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Read time: 5 minutes Hey Subscriber First Name, There's a rule in aviation called the 1 in 60 rule. It says that if a plane is off course by just one degree, it will miss its destination by one mile for every sixty miles it flies. One degree. At the start, it feels like nothing. You're almost exactly where you should be. But six hundred miles later, you're ten miles from where you were meant to be. The further you travel without correcting, the bigger the gap gets. I think about this all the time when I look at projects. Because most projects don't fail in a dramatic, obvious way. There's no single moment where someone makes a catastrophic call and the whole thing falls apart. That's the version we hear about in case studies and lessons learned reviews, but it's rarely what actually happens. What actually happens is drift. A small assumption goes unchecked. A conversation that should have happened gets pushed to next week. A risk gets logged but never really discussed. A team member starts to disengage and nobody asks why. A stakeholder's expectation shifts slightly and nobody notices. None of these feel like a problem at the time. But they add up. Quietly. Week by week. Degree by degree. Until one day you look up and realise the project is somewhere you didn't plan for, and you're not quite sure how it got there. That's the one-degree problem. And almost every PM I know has lived it. I came across this idea through Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO, where he talks about it as a law: a small miss now creates a big miss later. He uses Tiger Woods as an example. In 1997, just after winning the Masters, Woods told his coach he wanted to completely rebuild his swing from scratch. His coach warned him it would take time. His performance would get worse before it got better. Everyone around him said he was mad. He didn't win anything for eighteen months. Critics wrote him off. But Woods kept making tiny adjustments, reviewing footage, refining one small thing at a time. And when the new swing clicked, it was more precise, more accurate, and more versatile than anything he'd had before. He went on to win six straight tournaments and became arguably the greatest golfer of all time. He wasn't chasing a big breakthrough. He was making small corrections, over and over, until the direction was exactly right. That's the lesson I keep coming back to in my own work. The PMs who stay on track aren't the ones running big monthly reviews and hoping for the best in between. They're the ones making small corrections constantly. A five-minute check-in with a team lead on Monday. A quick read of the risk log on Wednesday. A short conversation with a stakeholder on Friday to make sure expectations haven't shifted. None of it takes long. None of it feels like "important PM work". But it's the thing that stops one degree becoming ten. Here's what I've learned the hard way. The stuff that eventually becomes a crisis almost always started as something small that nobody addressed. A concern someone didn't voice. A question someone didn't ask. A tiny misalignment that everyone assumed would sort itself out. It never sorts itself out. It just compounds. So the skill isn't crisis management. The skill is course correction. Catching the one-degree drift before it becomes a ten-degree problem. And every time you do it, you're building judgement. You're learning what to look for, when to step in, and when to leave things alone. That's what delivery actually is. Not one big call that saves the day. It's the quiet, repeated act of checking, adjusting, and keeping things on track. Not a two-hour governance board. Not a twelve-slide status deck. Just a habit of paying attention to the small signals and adjusting before they grow. If there's one thing that shaped my ability to make things happen over the years, it's this. Making things happen is the art of delivery, execution, and building judgement. And judgement doesn't come from one brilliant decision or one heroic save. It comes from getting the small things right, consistently. That's what leads to performance and successful outcomes. Not grand gestures. Just the discipline of staying close to the work. MAKING IT HAPPEN: Your Weekly Strategy This week, just observe. Don't fix anything. Don't chase anything. Just pay attention to your project and notice where something might be drifting by one degree. At the end of the week, write down what you noticed and sit with these two questions: If I left this alone for another month, where would it end up? What's the smallest adjustment I could make right now to bring it back on track?
That's it. The act of noticing is the strategy. Most drift doesn't survive being seen. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE LET AI FLY THE PLANE? The habit of course correction doesn't just apply to projects and teams. It builds judgement. And that judgement matters more than ever now because of how good AI tools have become. AI is doing genuinely amazing things right now. It can draft reports, summarise research, generate analysis, and move work forward faster than we've ever been able to before. I'm a big believer in using it. But the better it gets, the more tempting it is to trust the output without checking it. To assume it got it right. To skip the step where you actually read the thing, question it, and apply your own judgement. Last year, Deloitte delivered a $290,000 report to the Australian government on welfare policy. It turned out the report contained fabricated references, made-up academic papers, and even an invented quote from a federal court judge. A university researcher spotted it. Nobody at Deloitte had. It's a reminder that AI is a tool. A powerful one. But it can make mistakes, and it doesn't know when it has. It doesn't course-correct itself. That part is still on us. The same skill we've been talking about all newsletter, checking, adjusting, staying close to the detail, applies just as much to the tools we use as it does to the projects we run. CHEAT SHEETS New this week: the DDAM Framework cheat sheet. Document, Delegate, Automate, Monitor. If last week's newsletter on designing yourself out of the bottleneck landed with you, this is the one-page version you can keep coming back to. It's in the free cheat sheet library here alongside the OPEN Framework, AI-Era PM Playbook, and the rest. Save the link and grab whatever helps. If this landed with you, forward it to a PM who's quietly watching something drift and hasn't said anything yet. They'll thank you for it. bilaljamil.com | Newsletter archive | Hit reply and tell me what's been quietly drifting on your project. I read every one. Take care and speak soon, Bilal
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