When “We’ll Figure It Out” is no longer an option

There is a phrase I hear in almost every discovery call I run, usually somewhere around minute ten, once the small talk wears off and the real conversation starts.

"We'll figure it out."

It is said with a laugh, sometimes with a little exhaustion underneath it. And I understand it completely, because I have said it myself more times than I can count. It is the phrase of every founder who has ever built something from nothing. It is scrappy. It is resourceful. In the early days, it is often exactly the right approach, because there is no manual for the specific version of the business sitting in front of you, and the fastest way to learn what works is to try things and adjust.

But I want to talk about the moment that phrase stops being a strength and starts being a liability, because I see it happen constantly, and it rarely announces itself.

The quiet shift

In the beginning, "we'll figure it out" means momentum. It means a team that is willing to move, willing to problem solve on the fly, willing to say yes and sort out the details later. That energy is often what gets a business off the ground in the first place.

Somewhere along the way, though, the business grows past the point where that approach can carry it. Maybe it is a second location. Maybe it is the first time you hire someone to manage your team. Maybe it is the moment a founder realizes they are the only one who actually understands how anything works, and there is no version of taking a real vacation without everything slowing to a crawl.

At that point, "we'll figure it out" is not resourceful anymore. It is the absence of a plan worn as a resourceful costume.

What it actually looks like

This rarely shows up as one dramatic failure. It shows up in small, chronic ways that are easy to explain away individually and much harder to ignore once you see the pattern.

It looks like a leadership team that is busy every day and still cannot say what the business is trying to achieve this quarter. It looks like a manager who was promoted because they were good at the job, not because anyone taught them how to lead people, now quietly drowning. It looks like decisions getting made in the moment, over and over, because there was never time to sit down and build the strategy that would have made most of those decisions unnecessary.

None of this means the business is failing. Often it means the opposite. It means the business outgrew the way it was being run, and nobody stopped long enough to notice.

The turn

The businesses I respect most are not the ones that never had to figure it out as they went. Every business starts that way. The ones I respect most are the ones that know when to make the turn, from instinct to structure, from reacting to planning, from "we'll figure it out" to "here is how we handle it, on purpose, every time."

That turn does not require abandoning the resourcefulness that got you here. It requires giving that resourcefulness a foundation to stand on. A clear vision everyone on the team can repeat back to you and get on board with. A plan that stretches further than next month. Leaders who were actually taught how to lead, instead of being left to guess. Systems that catch problems before they become emergencies, rather than after.

If this sounds familiar

If you read this and felt a small, uncomfortable flicker of recognition, you are not alone, and you are not behind. You are simply at the point almost every growing organization reaches eventually, the point where good instincts need a good structure underneath them.

That is the work I do at The Shine Institute. Whether it is a first-time manager who needs the tools to lead a team, or an established organization that has hit a wall it cannot quite name, the goal is the same: turn "we'll figure it out" into something you can actually count on.

If that is where you are right now, I would love to talk it through. You can learn more about the programs at www.ShineWithTSI.com, or grab time directly on my calendar: https://koalendar.com/e/meet-with-valerie-dellocono

Until next time,

Val