Today’s column is a continuation of the column on reaching the Complexity Horizon. It’s part of a series I call “Leading Through Complexity.” Which is about the challenges that young companies face when they transition from starting up to operating – or as I often say – when they stop talking runway and start talking altitude.
Future Perfect Tense: is a verb tense used to describe an action that will have been completed before a specified point in the future. It is formed using “will have” followed by the past participle of the main verb.
Please allow a very brief plug here. If you are interested in knowing more about this subject, I offer a short course on how to lead a company through this transition with your finances and sanity intact. It is meant for founders and their management teams. If you are interested, please contact me through LinkedIn.
So, last time we discussed how to know when you have hit the Complexity Horizon. And why, it is actually “A Thing” and that arriving there is not a mark of failure but rather a reflection of success. But we also talked about the fact that having arrived there, the approach that got you that far, stops being effective at taking you farther.
That’s because you have hit a point where traditional planning stops being effective because the nature of the problem you are trying to solve has changed because beyond the Complexity Horizon linear thinking starts to break down. There are too many uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) variables. The future becomes foggy, things like detailed plans, rigid roadmaps, step-by-step Gantt charts — just don’t seem to be working any more. In fact, maintaining those project management tools seems to generate more work – and makes the problem worse – rather than streamlining and guiding the process.
So, what does a founder do then?
If you are that founder this is where you have to take a deep breath and start thinking outside the box you have been living in while you have been starting up your company. You have to give up on the idea that you get where you want to go by making detailed plans and sticking to them. In fact, you have to realize that now the answer lies not in trying to predict the path ahead — but in focusing with clarity on the outcome you want, and the conditions that must be true in order to get there. And on communicating those clearly to the rest of the team.
This represents a major shift in thinking because most founders are taught that proper planning is a linear process. Define near-term goals, which lead to the next set of goals, that lead to the next set, according to a well-defined ordering of events with a clear “task list” or “statement of work” or more simply as The Plan. Founders learn early the maxim that if “They fail to plan, they plan to fail.” And this approach works very well — until it doesn’t.
In a Complicated (but well defined) environment, like launching a new version of your website or manufacturing a well-defined piece of hardware, detailed plans are effective and essential. You can define the work, assign tasks, track progress, and adjust as needed. These are systems where cause and effect are visible. Input A leads to Output B. Linear progress is possible.
But once you cross the Complexity Horizon, that clarity disappears. Feedback loops start emerging that you did not know existed. Customer needs evolve mid-project. Team dynamics shift. Employees leave. New employees arrive. Governments change and with them funding programs. Customers refuse delivery of contracted items or go bankrupt before they can pay. Launch dates slip. Etc. etc. etc. The environment changes faster than your detailed planning process can keep up.
The problem then gets exacerbated when you start putting more and more effort into adapting the plan to the ever-changing situation. When departures from expectation occur, your first reaction is to collect more data, and analyze where the variance came from. Then, adjust the plan to get back to the expected trajectory and get going again. Except that in the time it takes for you to complete that analysis, the situation has changed again, and your new plan is already out of date before you start to implement it.
Effectively, an approach that treats a plan as The Plan, as the only available path forward becomes brittle — and misleading. The more complex the system is, the more likely it is that your plan will collapse not because it was poorly made, but because it assumed that the world would hold still while you execute.
It won’t.
To overcome this a founder has to make a subtle but profound shift in their thinking. Instead of asking, “What’s our plan?,” they need to start by asking: “What’s the outcome we want?”
By outcome, I do not mean a milestone. I do not mean a list of completed tasks. I mean a clear picture of what success will look like when it happens. It means asking the question. “If I closed my eyes and opened them 3 years from now – what would the company I want own look like.”
It is vital to reduce this down to the essentials. A three-page list of “success metrics” will not do it. Nor will a five-sentence paragraph with notional statements of the company’s vision.
An outcome has to be a real state of affairs. It has to be the thing that founders want. It has to be, in effect, the reason they started the company. It has to be something that they will know categorically when it has been achieved.
Now, an Outcome is a very long-term and general thing. How does setting that help a founder decide what to do tomorrow. Well, to get there you have to ask second key question, which is: “What would have to be true for that outcome to become real?”
This is the core of what I call Future Perfect thinking — not just worrying about where you would like to end up, but what has to have happened when you arrive. So, instead of laying out a step-by-step path, you focus on building the conditions that make success possible – in ANY way that is, or becomes, possible.
This doesn’t mean being vague or hands-off. Instead, it means becoming very clear about what matters, but it means letting the team find the best way to deliver it — especially as the situation evolves. In other words, don’t focus on the road in front of you, focus on where you want to go. But train a team that knows how to follow your directions.
This is a significant shift in thinking because in the early days of a startup, founders pour their energy into a few key tasks: making those first sales, getting the product to work reliably, and building initial customer relationships. The problems are clear, and the solutions are often direct.
But as the company grows, the nature of these sorts of tasks evolves. The challenge shifts from simply generating sales to optimizing the sales cycle, ensuring deals close faster and more predictably. Instead of just making a product work, the focus shifts to making it work efficiently improving margins, scaling production, and reducing costs.
This is where the founder’s role needs to transform. The person who was brilliant at finding those early customers might not be the same person who excels at streamlining the sales pipeline. The technical genius who understood every nuance of the product might not be the best at leading large-scale production.
In other words, growth often means adding another layer of people—specialists who can do these jobs better in the context of a larger, more complex organization. The founder must shift from being the hands-on problem solver to the leader who builds and leads a team of experts.
This is the essence of leading past the complexity horizon: recognizing that the skills and strategies that got you through the startup phase need to evolve. There are other people who are better suited and better trained to handle some of the jobs you have had to learn – and which you took pride in learning. Once you have crossed the Complexity Horizon it is time to stop doing and start leading
And leadership beyond the complexity horizon isn’t about foresight. It’s about clarity. Clarity of intent: What are we trying to achieve? Clarity of constraints: What must be true to get there? Clarity of priorities: What are we working on TOGETHER and how do we know if we are making progress?
Leadership beyond the complexity horizon is about establishing clear expectations and creating an atmosphere in which your team can meet them. It is not about weekly progress meetings in which the leader provides detailed instructions. Because in complex systems, the best path often only reveals itself after several attempts. When it becomes clear that the original plan is not actually going to achieve the leader’s intent, the team needs to know how to adapt and reorient and keep moving forward.
Leaders who insist on alignment around the outcome — but who allow for intelligent adaptation — give their teams the space to succeed. And remember Leadership is – The Art Of Influencing Human Behaviour So As To Achieve The Mission In the Manner Desired By The Leader.
This is hard. Especially for founders who built their early success on execution. But at a certain point, your value is no longer measured by how well you manage the plan. It’s measured by how well you align your team to the outcome — and how resilient that alignment is under pressure.
So, if you’re leading a company that’s beginning to wobble under the weight of its own complexity — you’re not failing. You’re evolving. Your new job, now, is not to push harder. It’s to lead with clarity.
