Soldier Sailor | Leadership under pressure. Lessons from operations and offshore.

As part of our work at Sunny Side Sailing, and in association with D3A Consulting, Alex has been publishing ideas that coexist in business, on military operations, and in the world of sailing.

Here's a recent post about Velocity Made Good. Can you see the parallels?

Velocity Made Good – Why Alignment Beats Speed in Projects and Sailing

In offshore sailing, there are a couple of concepts that separate the ‘fast’ from the ‘effective’: Velocity Made Good (VMG) and Course Made Good (CMG). It’s not about how fast you’re moving through the water, or even whether you’re pointing directly towards your final destination; it’s about how efficiently and effectively you’re progressing towards your objective.

You can be ripping along, sails full and rail down… but if that comes at the price of too much additional distance, your velocity ‘made good’ will be low. Meanwhile, a boat sailing slower but pointing closer to the next waypoint, the right side of a weather shift, or into a favourable tidal gate, is making far better progress towards it’s ultimate destination.

There are parallels here, with project delivery and organisational change.

Too often, teams mistake activity for progress. They’re 'working hard', 'fast', and busy, burning through milestones and status updates – but not getting much closer to their strategic goal. Like a boat on the wrong wind angle, they may be making great speed in one direction or another, but poor velocity towards the intended outcome.

In both worlds – sailing and project management – alignment trumps pace. A project team moving more slowly, but sharing a clear purpose, understanding the external environment, and working in harmony, will beat a high-speed, misaligned team every time.

The best project leads and programme managers operate like good offshore tacticians:

They watch the shifts.

They reassess heading with changing conditions.

They coordinate the crew through complex processes or manoeuvres.

And they’re not afraid to go ‘off course’ temporarily – to reach better wind, mitigate a risk, or set up for the next phase.

And here’s where Course Made Good (CMG) plays a role too...

Offshore sailors know that sometimes, to get to your destination more quickly and in better shape, you needn't necessarily head directly for it. You can ease a little, seek a wind shift, or ride a favourable tide – even if it means deviating from the straight (rhumb) line. The same is true in transformation work: strategic pauses, team recalibration, or capability building might look like costly delays, but can vastly improve long-term VMG and CMG.

At D3A Consulting, we coach leaders and teams to achieve the best possible Velocity Made Good… to focus less on how fast they’re going, and more on how well they’re aligned to where they want to end up. And at Sunny Side Sailing we coach the same principles, but in a different, fun, and ‘safe to fail’ environment that helps project professionals and corporate leaders understand these ideas… as well as achieving their skipper’s tickets and getting to the pub just a little more quickly!