The success of any business is directly proportional to the velocity of its good decision making.

Velocity is speed with direction, and both matter. Without direction, speed just compounds mistakes faster. Direction is where quality lives, the signal that tells you the decisions you are making are pointing you the right way.

Indecision will kill most businesses, and it has a pattern that good leaders recognise.

• A performance issue with someone central to a key piece of work or team, where addressing it feels too risky so it sits.
• Customer feedback that contradicts the roadmap, deferred into a future research cycle rather than acted on now.
• A product planning process that has become a ritual of refinement, consuming the time of the people who should be building.
• A prospect held in a sales pipeline because the next conversation might finally unlock the deal, when every previous conversation already told you it won’t.

Underneath all of it, a consistent pattern of treating small, reversible decisions as though they carry existential weight such that they get the deliberation of big ones and the timeliness of none.

Good decision velocity starts with clarity on who decides what. Ambiguity about ownership stalls velocity more reliably than almost anything else, usually through no bad intent, with people genuinely unsure if a call is theirs to make. The best operators are obsessive about this. Decisions get made in the room, not escalated. People leave meetings with clear next steps rather than further discussion points.

Those same operators also have a very practical relationship with reversibility. Most decisions can be corrected later with limited cost, and treating them as permanent is what turns discomfort into paralysis. The cost of delay compounds in ways the cost of a slightly wrong call usually doesn’t. The instinct to decide, and to reverse quickly when the signal demands it, is one of the most underrated things a leadership team can build.

Choosing to postpone a decision because the timing is wrong or other priorities take precedence is itself an act of velocity. What corrodes a business is the decision that sits because making it feels worse than not making it. That distinction, between judgement and drift, is worth knowing.

Data informed decision making matters, but there is a large class of decision where more data will never change the outcome you already know is coming. Barack Obama wrote that no decision that landed on his desk had an easy, tidy answer, and that the best you can do is get to 51% confidence and make the call. Most founders and scale-up leaders, if they are honest, are already past that threshold on the decisions they are deferring. Most of these decisions are already made. You know the person isn’t right, the feature needs to be cut, the prospect isn’t going to close. The cost is not in the deciding. It is in the gap between knowing and saying so. Every day that gap stays open the cost accrues in invisible ways. Confidence erodes and time disappears into the wrong things. The window for a clean decision closes quietly. What fills it is a harder conversation, a more expensive correction, and a team that watched it all happen and quietly noted what leadership looks like under pressure.

Your business is as likely to be undone by the accumulation of decisions never made, your backlog of deferred calls, as it is by making the wrong decision. The businesses that survive and scale have learned that velocity is a condition of survival. Every decision made at pace, in the right direction, creates the conditions for the next one to be made faster and with better information. Find the hard decision you have been deferring and make it today. Look honestly at where you have become the decision bottleneck and remove yourself from it. On the decisions that are genuinely reversible, be brave and make the call. The cost of getting them wrong is almost never as high as the cost of leaving them unmade.

Product-Market Fit is the ultimate milestone for a startup. The point at which your product and/or services successfully meet the needs of its target market, creating strong customer demand and sustainable business growth.

In his series of essays on building a $100M ARR business, Brian Balfour posits that Product-Market Fit is in reality made up of four essential “fits”: Market-Product Fit, Product-Channel Fit, Channel-Model Fit, and Model-Market Fit. The underlying premise of Balfour’s framework remains valid and may form the basis of a good growth strategy for your scale-up. Yet it misses one critical ingredient for those genuinely wanting to build a significantly successful business: the Team.

Without an aligned, capable, and well-organised team even the best product, serving the needs of a very large market at exactly the right moment, will fail to reach its potential. This is not just about team culture, although that is a significant part of it. It’s about the intersection of team selection, team capability, and organisational strategy for growth. That intersection is what I define as Team-Market Fit.

What is Team-Market Fit?

Team-Market Fit is more than having talented individuals or a high-functioning team. It’s building a team that understands, cares about, and evolves with your product, market, and the scale of your business. It is ensuring that your team are not just executing tasks but are intrinsically aligning to customer needs, company goals, and the market realities of scaling. It’s a strategic imperative that your team is actively designed to meet the needs of your business.

Strategic Team-Market Fit occurs when:

1. Your team cares deeply about the problem you are solving. They are part of the “tribe” that identifies with your customers and the change you want to make.
2. Your team are engaged with the commercial realities of your market. They understand how your business works and how it makes money – and they adapt and evolve with the market.
3. Your team has the skills and experience necessary to execute at your current stage of business while building the operating system for the next stages.

Without Team-Market Fit, Product-Market Fit is fragile. Misaligned teams often lack curiosity, empathy, and drive; resulting in stalled growth and a rapid drift away from what makes you successful.

At the very early stages of your startup, with your small team, maybe just two or three people, Team-Market Fit is achieved through an osmosis like effect. Your team is multi-skilled, amorphous and aligned by purpose. Progress is rapid. As you grow, that founding group is augmented by new capabilities and people – and the organisational dynamics shift, until you hit a threshold (with as few as 20–25 colleagues) where the osmosis stops working. Your evolution at this stage has to be intentional. If you do not consciously manage Team-Market Fit in the same way as you focus on Product-Market Fit – your scale up will most likely fail.

Passion for the Problem Space

A team that truly cares about the customer and the problem you’re solving is highly engaged. They’re more motivated to go the extra mile. They approach challenges with a customer-first mindset – which, more often than not, leads to better outcomes. This is what organisational alignment is at its core. This is where the value of having a concrete Vision and Mission that anchors the customer in all of your operations becomes critical.

At Current Health (where I was COO for 5 years), we envisioned a world where physical hospitals only exist for emergency and surgical needs; everything else – routine, chronic, and post-acute care – should be delivered in the home. Our mission was to enable that care at home for everyone.

Two sentences. That was enough for the team to understand and connect with what we were trying to achieve, and why their work mattered. Our customers, the healthcare providers, could relate to that too.

Post-COVID-19, the care at home model became an imperative for health systems. However, making the operating of these programmes sustainable was a major barrier. Our technology platform was a key component, but by itself was not sufficient to address that problem. Our team truly understood how health systems worked. We adapted our solution. We didn’t just build software; we solved the real operational challenges with additional services like logistics and 24/7 nurse monitoring of patients. A team that wasn’t bought into our customers’ needs or that limited our thinking to being solely a technology platform would not have succeeded.

Being absolutely clear on vision and mission is foundational to creating Team-Market Fit. It’s how you identify your critical collaborators and how they identify you. You cannot buy this level of engagement. Apathy toward your mission creates friction that slows you down. If the customer need is at the heart of your decision making, you will accelerate.

Engaged with Commercial Reality

You are in business to make money and, over some time period, your company must become sustainable and profitable. To achieve this, there must be a mutually successful value exchange between your business and your customers. Your team has to be aware of how your business works and how the market functions. While vision and mission create purpose, commercial awareness creates discipline and opportunity.

Purpose and commerciality are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are highly aligned. The understanding of the commercial constraints of your customers will force your teams to make better, more focused decisions; particularly in product. It helps you build solutions people will ultimately pay for in the long term and help you better drive that model-market fit.

Markets, however, also evolve – and your team must evolve with them. In high-growth environments, static approaches stall. Adaptable teams thrive in uncertainty, and can create unique opportunity.

How can you build that commercial adaptability?

1. Create the shortest possible feedback loops between your team and your customer. Use interviews, metrics, frontline engagement. For significantly longer than you might expect or desire, CEO-led or founder-led sales matter hugely. Not just because the founder can close the deal, but because they are the best context-holder. That sales interaction becomes a real-time feedback loop between market, message, and product.
2. Follow the money. When you understand how your customers make their own revenue and where their constraints are; you can better see how that aligns to your own product, delivery and business model. Are you a cost center product and thus saving money or a growth engine for your customers? The difference in the potential for your own business model could be massive.
3. Build systems for continuous learning. Use Market reviews, customer insights and retrospectives. These shouldn’t be one-off sessions either. They should be part of your rhythm. A learning team stays close to the edge of what’s changing with customers and can better adapt to their reality.

Aligning Experience with Stage

Misalignment between team members and the stage of the business is arguably one of the most common friction points in the transition from startup to scsale-up stages I have seen. Every hire should match the current stage of the business, while being capable of growing the business into the next one or two stages. That doesn’t mean hiring someone to solve the problems five years out. It means hiring someone who’s been through transitions like the one you’re in.

Hiring a senior leader from a big corporation or your local unicorn into an early-stage scale-up often fails and, frankly, has for me on several occassions. This isn’t because they are not highly capable individuals; far from it. They may be excellent at running systems; but struggle significantly when those systems don’t yet exist. They expect to operate within structure whereas the business needs them to build it.

Equally this is the point of hard decisions. Those at the start of the journey may not be able to serve the needs of the future business as it scales. So often startup leaders have a CxO title, but are not equipped to scale with the company. Loyalty and trust often mean a leader will not act on this, working around the issues. Like a sports team coach the strength of your team means you may have to help your superstar player to adapt and grow or help them move on gracefully.

How to Hire for Scaling?

1. Hire for trajectory, not title. What problems have they solved? At what scale? Is it your Scale? Were they the system builder or simply an operator within a scaled system that worked?
2. Look for scalers, not operators. Scalers can create from scratch. Operators need structure. You need the right balance – but early on, you need builders who will help build and simplify your operating processes. Without this the scale-up treacle gets hold of your organisation, and its a constant grind.
3. Assess colleagues fit through real stories. Ask about ambiguity. Ask how they dealt with chaos. Ask what they built, and how they learned.
4. Match pace and mindset. Can they keep up with the speed and ambiguity? Will they thrive or freeze when things change fast?

Obsession with the Customer

Team-Market Fit is ultimately about the customer. Your team must solve real problems for real people. That means understanding the customer deeply – not just at the front line, but across the organisation. No one should be too far from the customer to understand the impact of the work that they do.

At Skyscanner this was easy. Most of the team would be searching for flights and travel options daily. We were our own customers. Yet in a B2B or B2E product-led org, that is most likely not the case. You need to build frameworks that compensate for this. That teach everyone in the organisation about the reality for your customers.

How to Build Customer Obsession

1. Share customer stories regularly across the whole team. Raw quotes, wins, frustrations – bring the customer into the room. It’s not about decks or polished testimonials, it’s about real voices.
2. Encourage direct engagement. Product, engineering, ops, finance, should all be hearing customer calls, seeing reactions to demos and reviewing support threads. By making customers tangible, that feedback loops is shortened and your team can work for the customer.
3. Align success metrics to outcomes. It’s not just NPS. It’s retention, activation, satisfaction. Metrics need to reflect if the customer is actually succeeding.

Why It Matters

Without Team-Market Fit, Product-Market Fit is fleeting and fickle. The market evolves. Customer needs change. New challenges emerge. If your team isn’t also evolving you will slow down and most like stop completely.

If your team fits the market they become your engine for growth. As you consider how to scale your team from 20 to 200 or 200 to 1000, you must plan for those changes and be intentional about ensuring that your operating system enables them to continue to deliver value to the market.

Team-Market Fit isn’t an endstate. It is a constant reevaluation of whether your team is the right one to make this endeavour a success. It requires constant coaching, adaptation, and leadership.

Getting this right isn’t just about scaling the team; this is the work that gives you the greatest chance of achieving substantial growth and a business that can make £100m+ a year.

At a recent pitching event, I had a brief discussion with a founder at the start of their day. Things had been going wrong for them. They had their elevator pitch ready, yet administrative errors meant they had no set location to engage with potential investors or customers. Understandably, it was getting to them.

A little later in the day, they thanked me for what I had said to them in that moment. In the midst of it all, I’d said:

“I’m sorry that happened. Don’t worry about it. You can’t change it now. You just have to play the cards that you have been dealt.”

It completely changed their day — addressing the spiralling panic and turned it into a success. With their gratitude, I realised that perhaps this is something that isn’t as common as I thought.

Having been a leader in two hugely successful scale-ups, this has often become something I intrinsically remind myself, almost every week. It’s my “go to” for managing the extremely low points thrown at you, as well as some of those extreme highs. Sometimes, no matter how well-prepared you are, things break; systems fail; plans go awry; people let you down. Fundamentally you can dwell on the unfairness of it all – or you can work the problem with what’s in front of you and get stronger.

Everything Breaks Eventually

One of the core truths of any system, and specifically entrepreneurship and scaling companies, is that everything breaks at some point. Teams misfire, markets shift overnight, your software platform fails or your investment deal falls through. You can design the best strategy, but reality doesn’t care about that and the goalposts have just moved.

The difference between those who thrive and those who struggle, isn’t about avoiding failures or hurdles but about how they respond when it the proverbial hits the fan. Do you let setbacks derail you or do you reassess, adapt, and overcome? This is not just about being resilient; having fortitude or even stubbornness, it is being Antifragile.

Introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, antifragility is the ability not just to withstand chaos and uncertainty, but to grow stronger because of it. Unlike resilience, which resists shocks, or robustness, which endures them, antifragility thrives on disorder – adapting, evolving, and improving in response to stress, volatility, and failure. Antifragility allows you to move forward better because of the challenge.

Putting antifragility into practice

It’s one thing to say that being antifragile matters – but how do you actually become antifragile? Here are some of the ways I’ve come to think about it in practice:

1. Detach from the Perfect Plan

You might have wanted or needed that Ace, but you got a Jack. That can’t change and it is out of your control. So the first step is quite simply letting go of the hand you wanted. The “if only’s”, blaming others or looking backwards won’t move you to a winning position. By giving up on what you thought would happen to focus in the moment on what you have and the next possible actions, you can reassess, adapt and overcome. But that will only happen if you let go of your original plan.

2. Reframe the Problems as Constraints, Not a Failure

By reframing the problems, to constraints, you can see it from a more positive approach. Every system has a constraint. Constraints can be exploited, elevated and leveraged. Constraints force creativity. Failures or problems are barriers to overcome, constraints are exciting opportunities.

3. Leverage the Unexpected

Some of the best opportunities come from the moments of breakdown. Many great businesses were built not from initial plans but from responding to failure with agility. Slack, Flickr, and many other business were not borne out of planning, but reacting to the unexpected and challenges in a new way. When your plans collapse, look for new perspectives and original angles for your next move.

4. Build Emotional Agility

Antifragility isn’t just about grit; it’s about adaptability. Harvard psychologist Susan David talks about emotional agility – the ability to navigate challenges with flexibility rather than rigidity. The best leaders aren’t the ones who bulldoze through problems with sheer force; they’re the ones who can pivot their thinking, stay open to change, and keep moving.

The Mindset Shift: From Control to Antifragility

It’s tempting to believe that if we plan well, work hard enough, and anticipate all the risk, have the right structure, we can avoid chaos and simply win. That sense of control is a comfort blanket. Things will without doubt go wrong. The real skill isn’t controlling every variable – it’s learning to adapt and become stronger when control is no longer an option.

The best founders, operators, and leaders don’t just survive the incoming storms, they leverage them. They know that growth isn’t about resisting change – it’s about moving with it.

Next time things break (and they will), don’t waste time lamenting the perfect scenario that didn’t happen. Instead, take a deep breath, look at what’s in front of you, and play the best hand you can.

The latest essay by Paul Graham of YC on Founder Mode has being stirring quite the debate in the tech community. If you haven’t read it, take a moment or to do so.

In what appears to be a deliberate provocative and polarised stance, Graham argues that scaling of a company can’t happen in Manager Mode as certain leadership behaviours critical to growth often contradict conventional management best practices. His boldest claim being that founders, and only founders, have the contrarian superpowers required for effective scaling and that non-founder execs or so-called ‘professional managers’ are imposters and charlatans doomed to fail.

It is easy to get swept up in this Founders vs Managers narrative. For every successful Founder Mode example there are several others that are driving, or have driven, their own companies into the ground. Likewise, while there are definitely some career executives who are not well-suited to the rigours and high-stakes environment of a scale-up, many have been hugely successful at building thriving, sustainable and hugely successful organisations.

Beyond the rhetoric, however, the behaviours Graham outlines – visionary thinking, time protection for strategic considerations and the ability to simultaneously juggle the details of daily operations while still looking at the bigger picture – are extremely valuable in a scaling organisation. They simply aren’t exclusive to founders. These traits define anyone operating in what’s better described as Owner Mode.

Owner Mode: A Mindset for All Leaders

Successful organisations are not built by founders alone. They are built by teams of leaders and employees who act like owners, regardless of their specific job titles. This idea aligns with Harvard Business School’s definition of entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled.” HBS frames entrepreneurship not as a founder nor a specific role or job but as a way of thinking and executing that drives innovation, accountability and resourcefulness.

In this sense, every employee and every leader should adopt Owner Mode, not just founders.

The assumption that only founders are capable of such visionary work narrows the conversation. In reality, companies need leaders who operate with the same deep responsibility and creativity, regardless of position. Some of the most pivotal decisions by people who weren’t there at the inception. As a company scales the task of ensuring a company and product thrives often falls to the leaders. Their deep, focused efforts to drive the company forward are no less valuable because they didn’t start it.

In fact, it’s their Owner Mode mindset that enables them to maintain the same high level of commitment and strategic vision that Graham attributes solely to founders. The key is to instill this ownership culture across the board. In a well-led company, this ownership mentality isn’t just reserved for the C-suite – it’s an expectation for all leaders and influencers within the organization.

A Balanced Leadership Approach

By expanding the concept of Founder Mode to Owner Mode we can foster a more balanced and inclusive view of the leadership behaviours needed for scaling. As leaders we don’t operate strictly in black-and-white categories of Owner Mode versus Manager Mode. With a strong sense of ownership and clear alignment on our goals and expectations, we can adapt our leadership styles to meet the business’ needs at any given moment. This ability to switch modes – balancing situational leadership with a deep-rooted sense of ownership – is what propels companies forward.

For founders who feel like you are the only one operating in Owner Mode, you have a problem – and it isn’t a problem of Founder vs Manager. It is about the lack of an ownership culture in your team. How can you foster that sense of ownership across your organisation? How can you empower your leaders to make the right decisions, with the right level of urgency to drive your success? What would Owner Mode look like in your organisation?

It’s somewhat ironic that I start this thought with a quote from one of the almost endless supply of resources available to teach us how we should build, scale and lead a company. I am a voracious reader, listener and learner who deeply appreciates the wealth of perspectives that come from this. When used appropriately, wisely even, the acquired knowledge allows us to make better decisions and scale faster.

However, this quote has been sitting with me, percolating for a little while. I believe, it reflects a truth about our start-up and scale-up ecosystem. The ease of studying entrepreneurial success contrasts sharply with the challenges of actual execution. While creating and participating in numerous learning experiences for “how to start a startup” and “how to scale” might seem inherently valuable the question I think we have to ask ourselves: Is our desire to act as educators/students serving as a comforting illusion of progress rather than a catalyst for real achievement?

I fully appreciate the wealth of perspectives that come from diverse learning experiences. Engaging with different viewpoints enriches our understanding and the value, when applied appropriately can be huge. There is clearly a need to close the entrepreneurship knowledge gap left by the more traditional educational establishments. Yet, we are inundated with workshops, meet-ups, courses, and accelerators. These experiences are designed to impart knowledge, offer networking opportunities, and lots of good things – yet how many inspire material action or change within the business.

Building and scaling a business demands resilience, adaptability, and primarily the courage to act in the face of uncertainty. It is messy and it is unpredictable. We make decisions with incomplete information, pivot strategies in response to market feedback, and endure significant setbacks all of which are specific to our context. You cannot truly replicate that experience in a classroom, even those created and delivered by ex-operators. In my own experience the challenge is pattern matching in that critical moment and then truly synthesising that knowledge that delivers success.

While education is undeniably valuable, it needs to complement necessary action to unlock growth. Effective leaders will strike a balance between acquiring targeted knowledge and critically applying it. Fundamentally both Skyscanner and Current Health were built on an *execution first* mindset coupled with continuous learning. How can we better support and move towards a bias for action within our ecosystem?

One specific suggestion is maximising access to experienced operators, execs and founders – those that have relative and actively lived the journey – at the point and time of need. This goes beyond mentoring programs, with prescribed approaches and minimal mutual value exchange, to a system that delivers direct support through people with some skin in the game. We need to better help scale-up leadership teams to throw away the notion of boards and advisor panels made up of institutionalised investors and analysts; but to create cross-functional ‘mastermind groups’ that contribute at the right time. These mastermind groups would regularly advise but also lean in to the business as needed. Whether that be for a short burst, like a new, thorny contract review, or for a longer or fractional engagement as the company targets the next inflection point, like setting up for the next funding round. Whatever their nature the engagements are highly execution focused and accelerative for the business, while at the same time helping the leadership teams grow and learn. When you move into the scaling phase post market fit, this would be inherently more valuable than the latest best selling “How to scale” lesson.

(This is a cross-post from LinkedIn – original here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/studying-entrepreneurship-comforting-illusion-progress-lennox-wtpce/)

We have all likely experienced the salesperson having the company’s most successful quarter only to have relatively poor quarters after that; or the product engineering team who pulled off a quick, high quality, high value delivery in one project only to stutter through the next with delays and confusion. An individual or team that performs exceptionally well (or exceptionally poorly) in one period will more than likely see their performance move closer to the wider group norm over time. Such fluctuations in performance is common place across all teams over time.

Sir Francis Galton’s principle of “regression to the mean” is a statistical phenomenon where extreme values in a dataset are likely to be followed by more moderate values. In the late 19th century, Galton observed that exceptional hereditary characteristics in parents (height for example), would not be passed on to their children, whose traits would typically be closer to the average of the population. While not necessarily a universal law, this principle has been considered across a variety of fields broader than statistics and particularly in organisational and team performance, where most complex projects have some elements that cannot be controlled.

In my experience however, this is less a factor of reverting to a mean but one of teams reverting to the Lowest Common Denominator of accepted performance. In this instance Galton’s original description of the principle is more relevant – “regression to mediocrity”. As organisation leaders, and managers of all levels, it is imperative that we counter this effect early and often, continually raising expected standards. As soon as we accept the behaviours of low performance and appeal to the lowest common denominator we will begin to fail.

“It is not our job to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It is our job to raise it.” — Aaron Sorkin / President Josiah Bartlet — The West Wing

For scale-up organisations, particularly those looking to grow rapidly, it is therefore essential to consider performance management strategically much earlier than you’d perhaps feel necessary. And by early, I mean likely not long after the team has hit double figures and certainly no more than 30. Without being proactive, the dynamism and high performance that characterised the early start-up stages wanes and outcomes become seemingly harder to achieve.

A strong Vision and mission, well-defined cultural values and goal setting can be the foundation for successful performance management as much as every other part of the business. By themselves, however, they are not sufficient. In order to navigate this pivotal growth phase successfully, several operational systems and practices need be put in place to focus on raising standards for all.

Instilling Continuous Improvement, Self-reflection and Feedback
A critical component of raising standards is a culture that values both continuous improvement and open, constructive feedback yet avoids any sense of blame. By defining success by an individuals growth trajectory as well as their work outcomes, the employee is rewarded for focussing on performing better. Regular self-reflection and feedback, in a supportive environment that encourages taking on new challenges adds to this, reinforcing their strengths while making space to safely address their opportunities. This is particularly true of positive feedback and the impact of publicly recognising a job well done. This fosters both the resilience and adaptability needed to address the next set of challenges and when faced with unknowns.

Cultivating Robust Management
When poor performance is accepted, that level becomes the lowest common denominator and is pervasive through the organisation. Even your strongest performers recognise they simply don’t need to do as much to be successful. It is not enough to have a performance framework and policies written on paper with managers giving it short shrift or trying not to offend anyone. The core of elevating performance is in active and engaged managers. To thrive, the company needs your leaders to take an active and objective role, challenging their employees to grow and not to accept a status quo. Managers of all levels, must not only act as coaches, mentors and role models but as custodians of excellence. Addressing deteriorating performance, is the hardest part of being a manager but arguably the most crucial to long term organisation health. Implementing clear management guidelines reinforced through appropriate and regular management skills training early can provide the support and toolset managers need to be successful.

Building a growth-led hiring and onboarding process
A strong hiring process is crucial for elevating performance standards. Every person you hire will either add value to the organisation or they will have a detrimental impact on the team. Therefore your hiring processes cannot just assess technical skills and alignment with values, but identify those candidate who demonstrate the capacity for growth, adaptability and ability to influence such that they can inject fresh energy and ideas into every aspect of the team. For many start-ups, hiring processes early are ad-hoc and instinctual or referral based. This is an oversight as the damage by then can be too late. Your hiring process needs to consider the removal of bias from the process, focus on building the powerful diverse people your team, while improving the team with each hire. Equally important is how quickly you can onboard your new employees to self-sufficiency in delivering value in their role. This effectiveness and efficiency in getting people to this point sets the benchmark of expectation for the employees performance for their entire tenure.

Implementing Rotations
Employee Rotations are a strategic tool for injecting and redistributing dynamism and versatility through your team. Systematically rotating employees through different projects, roles and even departments can foster a more holistic understanding of the business, promote cross-functional collaboration while introducing new injections of energy and skills into areas that are beginning to falter. Rotations are a huge motivation to the individual as they develop a broader technical skill-set, stimulate innovative and critical thinking while preventing stagnation that contributes to lowering performance. With each new tour of duty, the employees become refreshed, and re-engaged through the introduction of new learning opportunities and career experience. While often not feasible when the company is really small (although your employees are probably doing at least 5 jobs concurrently), a rotations policy can add huge institutional value while maximising your chances of retaining your best talent.

In the fluid environment of a rapidly scaling organisation, proactively managing performance is not just a nice to have or a “thing larger companies do” — it’s a necessity for long term survival and sustainability. Yet the challenge of maintaining and elevating performance standards becomes more complex with every new employee. By actively choosing to implement core, lightweight operational systems that manage organisational performance early on in the growth curve, leaders can navigate this successfully. Not only will they stave off regression towards mediocrity but primarily lay the foundation for sustained excellence and innovation as the team grows at pace.

Much of the glamour around the technology sector is focused on the start-up phase. That scrappiness and fighting for every inch in the race towards a successful, or not, product launch and market entry. However, for those that have been through it, and those in it, I am sure they will recognise that the Scale-Up phase is significantly harder. The challenges of growth and building a successful operating system for the business become more complex. While at the same time, the risks associated are as high, if not higher. Growth, business process, team expansion, and investor management become the critical areas of focus alongside continuing to build Product-Market fit, commercial traction, and winning.

In all the companies that I support or have supported, we will eventually discuss inflection points — the inevitable time when the fundamentals of a business are about to change, and it can signal either an opportunity to rise or the beginning of the end. The transition from start-up to scale-up is certainly one of these moments. However, it is better described not as a single inflection point, but as a constant stream of large and small discrete changes that often overlap. Decisions and actions here mean that the business is in an almost constant state of rapid evolution. The organisation wants and needs to maintain the appropriate level of agility and nimbleness. This puts more onus on the team to evolve and adapt just as quickly as the organisation.

It is therefore essential to ensure that your team’s ability to adapt to your fast-paced environment is at the forefront of your thinking. When inviting someone to join your team, this is more important at this stage than their depth of technical experience. Knowledge can be learned, it’s harder to learn the attitude and adaptability required to be successful when reality is constantly shifting.

For those embarking on the scale-up journey or looking for an opportunity to join — you have to make an active decision as to whether you are willing, capable, and ready to operate under these conditions. If you can master this, though, the rewards are huge. Your opportunities for your own personal growth can be exponential.

Adaptability is a fairly ambiguous term and many will have a different interpretation of what that means. Over the years these are the traits that make up my definition:

• Flexibility: Are you open to new ideas and able to change approaches based on new information?
• Resilience: Can you quickly bounce back from setbacks, learn and embrace them as an opportunity for growth?
• Continuous learning and improvement: What is your commitment to growth and development?
• Adaptive problem-solving: Are you a critical thinker — with creative and innovative approaches to problem-solving? Can you see unique and original angles to make achieving your objective easier?
• Volunteering in the face of ambiguity: Do you know it's necessary but aren’t sure what or how to achieve it, yet step forward anyway?
• Effective communication: Are you able to change your communication styles to reflect different situations in the support of others?

The one thing I can almost certainly guarantee about any role in any rapidly scaling organisation is that the role parameters of today will be completely different in 6 months' time. It is critical, therefore, that everyone involved is able to adapt to those circumstances.

One approach has been to work with the team to define the principles, behaviours and norms that define how they work together to be more successful. Harvard Business Review defines these as:

“a set of agreements about how members will work with each other and how the group will work overall. These agreed-upon behaviors allow the team to increase its collective performance through healthy debate and clarity of purpose and roles.”

Over this time I have seen a number of these norms independently repeat team after team after team. As I’ve noticed the patterns, I began to collate the intersection and have refined them into a common, general list, that neatly fits in a single page. This is the list I have come up with. Is there anything missing? What would you add? What would you remove?

One Team

The prime directive is for us to ensure that the team is successfully achieving its goals and objectives. We are willing to work outside of our individual specialisms to do this. We measure ourselves as one team over a set of individual contributions.

Agency

We have the necessary capability, resources and tools to be successful. We are highly aligned with the wider mission, goals and principles of the wider organisation. We take appropriate decisions autonomously, without unnecessary approvals. We are fully accountable for our outcomes.

Focus

We deliver customer value outcomes. Outcomes happen when we finish work, not when we start. We radically focus on our current goal, serialising delivery to optimise finishing. Through serialisation we achieve small batches and facilitate learning fast.

Transparency

We are radically open and transparent about everything we do. We actively overshare to provide context and manage expectations inside and outside of the team. We embrace honest and direct feedback.

Simplicity

Simplicity is the cornerstone of scalability. This is as true for our product, technical solutions, sales process, customer engagement etc. as for our methods of working and organising ourselves.

Continuous Improvement

We continuously look at ways we can improve as a team, as an individual and as a wider community. We take the best from others and synthesise it to suit our needs.

Trust

We are smart, rational and capable people; we trust our colleagues and teams to make informed decisions about the best way to move forward. We start from the position of everyone is trying to do the right thing, right.

#FailFast has probably joined the list of business buzzwords; it’s a badge of honour snd symbol of culture for start-ups, scale-ups and enterprises alike. Led by the technical giants of Silicon Valley — like Facebook with it’s “Move fast and break things” slogan — and the Lean Startup advocates, it has become the default poster statement for moving quickly, experimenting and learning as we go. But are we missing the valuable lessons from our successes too?

The underlying intent of failing fast is, of course, to Learn Fast. To execute the items that test our hypotheses and validate our assumptions. In doing so, we get comfortable with failure. We accept that we may be wrong and that will likely not achieve the outcomes we expect. Which is most often the case. We know our aim is to validate that we are on the right path to achieving our ultimate goals. And we will learn this through testing and learning.

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” Eric Reis

As we embrace failure as the opportunity to learn, it is almost inevitable that we spend a lot of time analysing each one. We pour over the data, apply investigative post-mortems, root cause analysis and 5 whys exercises to tease out every possible learning. Failures, however, only really tell us what doesn’t work, what not to repeat; narrowing our available options rather than explicitly pointing us in the right direction.

It is rare that I see the same attention and rigour given to learning from our most successful experiments. It’s easy and fulfilling to take our wins for granted, accepting that we were correct all along, and move forward.

It is an even rarer occurrence that the success is solely the result of the action we took. The context is as influential, if not more so, to the positive outcome. We’ve probably all had the experience of repeating something that worked before, not work again and we’ve scratched our heads for hours to understand what was happening. We needed to better understand the context of the success to guide what we should do next.

When taking a scientific approach we try to control that influence as much as possible — we use laboratory conditions or design controls for the experiment, such ensuring an AA comparison. This is not always as possible, particularly in a world where we are ultimately seeking customer validation. However, we can choose to get below the surface of success applying the same rigour to tell us why the assumptions we made were correct. We can better understand the root cause driving that success.

This focus will help us discover what to do, rather than add to the list of things we should avoid. And this is the significant difference and why deriving the key lessons from our success will provide a more significant insight. Knowing what to do is more valuable than knowing what not to do. When we gloss over the real cause of our success we neglect the opportunity for greater learning, faster.

Success tells us what to do; failure only what we shouldn’t do again.

When was the last time you had a postmortem on a significant success to the same level of detail as your last critical failure?

This is the premise of Antoinette Portis’ powerful children’s book extolling the virtues and power of losing oneself in our imagination to the point it feels real.

And yet, putting each other into boxes is something we seem particularly good at. It is unhealthy. It is unfair. It is a driver of the major schisms in today’s society.

• “I don’t think women fit comfortably into the board environment”.
• “They’ve reached the limit of their scale. We can’t be successful with them in that role.”
• “That CEO, is young, doesn’t know what they are doing. Always making wrong decisions. We’ll do this instead because I know better.”
• “He writes really well even though he’s a technical developer by trade.”
• “He’s the janitor, he can’t possibly be helping send people to the moon. Can he?”
• Etc. Etc. Etc.

What do we really know? Who are we to put people in boxes?

Through the lens of a growth mindset, putting people in boxes – even unconsciously – is quite possibly the most detrimental failing of leadership. Our goal should be break down those boxes and support our team to grow in the directions they want to grow; to be who they are not who we think they should be. Letting their capabilities, their strengths, their growth, their ambitions and, yes, their imaginations rule what their box is. Until we do that we can never have true diversity nor full inclusion.

I am not a box. I’m not in a box. Neither are you.

I’ve struggled with boxes and labels throughout my career. I find them limiting. I have been aware of “Not a Box” since 2012, when I explored pushing myself outside of a particular box that was a limiting factor for me. It gave me the impetus to believe I could choose my own path without taking the exit door as I had previously. Subsequently, I have been lucky enough to find a unique path, that has allowed for exponential personal growth.

Some might say thats because I have not faced the same challenges as I would have if I was not a white male with a middle class background and a good eduction in a wealthy country. They may be right but, isn’t that just another box?

I’ve equally tried to treat everyone as the individuals they are. I am not always successful. It’s something that needs consistent thought and dedication. No one said it was easy. However, when I hit another roadblock another source of inspiration is the video from TV2 Denmark — “All That We Share” that went viral in 2017.

I truly believe we have the capacity to do better.