for emotional furniture. Defensiveness. Blame. Over-control. Narrative polishing. The sudden urge to label all rework as failure. The even stronger urge to protect whatever part of the process they personally touched, as though the graph has become a referendum on their worth as a human being.
And this is how organisations get themselves into trouble. Because real improvement work is rarely linear. Real learning loops. Real discovery backtracks. Real redesign reveals things you did not want to find, often at the exact moment you were hoping to declare progress and move on with your life.
Nothing is necessarily wrong. You are just in the squiggle.
Diagnosis
The deeper issue is not that the work is messy. The issue is that most organisations are emotionally built for straight lines.
They are trained to interpret smooth progress as competence and messy progress as mismanagement. They reward certainty, tidy updates, and the reassuring theatre of control. They love a graph that rises gently upward and behaves like it was educated in a private school. The moment the line wobbles, however, suspicion enters the room. Confidence drops. People start asking who broke it, who owns it, who approved it, and whether the whole thing was a mistake from the beginning.
This is where the squiggle gets misread. A nonlinear path does not always mean the work is failing. Often it means the work is real.
If you are following clues properly, you will backtrack. If you are doing root-cause analysis honestly, you will discover things that complicate the original story. If you are running experiments worth doing, some will reveal uncomfortable truths. If you are genuinely redesigning anything, rather than just applying corporate lipstick to the existing process, you will encounter ambiguity, contradiction, and moments where the only sensible next step is to pause, reframe, and try again.
That is not incompetence. That is contact with reality.
The problem is that many organisations still respond to this as though the mess itself is the scandal. It is not. The scandal is often how quickly people abandon curiosity the moment the route becomes inconvenient.
This is why a Sigma lens belongs here so naturally. Defects are not insults. They are clues. A corrective action log is not a monument to shame. A COE is not proof that everyone is foolish and civilisation is collapsing. It is evidence. It is the trail. It is the work talking back. And if you cannot tolerate that feedback without becoming defensive, you do not have an improvement culture. You have a performance culture wearing safety goggles.
Resistance
So why do people resist the squiggle so dramatically? Well because it attacks several illusions at once.
First, it attacks the illusion of tidy competence. People like to feel that capable work unfolds in a clean, orderly line from insight to plan to outcome. The squiggle rudely points out that most serious progress involves confusion, revision, and a few regrettable assumptions left face-down on the floor.
Second, it attacks ego. The moment the path loops back, many people do not experience it as data. They experience it as exposure. If the solution needs rethinking, if the defect list is growing, if the plan needs revision, then perhaps somebody fears that means they were wrong. And for many organisations, “we learned something” still feels much less socially safe than “we were right all along.”
Third, it attacks control. Straight lines feel manageable. Squiggles feel alive. A straight line can be narrated. A squiggle has opinions. It reveals that the terrain is changing, that the data is talking, that the frontline is noticing something the original model missed, that the process is less elegant than the rollout deck implied. This can make leaders and teams alike twitchy, especially if they have been trained to equate good leadership with certainty rather than discernment.
And then, of course, there is blame. When discomfort rises, many organisations reach for blame the way others reach for biscuits. It is soothing. Familiar. Temporarily satisfying. Completely unhelpful. Blame creates the illusion of control by suggesting that if one person can be identified as the source of the untidiness, then order can be restored and everyone can get back to pretending linear progress was always a reasonable expectation.
It rarely works. The squiggle does not care whose feelings are hurt. It simply keeps revealing the truth until somebody learns how to listen.
Incision
So what does a healthy relationship with the squiggle actually look like? Let us list it.
First, stop treating backtracking as a character flaw. If a team follows a clue, tests a fix, and then realises the problem is deeper or sideways or dressed in a different outfit than expected, that is not necessarily wasted motion. That is discovery. The work has become more accurate. Progress is not only the forward march. Sometimes progress is the moment you stop insisting you were on the right road.
Second, make defects visible without making them moral. This matters enormously. A defect list should not feel like a public trial. It should feel like live intelligence. If teams are frightened of what a defect log implies about them, they will hide signal, soften language, and rush to cosmetic fixes. If the organisation treats defects as clues, however, people begin to surface them earlier, trace them more honestly, and use them to improve the design rather than defend the ego.
Third, normalise the COE. Not as a badge of dysfunction, but as part of how serious organisations learn. There is nothing especially noble about pretending complexity should behave like a straight line simply because someone in leadership gets hives when a trend chart looks untidy. If the event, the escalation, or the repeated breakdown gives you information you did not have before, then it belongs in the body of evidence. Not buried. Not explained away. Not immediately filed under “exception” so everyone can go back to sleep.
Fourth, train people to watch what they are defending and why. This is one of the sneakiest traps in improvement work. People often believe they are defending quality, rigour, or standards, when in truth they are defending authorship, identity, and emotional territory. The moment a process becomes personal, learning slows down. So the question to ask in the messy middle is not only what is happening in the work, but what are we becoming protective of. The plan. The role. The old metric. The original assumption. The dignity of being seen as correct. Once you can see the defence mechanism, you can stop confusing it with strategy.
Fifth, build a cadence for messy truth. Do not wait until the whole room is emotionally waterlogged before naming that the path has become nonlinear. Create regular spaces where teams can say: here is what we thought, here is what we found, here is where we had to backtrack, here is what the defects are teaching us, here is where the signal is getting clearer even though the graph currently looks like a seismograph in a thunderstorm. That is grown-up work. That is what an actual learning organisation sounds like when it stops performing competence and starts earning it.
And finally, remember that the squiggle is not a detour from serious work. It is often the shape of serious work. Particularly now, when AI, customer expectations, and organisational redesign are all moving at once, clean trajectories are more likely to be a sign of over-simplification than mastery. If everything looks suspiciously tidy, I would not automatically relax. I might start asking what is being edited out.
Prognosis
The organisations that navigate the squiggle well become more resilient, not because they enjoy chaos for sport, but because they stop panicking when reality refuses to move in a straight line.
They learn faster. They hide less. They defend less. They become more comfortable saying, we do not fully understand this yet, but the signal is getting stronger. They stop requiring every project to look elegant at every stage in order to feel legitimate. They build teams that can stay curious in the middle of ambiguity instead of sprinting for blame or polishing the update until it resembles fiction.
That changes the culture in very practical ways.
Defects become guidance. Rework becomes refinement. COEs become evidence, not embarrassment. Frontline observations gain value because they are treated as part of the map rather than as noise from the cheap seats. Leaders become more trustworthy because they are willing to acknowledge messy progress without either dramatizing it or denying it. The organisation becomes less brittle because its people are no longer trained to interpret every wobble as a threat.
And that, ultimately, is the point. The squiggle is not a temporary inconvenience on the way back to the nice, clean graph everyone prefers. In serious transformation work, it is often the graph.
So no, the squiggle is not a phase. It is the shape of contact with reality before the narrative has caught up. It is what progress looks like when the organisation is still learning faster than it is posturing. It is what happens when clues are followed properly, defects are allowed to speak, and people resist the urge to confuse emotional discomfort with strategic failure.
Straight lines are lovely. Framed artwork. Elegant handwriting. A parking bay, on a good day.
But if you are redesigning work, rethinking a system, or learning your way through real complexity, do not expect the path to behave like a ruler.
Expect the squiggle. Then learn how not to lose your mind when it arrives.