Putting money into a company you don’t control, as many early-stage investors do, is an opaque process at its best- like seeing part of the picture through a curtain or a fence. From the outside, you never really know how things are going on the inside of the business. To…

It’s a surprise to no one that startups deal with a high degree of uncertainty. What is less intuitive is how to break uncertainty apart in order to take action on it. Here’s where the Cynefin framework comes in handy, he breaks the spectrum of work into different categories with…

I believe in a big day one. I call it Radical Welcoming and it’s something I’ve thought a lot about along with my colleagues Natty Zola and Zach Nies. We were inspired by a book called, “The Power of Moments” which talks about elevating important moments to make them stand…

Retrospectives or “retros” are commonplace on agile teams. You can hold a retro to look back on an important day, an event, a week, a month, a quarter, a year, and so on. Generally speaking, the longer the lookback, the longer it takes to do the retro, which makes sense…

Now that we are returning to working in-person, companies have restarted meeting for regular offsites. I’m grateful that we are able to connect face-to-face again, and I’m also aware that these are “expensive” meetings, and that the time is best used when it is thoughtfully planned. When I help companies…

Founders start companies for many reasons. It’s usually a mix of motivations, some motivations are in their awareness, others are not. Some come from a place of possibility, of expansion, even from love. I call them motivations in the light. But founders also have motivations that come from deep needs…

One tool I’ve taught many founders in order to help them run better meetings and make decisions as a team more smoothly is what I refer to as Collaborative Stances. It’s a term I got from Zach Nies who adopted it from Peter Senge’s work on Shared Vision. There are…

Cofounder relationships are like all important relationships in your life- they require care, time, attention, and I believe skill, in order to maintain. Rupture and repair is the cycle we all experience with our functioning relationships. Humans are imperfect creatures. What we do and say or fail to do and…

A few years ago, I was in a forum with some CEOs who were talking about various problems they had at their companies. One question caught my attention in particular: “What do you do about the dishes in the sink?” It seems like an innocuous and even boring question, but…