Helping Leaders Shape Culture So Teams Solve Problems & Profits Grow
Change the Pattern...Change the Culture
I spent thirty years co-founding and running one of the largest homebuilding companies in the Midwest. I’m a CPA. I have a PhD. I sold the company and stayed four more years to hand it over properly, which was the hardest and most useful thing I have ever done.
In all of that time, I never once saw a five-year plan survive the next six months.
Not because the plans were bad. Some were very good. Smart people, real numbers, a genuine interest in being right. Every November we put a number on the wall. By July we were running a company that looked almost nothing like the one we had described.
For a long time, I thought that was a planning problem.
Better forecasting. Tighter assumptions. More frequent reviews. We tried all of it. It moved the margins and changed nothing structural. Eventually I had to admit something that should have been obvious years earlier:
The problem was not the quality of the plan. The problem was believing the plan was the thing controlling the outcome.
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A Company Is Not a Machine.
A machine gives you the same output from the same input. A company does not.
A company is a living system, where small things get amplified, large things get absorbed, and timing matters more than most leaders want to admit.
That is not poetry. That is physics.
In 1961, a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz reran a weather simulation using one number rounded from six decimal places to three. Same equations. Same model. A rounding error. A little further out, the forecast was entirely different—an early glimpse of what we now call the butterfly effect, where the smallest change can ripple outward into profoundly different outcomes.
That is my business. That is your business.
The offhand remark you let stand.
The manager you kept six months too long.
The rushed hire in March because you needed a body on the job.
None of those show up in the annual plan.
Every one of them is compounding somewhere in your company right now.
But here is the part that took me years to see:
Chaotic systems are unpredictable. They are not random. They have a shape.
In the math, that shape is called an attractor: the region a system keeps returning to no matter where it starts. Nobody can tell you what the weather will do six weeks from now. Anybody can tell you that Indiana in January will not feel like Florida in June.
Your company has these attractors too.
Under pressure, your organization returns to a pattern. A bad quarter. A missed close. A key person walking out. Different trigger, same response.
Maybe your people go quiet and stop escalating problems.
Maybe everyone gets very busy, and nothing gets decided.
Maybe blame moves downhill faster than information moves up.
That pattern is your culture.
Not the values on the wall. Not the retreat slideshow. Not the hockeystick whiteboard growth chart. Not the version of the company everyone performs when the numbers are good.
I mean what your system defaults to when it is stressed, and nobody is pretending – when the masks are off.
My attractor took me too long to admit. My team went quiet under pressure because I got sharp under pressure.
I thought I was creating urgency. I was teaching concealment.
Silence was the cheapest available response. Once you see the attractor, everything changes.
You stop trying to predict the outcome and start trying to change the pattern and incentives that keep producing it.
One Thing You Can Do Monday
Take the last three genuinely bad circumstances your company has faced.
Different causes. A lost client. A resignation. A missed schedule. A failed product launch.
Write down what your team actually did in the first forty-eight hours of each.
Not what they should have done? What happened?
When you recognize the same behavior three times.
That is your attractor.
It is also, usually, the first honest thing a leadership team has written down in years. It’s quite beautiful in its honesty and authenticity.
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What This Newsletter Is
Butterfly in the Boardroom comes out just about every week.
One idea. One real situation. A job site, a boardroom, a conversation handled poorly, a decision that looked smart on paper and failed in the field.
It is for founders, owners, leaders, and executives running something real, with payroll to make and a plan that keeps shifting underneath your feet.
Over time, I’ll work through five strategic lenses that make an organization more resilient in a system nobody can predict:
- Shorter horizons
- Early feedback
- Reversible moves
- Modular teams
- Portfolios of small bets
None of them require you to know the future.
All of them assume you will NOT know the future.
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