Most ambitious founders know the feeling: the business is growing, but nowhere near what you know is possible. The sensible fixes — new hires, better processes, pushing harder — bring partial results at best. What’s actually missing is a different kind of move altogether. This essay explains what that move is, why most leaders avoid it, and how to make it real.
The business that should have been roaring
We all had to wait until Bill, the founder, had finished his rant.
Day 1 of the team offsite. He’d snagged the seat by the door. No escape.
He wasn’t ranting because his business was failing. It was growing at a decent 10% and had a true 10X opportunity thanks to an innovation whose time had come.
That was precisely the problem, and I’ve seen this tension in many ambitious leaders:
Your business may be growing solidly but you know a much bigger future is possible … yet the organisation feels underpowered to make that quantum leap.
🚗 The car is trundling along, stuck in third gear, but you want to be racing in fifth. 🏁
Back in the room, Bill’s execs nervously sipped their coffee as he lamented the mediocrity in the business. Nibbled their snacks as he lambasted their own lack of ambition. Cast anxious glances as he berated himself for failing to fix this earlier.
Turns out, this wasn’t a new rant. It was a regular fixture of being on Bill’s team.
And like Bill, you can see the symptoms and it’s frustrating as hell.
Perhaps it is a lack of passion and ownership, mediocre standards, or chronic busywork and lack of focus.
So you’ve probably tried to shift gears:
- New hires. It helps, but doesn’t change the dynamics.
- Pushing harder. Things move faster — until you run out of energy.
- New strategies. There’s excitement, but no real acceleration.
- Better processes. People tick boxes, but the leap forward doesn’t come.
All these things seem promising, but the results feel partial, temporary, exhausting or slightly inadequate.
The engine might be revving faster, but the business is still in third gear.
You don’t need more sensible moves
“If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” – Eisenhower
We’re so close to the business we often define the problem too narrowly and in too small a frame.
So we look at the surface issue and optimise as best we can:
Looks like poor execution? You tighten process.
Looks like weak ownership? You push your team harder.
Looks like lack of capability? You hire.
Each of those moves may help. But until you expand the frame, your sensible solutions are only ever going to bring temporary or partial results. Because you’re really only alleviating the symptoms of a bigger, deeper issue.
The problem is, the bigger frame usually reveals a harder move.
It’s easier to claim a problem is insoluble than to admit you’ve defined it in a way that protects you from the conversation, decision, or commitment you do not want to make.
And even if you make that move, you’ll be tempted to roll it back, give up, or undermine it before you’ve built the necessary leadership muscle to hold your nerve.
Which means what you actually need is this:
Scarier moves,
made repeatedly,
with a cadence fast enough for your ambition.
Imagine you want to get fit.
A sensible move might involve deciding to take up running, or signing up for a gym membership. You might get a little fitter, but chances are it won’t transform you.
But a scary move might be signing up for a marathon and immediately asking all your friends and colleagues to sponsor you in support of a worthy cause.
You shift gears immediately.
The frame has changed.
The stakes have changed.
Your very identity has changed (you’re now a marathon runner).
And by going public, you’ve made it highly likely you’ll follow through.
The power of a Defining Move
To help my clients make moves that break the limits of their current box, I teach them what I call Defining Moves.
A Defining Move is not just a good intention. It solves the larger problem and changes the conditions enough that a different future becomes more likely.
Signing up for a marathon is a Defining Move. You are no longer someone who would like to get fit. You are now someone publicly committed to running a marathon.
That’s why Defining Moves are powerful.
They force you to step up to the next level.
They are how you shift gears in your business.
But there’s a catch.
The move you can’t quite make
When we first met, Etienne knew his business needed a big investment so it could scale properly.
He’d pitched his investors but they weren’t interested. He tried to make organic growth work. No joy. He pleaded, argued and ranted to the shareholders, again and again.
He was not asleep at the wheel. He was trying. But he was still stuck.
What trapped Etienne traps many leaders:
First, Defining Moves are hard to see, because they live outside your frame of reference.
You can see the visible symptoms in your business. But if the root cause involves your own timidity, small thinking, fears or leadership patterns, then the solution is sitting right in your blindspot, waving at you while you stare determinedly in the other direction.
Second, they are hard to do, because you need courage to push past your fear.
Even when you sense what needs to change, it’s far too easy to make a smaller, more manageable move instead. Another ‘sensible’ move that doesn’t quite create the leap.
So the business stays in third gear, and the frustration keeps resurfacing.
In Etienne’s case, he was worried about his mortgage and providing for his young family. Legitimate concerns. But they were actually trapping him in timid, half-hearted action, not protecting him.
You can’t do this alone
The very moves that would most change your trajectory are the ones you are least well positioned to see, and least naturally inclined to make.
That’s why you won’t regularly make Defining Moves by yourself.
You need outside perspective to show you the move your current frame keeps hiding from you.
And then you need enough challenge, consequence and accountability to make the move real, without drifting back to the old pattern when things get uncomfortable.
Only after deep coaching conversations, where Etienne faced and overcame his fears, did he identify and make his Defining Move. He submitted an unsolicited bid to buy out the business. He’s now scaling hard and on his Series B.
But who will support you in your Defining Moves?
Not your obvious stakeholders like your board or team. They’re inside your existing frame and part of the system.
And not a typical CEO peer group. They’re great for ideas, connections and advice, but Defining Moves require something else: deep challenge, identity-level truth-telling, and someone willing to say the hard things:
- “You already know the move. You just do not want to make it.”
- Or even: “That next step you just committed to is bullshit.”
My experience is that this requires a very different structure: a discipline built to help you spot the move, face the fear, and make it real.
Your next Defining Move
Six weeks ago, Jacqui was bristling with frustration. She’d built a strong, innovative firm, but the marketing function was underperforming. In fact, it never had performed; that team had been the problem child of the business for years.
As founder, she’d got used to plugging the gaps herself. She was fed up with being the lynchpin, but she felt she’d tried almost everything over the years.
And that was what she brought to our meeting.
I received a voicemail from her today. She’d had a planning session with the marketing team earlier this week:
“It was amazing. I can really see the quality in the team coming through now. Lots of work still to be done, but the questions are better, the ideas are better. They have a tight plan. My frustration has gone. And it wouldn’t have happened without you all.”
What changed?
Five weeks ago, Jacqui got clear on her Defining Move.
Because, six weeks before, she’d stepped into a discipline that made these moves almost inevitable.
Introducing the Crucible Alliance
Because most rooms are not designed to surface and force Defining Moves, I created the Crucible Alliance:
A private circle of founders and CEOs who are serious about a quantum leap, and committed to the Defining Moves it requires.
Six times a year, we gather for an intense online working session – a Crucible – and tackle a pivotal theme: ambition, ignition, influence, team excellence, organisational leverage or strategic focus.
Each Crucible is designed to result in a Defining Move that forces a shift over the next 60 days:
1. Distill — you use a fresh lens to uncover the hidden bottleneck in your business
2. Hammer — in a structured peer process, you pinpoint what you’ve been avoiding
3. Forge — you sharpen that into a Defining Move, rather than another good intention.
This isn’t a forum for discussion, networking, or collecting ideas. It’s a decision-making room designed to turn insight into movement, alongside peers who want to see you win.
In our last Crucible, Jacqui saw her marketing challenge in a new light. The issue wasn’t that the team lacked ability. It was that she was stepping in too often, driving too much, and bypassing their accountability.
She made her Defining Move. She gave the marketing function 60 days to meet a specific set of performance standards, while removing herself from day-to-day decision-making. And as the work unfolded, she drew on the Alliance at critical moments.
The team responded far better than she expected.
Now, the Crucible Alliance is not for everyone.
It’s for founders and CEOs leading substantial businesses, who are committed to making a quantum leap, and who value challenge, honesty, and momentum more than status or talk.
Don’t drift along making sensible but incremental moves. Make this the quarter you establish a discipline of Defining Moves.
Joining the Alliance might actually be your next Defining Move. It closes the escape hatches of drift and deniability, and makes a different level of progress much harder to avoid.
Ready to find out if the Alliance is the right room for you? Contact us and let’s speak. If it feels like a fit, I’ll invite you to one of our next Crucibles so you can experience it and decide for yourself.
