I've been talking to a lot of senior professionals lately. Not in a formal research setting, just conversations. The kind that start as a catch-up and end up going somewhere more honest.
A pattern keeps emerging. And it's worth naming directly.
Most people, when they look back at the period before a redundancy or forced transition, can identify the signals. The restructure rumours that never quite materialised. The leadership change that shifted the culture. The quarterly review where the questions felt slightly different. The role expansion that spread them thin across too many priorities.
They knew something was changing. They just didn't act on it.
And when I ask them why, the answer isn't that they were naive. It's that they were rational. Each signal, on its own, had a plausible explanation. The rumours were always rumours. The leadership change was "positive." The review questions were probably just due diligence. The role expansion was a vote of confidence.
Context made each signal seem manageable. And so nothing changed.
THE GAP BETWEEN AWARENESS AND ACTION
This is one of the most interesting and most underexplored parts of senior career strategy. The gap between knowing something might be changing and actually doing something about it.
It's not denial, exactly. It's rational inertia. The cost of acting on a signal that turns out to be nothing (starting to build external presence, having conversations outside the organisation, doing the work of repositioning) feels higher than the cost of waiting.
Until suddenly it isn't.
What I've come to believe, from both research and observation, is that the professionals who manage transitions well aren't the ones with better instincts. They're the ones who've made a different kind of decision about what ongoing career maintenance looks like.
They don't treat career strategy as something you do when you need to. They treat it as something you do continuously - at low intensity - so that when the signals arrive, they're already positioned to act.
WHAT THAT LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
It doesn't mean constant networking or performative LinkedIn activity. It means a few things done consistently:
Being visible outside your organisation in your area of expertise. Not for vanity, but because visibility is optionality. If people know what you're good at, they think of you when it matters.
Knowing your market value on an ongoing basis. Not just at appraisal time. Understanding what your skills command externally keeps your internal perspective sharp and your confidence calibrated.
Having conversations that aren't transactional. The professional relationships that matter most in a transition are the ones built before you needed them. Those take time to develop, and they don't start with "I'm looking for my next role."
None of this is complicated. Most senior professionals know this already. The issue is that when things are going well, it all feels unnecessary.
And then, all at once, it doesn't.
If any of this is sitting with you, if you're in a role that feels stable but you're starting to do the maths, I'd welcome a conversation. Reply here or message me on LinkedIn. No agenda.