Every leadership team I've worked with believed their problem was unique. Almost none of them were right.

What actually happens is more predictable than that, and more useful. Companies move through recognizable stages as they grow, and the pain a team feels is usually not a strategy failure — it's the friction of running the business you used to be while trying to become the one you're headed toward.

The framework I use for this is Predictable Success, developed by Les McKeown. I studied under him directly for over a year and have been applying it in the field ever since. What follows is the practical version: how to tell which stage you're actually in, and what it costs you to misdiagnose it.

Stage one: Early Struggle

You are trying to prove the thing works at all. Cash is the constraint, the market hasn't confirmed you yet, and the entire company runs on the founder's conviction.

The only question that matters here is whether you can find a repeatable market before you run out of runway. Process is a distraction. Org charts are a fantasy. If you're in Early Struggle and someone is selling you a leadership development program, they're selling you the wrong decade.

Stage two: Fun

The market said yes. Revenue is climbing, the team is small enough to fit in one room, and every decision goes through the founder — which is fine, because the founder is usually right.

Fun is genuinely fun. It's also the stage companies are most reluctant to leave, and that reluctance is the trap. The instincts that make Fun work — move fast, decide in the hallway, hire people you personally like, keep it all in your head — are precisely the instincts that break at the next stage.

Here's the tell: in Fun, the business scales because the founder is in everything. That works right up until it physically can't.

Stage three: Whitewater

This is where nearly every company I get called into actually lives.

Whitewater is the stage where complexity outruns your ability to manage it informally. The symptoms are consistent enough to be a checklist:

  • The same problems keep resurfacing, solved by different people in different ways each time.
  • Decisions that used to take a hallway conversation now take three meetings and still don't stick.
  • Your best people are frustrated and can't quite say why.
  • Leadership meetings are full of firefighting and empty of strategy.
  • Growth is still happening, but it feels heavier every quarter.

Most leaders read those symptoms as a people problem. They conclude they hired wrong, or that the team can't keep up, and they go looking for a different VP.

That's almost always a misdiagnosis. Whitewater is a systems problem wearing a people costume. The company outgrew the informal operating model, and no one replaced it.

The fix is unglamorous: install just enough process to make the recurring decisions repeatable, and no more. Companies fail Whitewater in one of two directions — they refuse process and stay in permanent chaos, or they panic and bureaucratize, which kills the thing that made them good in the first place.

Stage four: Predictable Success

This is the goal, and it's the only stage where you can genuinely scale.

Predictable Success means you can set an objective and hit it — consistently, without heroics, without the founder personally rescuing the quarter. You've kept enough of the Fun-stage energy to stay creative, and added enough system to stay reliable.

The critical thing to understand is that Predictable Success is not a destination you arrive at and keep. It's a state you have to actively maintain. Companies that stop maintaining it drift into the Treadmill: still profitable, still efficient, and slowly suffocating under their own process. That's how a good company becomes a boring one, and then a vulnerable one.

Why the diagnosis matters more than the plan

Here is the practical value of all this, and the reason I keep using it.

The interventions that fix one stage will actively damage another.

Bring rigorous process into a Fun-stage company and you'll crush the momentum that's working. Bring Fun-stage informality into Whitewater and you'll pour gasoline on the chaos. Push a Treadmill company toward more efficiency and you'll accelerate exactly the wrong thing.

So when a leadership team tells me they need a growth strategy, my first question isn't about the market. It's: which stage are you actually operating in, and which one are you managing as though you're in?

The gap between those two answers explains most of what's frustrating them.

What this looks like in a room

When I run this with a leadership team, the exercise is deliberately simple. Everyone places the company on the curve independently, without discussing it first. Then we compare.

The disagreement is the finding.

I have watched a CEO place the company in Predictable Success while their head of operations placed it in Whitewater and their head of sales placed it back in Fun. Nobody was lying and nobody was stupid. They were each experiencing a genuinely different company, because the business had grown unevenly and no one had said so out loud.

That's a thirty-minute exercise that reframes a year of arguing.

Most companies don't need a new strategy. They need to agree on where they actually are — and then act like it.