Excerpt: Reality Is Unpredictable
How many unforeseen events have blindsided you that never appeared in your original projections?
CHAPTER 1 - REALITY IS UNPREDICTABLE
"Just so you know, Jeff, you are now creating six different timelines."
- Abed Nadir (character), Community Season 3 Episode 4, Remedial Chaos Theory
When The Dream Collides With Reality
On its face, the startup story appears beautifully seductive: a founder gets an idea, raises capital, builds a product and launches it into the market to great success. The vision gleams with clarity. The pitch deck sparkles with promise. The opportunities stretch endlessly ahead. The founder is the hero, setting out with a swagger, brimming with confidence.
Then the dream collides with reality, relentlessly delivering one unpredictable blow after another. Our founder weaves through minor setbacks and major upheavals, valiantly pivoting their vision, strategy, and tactics to respond to each surprise, bleeding money, opportunity and lifeforce with each whack. Eventually, the founder, unable to control the forces swirling around them, succumbs to their injuries. The dream is dead.
The prototypical startup story rests on a rickety foundation of hypotheses, assumptions, risks and dependencies that cause even the best-laid plans to crumble at first contact with the real world. Risk lurks like a persistent devil by your left ear, whispering reasons why you can't or shouldn't move forward. If you don't pay attention, it escalates to shouting. Your environment hurls curveballs at every opportunity: the economy freezes, markets vanish overnight, supply chains collapse, and technologies shift beneath your feet. Your pitch deck anticipated none of these disruptions, yet each one struck with devastating precision. How many unforeseen events have blindsided you that never appeared in your original projections?
The Interconnected World
At a societal level, globalization has woven our world into an increasingly interconnected and complex web. As the saying goes, "when a butterfly flaps its wings," small events in one corner of the globe can amplify into massive, unpredictable consequences elsewhere. A viral outbreak in China or a ship wedged in the Suez Canal can trigger cascading economic crises worldwide. Meanwhile, these same threads of globalization are fraying due to mounting political uncertainty, injecting chaos into highly optimized systems. Most critically, we're witnessing the first significant impacts of the global climate crisis, which will ripple everywhere, driving up costs and creating unavoidable disruptions in our daily lives. These external factors lie completely beyond our control, yet we must navigate them because they block our path to the outcomes we desire.
Understanding VUCA
Our confidence about the future hinges on two crucial factors: how much information we possess about what's coming, and our level of control over our environment. Warren Bennis, a pioneer in organizational leadership, captured this reality with the acronym "VUCA":
Volatility represents the rapid and unpredictable nature of change, describing how circumstances can shift quickly and unexpectedly, even when we have abundant information about current conditions;
Uncertainty reflects the difficulty in predicting future events or outcomes due to insufficient clear information or conflicting data about our operating environment;
Complexity describes the intricate nature of interconnected systems, making it nearly impossible to determine cause-and-effect relationships when pursuing specific results because we can only glimpse disconnected pieces of the larger puzzle; and
Ambiguity breeds confusion and paralysis in decision-making due to unclear realities, misunderstandings, mixed messages and information gaps.
Most obstacles that derail our plans stem from at least one VUCA factor: the market shifts suddenly in response to a political decision (volatility); the duration of an economic disruption becomes impossible to predict during a pandemic (uncertainty); the sales process stalls due to a client's labyrinthine decision-making structure (complexity); or, clients or investors fail to understand your offer because they struggle to fit your innovation into their existing mental frameworks (ambiguity).
The Blind Spots of Optimism
Founders are optimistic by nature, and this optimism fuels our courage to act. We hope for the best, assuming that our carefully crafted plans will lead us directly to the results we want. This optimism serves as both our greatest superpower and our most dangerous weakness.
Optimism has dangerous blind spots, causing us to ignore obstacles that don't align with the story we desperately want to live. Wall Street trader turned philosopher Nassim Nicolas Taleb, after analyzing the mindset that pervaded trading floors during the 2008 mortgage collapse, coined the term "Black Swan" events. These are disruptions that appear to emerge from nowhere but were entirely predictable if not for our cognitive biases.
Michele Wucker extended this framework by defining "Grey Rhinos" as threats we clearly see approaching but refuse to address. Climate change exemplifies this category, with its profound effects unfolding despite decades of warnings. Then there are "Black Jellyfish" risks that are both predictable and high-impact but ignored because they're too frightening or uncomfortable to confront. President Trump's imposition of global tariffs in 2025 perfectly illustrates this last pattern, since he telegraphed these intentions throughout his 2024 presidential campaign.
Some say that VUCA is outdated, with the extreme uncertainty leading to a new acronym coined by futurist Jamais Cascio: BANI, for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear and Incomprehensible. Trade relationships that we counted on for decades are broken beyond repair, shaking the economy and spiking inflation. The news cycle tears through our consciousness like a tornado, whether we want to pay attention or not. A new AI model is launched and billions of dollars are erased for some and created for others. And the fact that we are drowning in data, truthy or true, brings incomprehensible complexity to our everyday decision making. BANI is VUCA on steroids.
In the real world, risk transcends statistical probability. You cannot simply leap into action, hoping that everything beyond your control will align in your favour. Something will happen; you just don't know what. It will be something about what you know you don't know, or what you don't know you don't know, that will eventually become your downfall. You can bet on it.
The world remains fundamentally unpredictable, and risk permeates everything. This inherent uncertainty is precisely what makes startups so fragile.
Goal Setting In An Unpredictable World
From a young age, we're taught to dream big and set tangible goals. This traditional causal goal-setting mindset gives us the confidence to define a specific outcome and then create a plan to make it happen. The SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) is the archetype of this approach. Founders are encouraged to set detailed goals, like a three-year revenue forecast, and then build a plan and gather the resources to achieve it.
This cause-and-effect strategy works well when the world is predictable, because it relies on three key assumptions:
Linearity: The belief that there is a predictable path from where you are now to where you want to be;
Stability: The expectation that conditions will remain relatively consistent while you execute your plan; and
Certainty: The confidence that you can accurately predict future outcomes.
But what happens when the world is anything but predictable? In today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous landscape, this causal approach can be a significant liability.
Why Causal Goal Setting Fails in a VUCA World
The rigid nature of traditional goals is often no match for the realities of modern business. The very things that make SMART goals seem effective can also make them a hindrance:
Volatility: Rapid and unpredictable changes can quickly make long-term goals obsolete. If your goals are too rigid, they can become a barrier to adapting when new circumstances arise. Imagine a startup in Canada that planned its expansion taking for granted the stable 60-year trading relationship with the U.S. A new government is voted in, and within 90 days it reorients the national economy toward a partnership with Asia and Europe. The original expansion plan southward, once a solid goal, is now irrelevant.
Uncertainty: It's tough to set realistic goals when the future is so difficult to predict. The rapid evolution of AI, for example, means product teams are constantly chasing the latest iterations of technology. A key development milestone you set yesterday could be rendered useless by a new technological breakthrough announced this morning.
Complexity: In today's interconnected world, it's challenging to isolate which actions are causing specific results. You may see an increase in revenue or users, but how much of that is due to your efforts versus a general market shift? The dynamic interplay of various factors makes it difficult to draw a direct line between your actions and their outcomes, leading you to make erroneous decisions based on bad signals.
Ambiguity: A lack of clarity and multiple interpretations of information make defining clear, measurable goals incredibly difficult. What's the minimum viable product (MVP) in a crowded market? How do you know if an initial uptick in monthly revenue is a real trend or just a fluke? Ambiguity can lead to blind trust and poor decisions.
Ultimately, SMART goals create an illusion of control in a world that is fundamentally uncontrollable. When conditions are guaranteed to shift unexpectedly, rigid objectives that demand specific future outcomes can set you up for failure. The metrics you choose today may become irrelevant before you even reach them.
A Better Way: Embracing Direction Over Destination
Instead of locking yourself into fixed goals that quickly become obsolete, it's more effective to define guiding principles that give you flexibility and a sense of direction. This isn't about abandoning goals entirely, but about shifting your focus from a fixed destination to a flexible, adaptive journey.
Think of it like using a compass instead of a GPS. You know which way you're headed, but you're prepared to navigate around obstacles as you go, focusing on direction, not just the destination.
Learning becomes a primary measure of progress. Success isn't just about hitting a number, it's about what you discover and learn along the way to give context to your performance metrics. Be willing to question your metrics, asking what they're truly signalling. If your current metrics aren't providing meaningful insights, don't be afraid to choose more relevant ones. Finally, create frameworks for decision-making rather than rigid, step-by-step plans. A framework provides a structured way to make choices in new situations, something a static plan can never do.
The ultimate measure of success is not whether you hit an arbitrary target, but how much you discover and learn while executing your vision. Winners are the ones who get stronger when things go sideways, finding ways to turn constraints into real options through constant experimentation. In a world where uncertainty is the only certainty, flexible direction guided by continuous learning will always beat a fixed target.
This is a draft section of my book-in-progress: “Momentum Scaling: How To Successfully Scale Your Startup In An Unpredictable World”.
Momentum Scaling shows innovative entrepreneurs how to build a profitable, trusted and resilient business by managing uncertainty, leveraging constraints, and maximizing execution — proving you don't need venture capital to build a business that actually works, you need a better strategy.
Chapter 1 explores the nature of today’s increasingly chaotic world and how it impacts startup founders who want to scale.
I intend to share an excerpt of my draft every week or so for the next few weeks. Your comments are welcome.
Davender’s passion is to guide innovative entrepreneurs in developing the clarity, commitment, confidence and courage to enter, engage and lead their markets in an unpredictable world by thinking strategically and acting tactically. Find out more at https://www.davender.com and https://linkedin.com/in/coachdavender .