The Founder Ant

Find North without abdicating your leadership

One of the things that I’ve noticed is that it’s really difficult to define North when you are starting something new. There simply isn’t enough information to do it.

So what do you do?

Many would say that the problem is North isn’t often something you can fully define until you go down the road a bit. Much like it’s described in the book Imagine Inc., you can’t contemplate going down the road as an abstraction. You must actually go down it to understand all of the complexities.

So, rather than pretending we know what North is, we gather our teams and forage forth, like an ant, feeling our way through the fog.

Under the flag of “lean startup” or the apparent perfection of hypothesis testing, we empower our teams to begin testing, foraging, and finding their way North as a team. But that’s a dangerous bit of business. If you test everything, isn’t it abdicating your very role as a founder.

Where do you draw the line between being a leader and abdicating leadership for the sake of experimentation?

The siren song calls many Founders to begin letting their team test various hypothesis. As a team feels their way forward, they, having been given no clear definition of their destination, begins to create North in their own mind. It’s a safety thing. One needs to know where they are going before they head out on a bunch of trails — it’s human nature. The problem is, heading out without knowing the destination results in the potential for each team member to be creating their own reality.

And when there are multiple Norths, there is no North.

And even though everyone is operating with the best intentions, the result is that the team begins to split. At first, the changes aren’t even noticed, but small problems grow in big problems. Differences in ideas turn into differences of perspective and ultimately fiefdoms form, alliances form, and the “team” dissolves.

Worse yet, the Founder loses control.

And if you get to this point in your startup, like I have, you need to know that a Founder has a duty to define the immovable, immutable North of their own company. These are the things that the Founder believes in and are not necessarily subject to group think.

But does this mean that Founders must blindly define North in the face of hypothesis that truly do need to be tested?

No. But, it does mean that if North is what’s in question, the Founder is the only one who should be going down that road. If you’ve raised money, hired people, or started down the road before you’ve truly defined North in your heart, then you’ve set yourself on the road to pain and suffering. It’s for this reasons the the Founder, or Founders, that must take the road less traveled by alone.

Be the ant you wish to seek. Then forage until you find your own North.