British English has many phrases for changing a plan without drama.
Back to the drawing board: The plan has failed, so we start again.
To change tack: To try a different approach. The phrase comes from sailing.
To roll with the punches: To adjust to setbacks instead of fighting them.
To make the best of a bad job: To get the most out of a poor situation.
Needs must: The situation forces a change, so we accept it.
In 1914, Ernest Shackleton’s expedition set out to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. Its ship, Endurance, was trapped in the ice, which gradually crushed her. Sources differ on the date she finally sank.
The men reached Elephant Island in April 1916. Shackleton and five others sailed a small boat, the James Caird, to South Georgia to get help. On 30 August 1916, the Chilean ship Yelcho rescued the men left on Elephant Island. All of them were rescued.
John Maynard Keynes is often quoted as saying: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Quote Investigator could trace no source for it. The earliest attribution to him it located came from the economist Paul Samuelson, quoted in the Wall Street Journal in 1978.
Keynes did express a similar idea. In a 1924 essay on investment policy for insurance companies, he warned against an investor who “refuses to change his opinion merely because facts and circumstances have changed.”
On 23 June 1925, in a House of Commons debate on the Finance Bill, Winston Churchill said there was nothing wrong in change if it was in the right direction. Then he added: “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
In his lecture “Political Education,” given in 1951, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott compared political activity to a voyage. “In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea,” he said. “The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.”
In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the shipwrecked Crusoe goes back to the wreck and builds a raft to carry what he can ashore. When he finds the carpenter’s chest, he does not stop to open it: “I got it down to my raft, whole as it was, without losing time to look into it, for I knew in general what it contained.”
England’s team at the 1966 World Cup became known as the “wingless wonders.” The name is not quite accurate. The manager, Alf Ramsey, did not give up on wingers at once. Terry Paine, Ian Callaghan and John Connelly all played in the early matches.
Ramsey then changed to a 4-1-3-2 formation for the quarter-final against Argentina. England played the rest of the tournament without a winger and won the final.
The Duke of Wellington is reported to have described his way of running a campaign like this: “Now I make my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot and went on.”
The remark is known only from later accounts, and its wording differs between versions.
Harold Macmillan, prime minister from 1957 to 1963, is widely quoted as saying that politics is driven by “Events, dear boy, events.” Accounts differ on when he said it and to whom.
The attribution has never been firmly established. The earliest printed citation that Quote Investigator located, with the wording “Events, my dear boy, events,” dates from 1984. That is more than twenty years after Macmillan left office.