In the midst of a deep, sweeping, and sizzling change, small things will appear. It’s hard to know in the moment how to make sense of them. As a leader you will have to decide whether they are worth pursuing, whether they are an opportunity that needs your attention. Not every small thing rises to this level but every once in a while, one will.

Here is stunning example from this past week.

The BBC reported that the Alawite sect, the Islamic group behind Bashar Al-Assad, the brutal dictator and president of Syria, has released an eight-page document. These eight pages are an overview of the group’s rejection of Al-Assad, the assertion of a “third way” of Islam apart from Shia and Sunni divisions, and perhaps most astonishingly of all, the acceptance of a democratic, pluralistic, and liberty-based approach to governance and the body politic.

No one knows who wrote the document.

If you’ve kept up at all with the Syrian civil war and its effects around the Middle East, to say nothing of radical Islamic terrorism around the globe, you’ll begin to sense the enormity of what these eight pages could mean.

A leader will need to choose–should the document be treated as real or not? If the answer is yes, a string of actions should follow. If the answer is no, then that’s it. The day moves on.

Either way, The River flows.