When the Strategy Is Not the Problem

Part One

The hardest conversation a founder at this stage has is the one she has with herself when she realises that another strategy session is not going to do it.

She has done many strategy sessions by this point. Some of them have been useful. Some of them have been expensive. All of them have left her, if she is being honest with herself, roughly where she was before. The plans are sound. The plans are on paper. The plans sit on paper.

What the strategy sessions have not addressed is the quiet, ongoing experience of being the person who has to execute them. She knows how to think about the business. She does not know, in a way that lands in her body, how to be the person who runs it at the next level. The knowing and the being are in different places, and most strategic work only reaches the knowing.

This is why founders at the growth stage often cycle through advisors. Each one offers a plausible version of the missing piece. Each one turns out to be correct in its own domain and insufficient to the actual problem. The founder begins to distrust her own judgement, because surely something should have worked by now. What she does not yet trust is the suspicion that what is missing is not a piece of the strategy at all.

What is missing is her. Specifically, it is the version of her that has not yet been called into being, because the business has not yet required it often enough for her to develop it. The ceiling she is hitting is the ceiling of who she currently is, and it cannot be resolved by another piece of work done to the business. It can only be resolved by work done to her, and by a business that is set up to let her become the next version.

Part Two

The move that changes things, in my experience, is not the move to a new advisor or a new coach or a new programme. It is the move from treating the business as the patient to treating the founder as the patient.

Every founder coaching frame I have seen, and I have looked at many, treats the founder as an instrument. The founder is the one who will implement the strategy. The founder is the one who will hire the team. The founder is the one who will raise the round. The focus is on what the founder will do. What is rarely examined is who the founder is, and whether the person she is has the shape the business now needs.

This is a different kind of work. It requires looking at how she is wired, where she is forcing it, what she is compensating for, what parts of herself she has been asking to work overtime for the last five years, and what has gone underused for just as long. It requires noticing that the version of her that built the business was a specific version, shaped by a specific stage, and that holding onto that version past its usefulness is the quiet thing keeping her stuck.

When the work lands properly, the strategy stops being the problem, because the strategy was never really the problem. The business stops needing a new plan, because it has been waiting for a different founder to run the plan it already has. The ceiling lifts, not because anything external changed, but because the person running it has become big enough to hold the next version.

Continue reading: The Original Reason →

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