Why constant change needs a fixed point
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A song from 1998 and a question on growth that stayed
Last week, a client conversation brought back a song I hadn’t thought about in years.
Herbert Grönemeyer is a German singer I’m not too much a fan of. But over the years, one line from his song “Bleibt alles anders” stuck with me over the years: “Stillstand ist der Tod”. Stagnation is death.
What made me remember this line weren’t the words themselves but the contradictions surrounding them in the whole song. “Du steigst nach unten und fällst nach oben”. Climbing downward, falling upward. Things that make no logical sense but feel completely true, part social commentary, part philosophy, wrapped in a pop song playing between the weather report and the traffic update.
The song came out in 1998 when I was finishing high school and didn’t have the vocabulary for what I was hearing. But again, I still remember these lines today.
When we were working on my client’s positioning, that line surfaced during our discussion. And after the meeting, I kept thinking about it, because “keep moving” is easy to say.
What comes after that is harder to answer.
Why stagnation really is dangerous
Stop moving and your body starts to deteriorate, not overnight, not dramatically, but steadily in ways that compound over time. Movement isn’t optional for a healthy body, it’s the baseline condition everything else depends on.
Business works the same way. Markets shift, competitors move, and what worked three years ago needs adapting today. The companies that treated their 2019 playbook as permanent found out what stagnation costs, and some of them very publicly.
Most people nod along to this. But there’s a question underneath it that’s less comfortable.
If everything changes, why build anything?
If everything is constantly changing, why should we develop a positioning, a methodology, a content strategy, if you’re going to have to revise it anyway? Why invest in a brand when the market shifts underneath you before you’ve finished building it?
I hear this sometimes from people who are genuinely stuck, and I understand the exhaustion behind it. When you’ve been told to pivot often enough, you start to wonder whether committing to anything makes sense at all. But this framing confuses two things that aren’t the same.
The difference between adapting and drifting
Tactics change, channels change, and the format that worked on LinkedIn last year isn’t the one that works now. What resonates in one market fails in another, and these things require constant attention.
But underneath all of that, something else needs to stay fixed: what you stand for, the problem you care about solving and why, the way you think and what makes your perspective distinct. That’s precisely what makes constant adaptation possible without losing yourself in the process.
The people I work with who struggle most with visibility aren’t struggling because they don’t know enough. They’re struggling because they’ve been adapting everything, including the core. A new positioning every six months, different messages depending on who’s in the room, following every trend because standing still feels dangerous. That’s not growth, that’s drift.
Two ways to find your core
1. A useful starting point is paying attention to where the discomfort comes from. Adapting tactics usually feels energizing, trying a new format, shifting your messaging for a different audience, testing a new channel.
When adapting starts to feel like losing something, you’re probably touching the core. That feeling isn’t weakness or resistance to change, it’s a signal worth taking seriously.
2. The other test is cross-cultural. If what you stand for only works in one market or one cultural context, it’s probably not core, it’s a tactical adaptation you’ve mistaken for identity. Real positioning survives translation – not word for word, but in substance.
The problem you solve, the way you think, the perspective you bring, these should be recognizable whether you’re talking to a client in Germany, in Asia, or in the US, even if the language and style adapt around them.
Context changes how movement is read
What counts as healthy movement and what reads as instability isn’t universal.
In some markets, visible evolution signals ambition and relevance, and in others it signals that you don’t really know who you are. In German-speaking markets especially, consistency is a trust signal, and changing your message too often doesn’t communicate agility, it communicates doubt.
So even the pace and visibility of your evolution needs to be calibrated to context, not just whether you’re moving, but how that movement lands with the specific people you’re trying to reach.
Stillstand ist der Tod, yes. But movement without an anchor isn’t growth either, it’s just movement without direction.
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What’s your experience with this?
Where in your work do you feel the tension between adapting and staying grounded?
And how do you know when you’ve crossed from healthy evolution into drift?
I’d love to hear how you navigate this in the comments.
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