Hope you enjoyed my last write up about Technology Cycles and The Anti-FOMO Playbook For Web3 Builders. If you missed it, I recommend going back and reading it. I will follow up on it soon.

But today, I have to come back to big lie many founders seem to believe - that is what we can control.

The sad truth is your team doesn't control most of the metrics you're measuring them against. And when you set goals they can't influence, you're not building accountability - you're setting them up to fail and that creates a death spiral for your culture.

The Illusion of Control

Let's be real: as founders, we love control. We build companies so we can create our vision of the world. But this desire for control becomes toxic when we extend it to how we measure performance.

Example: A founder I worked with set a goal for his marketing team: "Generate 500 qualified leads this quarter." Sounds reasonable, right? Heck, I was setting such goals in my early companies

Wrong.

His product had fundamental usability issues. The pricing was misaligned with the market. The competition had just slashed prices by 40%.

The marketing team executed flawlessly—redesigned landing pages, optimized ad spend, created compelling content - but hit only 120 leads.

They were deemed "underperformers" despite controlling none of the major variables determining success in this case.

This isn't promoting accountability. It's promoting the delusional bad habit of hoping for a miracle.

The Math of Team Performance

Think of your business as a physics problem:

Results = (Team Effort × Team Skill) x External Variables

External variables include:

• Market conditions

• Competitive landscape

• Economic environment

• Platform algorithm changes

• Other teams' work

• Consumer sentiment

• Timing

• Luck

Your team controls effort and skill. That's it.

When you evaluate based on results without isolating these variables, you're essentially punishing or rewarding people for luck. It's dangerous because it kills your chance to build an always-learning and always-experimenting culture.

The Anti-Pattern: How To Destroy Team's Morals

The typical startup operates like this:

1. Set ambitious revenue/growth targets

2. Break them down by team/department

3. Hold everyone "accountable" when they miss

4. Wonder why turnover is high and morale is low

I've seen this destroy otherwise promising startups and their cultures:

A SaaS founder I advised set a goal for his customer success team: "Reduce churn to under 3%." The team redesigned onboarding, improved support response times, and created better educational content.

Churn remained at 7%.

Why? The product had critical missing features competitors offered. No amount of customer success magic could overcome this fundamental gap.

The team was penalized for something engineering and product needed to fix. The goals among teams were misaligned.

The Better Way: Controllable Commitments

Elite founders focus on controllable commitments instead of outcome goals. This starts with the fact that great founders also understand the fact that business (even with all our efforts) is a probabilistic game, not a neat deterministic economics equation.

Controllable commitments are:

• Specific actions teams pledge to complete

• Fully within their sphere of influence

• Ideally, measurable in binary terms (done/not done)

• Based on best-available knowledge about what drives results

For example:

Bad Goal: "Increase user engagement by 30%"
Good Commitment: "Ship and promote three new features users have specifically requested by EOQ"

Bad Goal: "Double sales this quarter"
Good Commitment: "Conduct 15 demos per week with qualified prospects in our target market"

Bad Goal: "Achieve product-market fit"
Good Commitment: "Conduct 50 customer interviews and identify the top three pain points by July 1"

My favorite startup guru, Paul Graham, emphasizes that startups win by doing things that don't scale. Similarly, great team evaluation comes from measuring things that don't make for flashy statements - but the daily actions that compound into results.

The Reality of Business Experiments

Here's the truth founders need to internalize: most things you do are experiments with assumed outcomes. That's as true for your strategy as it is for your goals to evaluate.

I've seen founders get the best results by using simple scientific approach:

1. Form a hypothesis ("If we do X, we believe Y will happen")

2. Design an experiment (the team commits to doing X)

3. Measure results (did Y happen?)

4. Learn and adjust

This creates the right accountability framework: teams are accountable for running the experiment, not for whether the hypothesis was correct.

A fintech founder I worked with thrived using this approach. Instead of "Achieve 10,000 new users," his team committed to "Launch three distribution channels and collect data on CAC and conversion for each."

When two channels failed and one worked, nobody was blamed—they were praised for generating valuable data that informed future strategy.

That's how he was building the always-learning and always-experimenting culture.

The Leadership Mindset Shift

This approach requires a profound mindset shift:

1. Accept uncertainty. Most business outcomes have probabilistic, not deterministic, relationships to inputs.

2. Embrace learning over outcomes. The quality of your team's learning often matters more than immediate results.

3. Separate evaluation from compensation. Evaluate people on their commitments, not on results beyond their control.

4. Focus on systems, not goals. Create systems that generate results rather than fixating on the results themselves.

5. Trust your team. If you've hired well, trust them to determine the right actions to take—then hold them accountable for taking those actions.

Implementation: Creating a Culture of Controllable Commitments

Here's how to implement this approach:

1. Start with outcomes, work backward to controllable actions. "We want to double revenue. What can each department actually control that might contribute to that?"

2. Make commitments public. Teams should publicly commit to their actions so everyone understands what others are responsible for.

3. Review regularly. Weekly reviews of commitments keep everyone honest and allow for quick adjustments.

4. Celebrate completion, study results. Celebrate when teams fulfill their commitments, then collectively study whether those actions produced the expected results.

5. Iterate on the process. If completed commitments aren't moving key metrics, reevaluate your hypotheses, not your team's performance.

Hard Truth: Final Thoughts

The need for control is a psychological crutch we all use way too often. It feels safer to pretend we control more than we do.

But great founders have the courage to face reality: you control less than you think, and so does your team.

When you accept this, you can build an organization that focuses energy on the few things within your sphere of influence rather than thrashing against the vast ocean of factors you can't control.

Your team doesn't want to hide from accountability. They crave it. They just want to be held accountable for the right things - the things they can actually impact. And you want to build the always-learning and always-experimenting organisation, because the work becomes more fun and chances of success multiply.

So ask yourself: are you measuring what matters, or what makes you feel in control?

The answer will determine whether your team thrives or suffocates under the weight of impossible expectations.

Build a culture of controllable commitments, and watch as your team achieves more than you thought possible - not because they're chasing arbitrary goals, but because they're focusing their energy where it actually makes a difference.

One controllable commitment at a time. That's how organizations and teams that can "figure it out" are built. That's how great companies are built.

I'd love to hear what you think about this. Any questions? Was this useful? Shoot me an email or just DM.

Till next time, let's BUILD BETTER!

Pete (aka BFG)

Coming Up Next:

In the upcoming essays I'll come back to exploring different theories around market cycles - think Ray Dalio's Debt, Shumpeter's Creative Destruction, Kondratiev's Long Waves.

I will also have a look at what are potential underdog themes and edge ideas that present opportunities for small, fast-moving teams, or where Web2 stands in the same cycles and what that means for the tech incumbents and late-stage unicorns trying to reinvent themselves before the next wave renders them obsolete.

Stay tuned 😉
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