When it breaks: North Star

Part of the solution has been staring at us the whole time. But first, the problem:

• Teams cannibalizing each other because each part of the organization develops its own implicit understanding of what matters.

• Agency and accountability disguised as defensibility and busyness, while lack of proactivity is the most frequent issue founders face within their team;

• People dragged by the gravitational pull of immediate trivial tasks in a painful continuum without connection to the bigger picture;

• Breaking during scaling;

• Headcount planning focusing on roles rather than outcomes;

Needless to say that part of the solution is something more meaningful than a set of instructions, procedures and, of course, just saying repeatedly to people that you need them to be more proactive or breaking up every fight among two teams.

If we keep solving problems at the ground level but we don’t take the fight a few levels above, they’ll keep showing up.

And the highest level is the North Star, with its business assets - Mission, Vision, Strategic Objectives. I would add Purpose, but I am just building up to the next newsletter.

They’re among those concepts we understood and applied poorly, sometimes doing them just to have them, as it seems customary that every serious business has them.

Of course they don’t work by themselves, it would be amazing for words to have that much power, right, moreover when we’re talking about groups.

And of course they’re just poetry when they’re not done right and left to rust somewhere on the website.

Here's where it breaks and why it breaks

When it’s too vague to be useful

The most common way a North Star breaks is by saying nothing specific enough to guide a decision. "Empower people." "Drive innovation." "Deliver excellence." "Create value." These sound good in a deck, but hey mean nothing in practice.

They’re too wide to clarify. And a vague North Star is worse than no North Star because it just creates the illusion of alignment while everyone pulls in different directions. 

Here's the test: If your mission could apply to any company in your industry, your business might very well just be another branch of it.

When it’s written for investors, not for the team

"Revolutionize the future of work." "Transform how the world learns." "Redefine the financial system.” Sounds amazing to investors, but means nothing internally.

A functional North Star has to serve two audiences. It has to inspire externally and guide internally.

If your team can't use your North Star to make a real decision, but investors love it, you've optimized for the wrong audience.

When it’s not embedded into every aspect of the business

Promising the world to the outside world, but don’t deliver internally on it, daily, makes it a lie. Theranos is the obvious example here: mission ignored by the teams supposed to deliver it, product that didn't work, but an external narrative too valuable to let go.

Teaser into next week: the valuable part it’s just beginning, right after the definiton. That’s the real hard part.

If your North Star isn't embedded in how you hire, how you measure performance, how you allocate resources, and how you make decisions, it's just a poster.

When it’s treated as a disconnected one-time exercise

A lot of companies define their North Star once, usually during a rebrand, a fundraise, or a leadership offsite. They workshop it until they get it perfect to be posted on the website and never touch it again.

No revisiting after bouncing it to reality, no measuring. Oh, we'll talk about the latter.

A functional North Star is a living system. It should be revisited, tested, and refined as the business evolves. Not rewritten every quarter, but not locked in stone either. 

If your North Star hasn't been questioned in three years, it's probably broken.

When Mission, Vision and Strategic Objectives don’t talk to each other

Strategic objectives should be the measurable translation of your mission and vision. They should tell you whether you're moving closer to where you're going.

Say your mission is about accessibility and democratization. Your vision is to become the market leader. Your strategic objectives focus on enterprise revenue and upselling existing customers. See the disconnect? Democratization means serving the underserved. Enterprise revenue means serving the biggest customers. Market leadership could mean either, depending on how you define the category.

When they're disconnected, you get a company that's working hard but not moving forward.

When it doesn’t work as a capital allocation framework

Because your mission doesn’t focus on the short-term profitability “maximise quarterly capital”, it helps build a profitable and sustainable company on the long term instead.

The North Star should be the clear map with impact on: cost structure, customer segmentation, org capability, headcount planning and hiring filter, product roadmap, operational constraints.

It should help you design processes and how you operate. How you do your what to achieve the North Star. And that’s WHY you do everything you do the way you do it.

How to Spot When It's Broken

Here are the signs:

1. Your team can't explain it. Ask five people across different functions to explain the mission and vision. If you get five different answers, it's broken.

2. Decisions get revisited constantly. If the same trade-offs keep coming up and leadership has to weigh in every time, the North Star isn't doing its job.

3. People are cynical about it. If your team rolls their eyes when the mission gets mentioned, you've lost them. The North Star has become a punchline.

4. New hires don't hear about it after onboarding. If the North Star only shows up in the welcome deck and never again, it's not functional.

5. Leadership behaviour contradicts it. If what leadership does doesn't match what the North Star says, the North Star is decoration.

What happens when it breaks.

Friction, misalignment, working hard but not getting anywhere, disengagement, poor decisions, patching, office politics, competitiveness eroded, bigger costs that the currencies can actually comprise.

It’s one of the main reasons people disconnect and disengage.

I think you got the point by now. It’s the blunt dissonance that hits people when they actually see beyond the interviews and onboarding veil, that you’re not actually about what you say you’re about. Trust erodes, as everything seems like a slow play with poor actors.

***

Where We Go Next

Next week, we'll build it. How to define a mission and vision that work together as a North Star. Specific enough to guide decisions, ambitious enough to matter, and honest enough that people actually trust it.

Then we'll make it worth it. How to embed your North Star into the systems that drive behavior, so it becomes the operating logic of how your organization works.