Adaptation or Whiplash? What Startup Leaders Can Learn From Detroit's EV Retreat

Russ Powell
Jul 15
6 min read

Updated: Jul 24

a lone car on a long, winding road — lone vehicle on long, winding road

There are no simple villains in Detroit's electric vehicle story—and that's exactly what makes it useful.

A recent New York Times Magazine article, "The American E.V. Has Been Crushed. Will It Take the U.S. Auto Industry With It?", traces Detroit's uneven response to electric vehicles: bold investments, shifting political winds, slower-than-expected sales, canceled programs, and a renewed emphasis on the trucks and SUVs that remain highly profitable.

It isn't only a story about electric vehicles. It's about how organizations respond when the future is uncertain, the stakes are high, and the evidence points in more than one direction.

That raises a question startup managers face constantly:

Are we adapting—or experiencing organizational whiplash?

Adaptation means changing direction because new evidence has challenged our assumptions.

Whiplash means changing direction because the pressure changed—without a stable goal, clear decision criteria, or enough understanding of what the evidence actually means.

From the outside, the two can look almost identical.

The S-Loop offers one way to tell the difference. It's a learning loop: we sense what's happening, seek to understand it, choose a response, put that response into practice, then learn from what happens next.

Changing direction isn't necessarily evidence of failure. Refusing to change when the evidence shifts can be just as dangerous.

But startup leaders are constantly told to move fast, stay flexible, and pivot. That's often good advice, but it's incomplete.

Motion is not progress.

Changing priorities every quarter may feel responsive while making it impossible for teams to build momentum. Canceling an initiative too quickly may prevent the organization from learning whether it could have worked.

A disciplined pivot starts with a few agreements:

What outcome are we trying to create?
What assumptions are we testing?
What evidence would tell us to continue, adjust, or stop?

Without those agreements, adaptation can turn into a reaction to the loudest pressure in the room.

Detroit's EV story points to four ways that can happen.

1. Past success can become a source of blindness

Detroit's earlier success may have made it harder to recognize how the market was changing.

Automakers had made enormous profits from large trucks and SUVs. It made sense to trust strategies that had worked extraordinarily well.

But experience can quietly lead us into the Knower Trap—when confidence crowds out curiosity and we stop looking for evidence that might challenge our thinking.

Startup managers face the same risk.

The product that won your first customers may not carry the next stage of growth. Communication habits that worked at 15 employees may create confusion at 75. A founder who once needed to approve every important decision may eventually become the reason decisions slow down.

The problem isn't confidence. Managers need confidence.

The problem is confidence without humility.

Useful Sensing questions:

What are we noticing right now—before we start explaining it?
What are we actually seeing, as distinct from what we expected to see?

Good adaptation starts with noticing evidence that doesn't fit the story we're already telling ourselves.

2. Reacting to data is not the same as understanding it

When EV sales failed to grow as quickly as expected, manufacturers delayed or canceled major programs. Some of those decisions may have been entirely justified.

But what, exactly, did the disappointing numbers mean?

Was the problem electric vehicles themselves? Or price? Size? Range? Charging access? Interest rates? Incentives? The customers being targeted?

Those are different problems, requiring different solutions.

Growing companies do the same thing: sales slow, so the sales team needs training. A launch disappoints, so the product must be wrong. Turnover rises, so employees must lack commitment.

Perhaps.

But the first explanation is rarely the only one.

A useful Seeking question is:

What else might account for what we're seeing?

The quality of our solutions depends heavily on the quality of the questions that precede them. Move too quickly from Sensing to Solving, and we can respond decisively to a problem we haven't yet understood.

3. Real constraints can become the whole explanation

Detroit's automakers face genuine constraints: changing policies, uneven charging infrastructure, expensive battery development, and formidable overseas competitors.

Recognizing those realities is part of good Sensing.

The danger comes when they become the whole explanation.

That's the Victim Trap—not because the constraints aren't real, but because focusing exclusively on them obscures what remains within our influence.

Startup managers have their own versions:

The founder will never let go.
We can't find strong managers.
There's never enough time to develop people.

Any may contain truth. But they don't yet tell us what to do.

A more useful question is:

Given these conditions, what remains within our influence?

We may not control the funding environment, but we can sharpen priorities. We may not be able to hire immediately, but we can clarify roles and strengthen delegation.

Agency begins by distinguishing what we can't control from what we can still influence.

4. Today's business or tomorrow's capability can become a false choice

And sometimes the problem isn't how we've interpreted the evidence. It's the choice we've constructed from it.

Much of the EV debate gets framed as an either/or:

Invest aggressively in an uncertain electric future—or protect the highly profitable business that exists today.

The tension is real. But the framing can create a Sucker's Choice: the assumption that honoring one important priority necessarily requires sacrificing the other.

For Detroit, the deeper tension may be between protecting near-term profitability and building capabilities for a potentially different future.

Growing companies face versions of this tension constantly:

How do we preserve cash while continuing to experiment?
How do we serve our strongest customers without becoming trapped by their preferences?
How do we give managers more authority while maintaining appropriate oversight?

A Middle Path question is:

How do we protect what's working today while building the capabilities we may need tomorrow?

The Middle Path isn't a compromise where each side gets half of what it wants. It's an attempt to understand what matters on both sides and search for a more integrated answer.

Sometimes one priority really does have to win. Resources are finite. Choices have consequences.

But before accepting an either/or, it's worth asking whether the choice itself has been framed too narrowly.

Staying in the learning loop

The American EV story may ultimately be less useful as a lesson about choosing the right technology than as a lesson about learning in a changing system.

That's hard for automakers under political, financial, technological, and competitive pressure.

It's just as hard for startup managers facing limited runway, impatient investors, fast-growing teams, and founders who still feel responsible for every important decision.

The challenge isn't to move slowly.

It's to move with enough curiosity and discipline that speed doesn't become reactivity.

A pivot can be evidence of learning.

Staying the course can be evidence of discipline.

Either can also be a trap.

The difference often lies in the quality of the thinking that happened before the decision.

Where might a more complete trip around the S-Loop have produced better questions—even if it could not guarantee a better outcome?

For a closer look at the framework behind this piece, see the S-Loop primer—an introduction to this collaborative problem-solving approach and the three traps that most often derail it.

Most teams don't stall for lack of talent.

They stall when attention is treated like a mechanical resource—something to allocate, optimize, or force.

This shows up as:

priorities that look aligned but aren't
decisions that drag—or get made too fast and revisited
meetings that circle without resolving the real issue
difficult conversations avoided, rushed, or mishandled

Leadership and the Middle Path helps leaders shift from managing people like machines to leading teams like living systems.

Participants build practical leadership skills, including:

listening well under pressure
noticing patterns instead of chasing symptoms
making clearer requests and agreements
solving problems collaboratively
navigating difficult conversations without losing trust

Refined across more than 160 startups and Fortune 100 companies.

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Sometimes leaders need more focused support—not because they lack capability, but because the stakes have changed.

This moment often looks like:

decisions that feel heavier than they used to
recurring patterns you can see but haven't shifted
assumptions and agreements that keep breaking down
important conversations you're preparing for—or avoiding

In those moments, the issue usually isn't effort or intelligence. It's where attention narrows under pressure—and what gets missed as a result.

Coaching creates space to slow things down just enough to notice what's actually happening—in you, in others, and in the system—so you can respond deliberately rather than react on autopilot.

I offer developmental, performance, and transition coaching for leaders who want to: