Don't Look at the Wall: What Motor Racing Teaches Us About M&A Turnarounds

There’s a moment in motor racing when everything goes wrong. The car loses traction. It starts to spin. And every instinct in the driver’s body screams: look at the wall. The very thing you’re trying to avoid.

Experienced drivers know something counterintuitive: if you look at the wall, you’ll hit it. Target fixation is the phenomenon called. The brain directs the body toward whatever the eyes are focused on. So the discipline — trained into every racing driver — is to look where you want to go, not where you’re afraid of ending up. Focus on the exit. Trust the car. Steer toward the line.

I was listening to Tony Robbins recently, and he used this exact analogy to make a broader point about focus and performance under pressure. It’s a vivid image. But as I sat with it, I kept thinking: this is also a perfect description of what happens when M&A deals go sideways — and what separates deals that recover from those that crash.

M&A Deals Go Into Spins.
More Often Than Anyone Admits.

Let’s be honest about something. Even well-planned M&A transactions run into turbulence. Key talent walks out the door. Integration timelines slip. Cultural friction surfaces faster than expected. A critical system migration fails. A major customer gets spooked. One or two of these is normal. Several at once? That’s a spin.

And when it happens, the instinct of most integration teams — and many executive sponsors — mirrors that of a rookie driver staring at the wall. Attention narrows to the problem at hand. War rooms fill up. Workstreams multiply. Post-mortem meetings get scheduled before the integration is even finished. Every conversation becomes about what’s broken.

The problems are real, and they need to be addressed. But here’s the risk: when a team’s entire focus shifts to what’s going wrong, the original value creation thesis — the whole reason the deal was done — quietly disappears from the conversation. And that’s when a recoverable situation becomes a genuine crash.

The Value Creation Thesis Is Your Exit Line

In every deal I’ve been involved in — and across more than thirty transactions on four continents, I’ve seen this pattern repeat — the investment thesis established at the start of the process is the most durable asset the deal team has. It answers the question that should govern every decision during integration: “Why did we do this deal?”

Was it market access? New capabilities? Cost synergies? A critical technology? Whatever the answer, that thesis is your exit line. It’s where you’re trying to steer. And when the deal starts spinning, the most important discipline any deal leader can exercise is to drag everyone’s attention back to it.

Not in a way that ignores the problems. The problems are real. But the value creation thesis provides something that problem-focused thinking cannot: a prioritization filter. When you’re clear on what you’re trying to achieve, you can quickly separate the issues that threaten your core thesis from the noise that doesn’t. The former needs urgent attention. The latter can wait, be delegated, or — sometimes — be let go entirely.

Why Problem-Focused Teams Keep Crashing

There’s a neuroscience dimension to this worth understanding. Target fixation isn’t just a metaphor — it reflects something real about how the brain operates under stress. When we’re threatened or under pressure, the brain’s threat-detection system narrows our attentional field. We become hyperaware of the danger and less able to see the broader picture. It’s adaptive in a physical emergency. In an M&A integration, it’s often destructive.

Teams in integration distress often exhibit a recognizable set of behaviors. Escalation loops that never resolve. Decision-making slows because no one is sure of the priority hierarchy. Leadership meetings that get bogged down in firefighting and squeeze out strategic alignment. Individual workstream leaders are optimizing for their own areas without reference to the broader value-creation goal.

All of these are symptoms of a team that has lost its exit line. They’re looking at the wall.

Refocusing: A Practical Approach

When a deal is spinning, the refocus conversation needs to happen at the leadership level first and be deliberate. Here’s how I’ve approached it:

Go back to the investment thesis explicitly. Not as a historical document, but as a living strategic compass. Put it on the whiteboard. Read it out loud if you have to. Ask the team: “Are the things we’re spending most of our time on actually connected to this?” Often, the answer is surprising.

Triage your problems against the thesis. Every issue currently consuming integration bandwidth should be evaluated through a single lens: does this directly threaten our ability to achieve the value we set out to create? If yes, prioritize it. If not, ask honestly whether it deserves the airtime it’s getting.

Reanchor every workstream to the goal. Integration teams tend to develop their own momentum, internal logic, and definitions of success. A spinning deal is the right moment to reset each workstream leader around the central question: what does success look like for this deal, and how does your workstream contribute to it?

Communicate the value creation story, not just the problem list. Internally and externally, distressed integrations often suffer from a narrative vacuum. Leaders become so consumed with operational issues that they stop telling the story of where the deal is going. That vacuum fills with anxiety and rumor. Consistently articulating the destination — why the deal still makes sense, what you’re building toward — is as much a management tool as any workstream tracker.

The Discipline Is the Difference

Motor racing drivers don’t look away from the wall because it’s easy. They do it because they’ve trained themselves to override a natural instinct under extreme pressure. The discipline is the whole point.

The same is true in M&A. It’s not that experienced deal leaders ignore problems. They address them with rigor. But they never let the problems become the entire field of vision. They keep steering toward the exit line. They keep asking: what are we trying to achieve, and are our actions getting us there?

The deals that recover from a spin aren’t the ones with fewer problems. They’re the ones with leadership disciplined enough to keep the value creation thesis in focus when everything else is noise.

Don’t look at the wall.

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