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Minset

Starting point

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Mindset (yours, the customer, the team)

Place this before value chain.

Reason: Mintzberg, burnout, and tacit knowledge live at the mental model / behaviourlevel.

This is where you talk about:

Founder pattern‑making vs over‑control

Effectuation origins vs the need for light planning

The mental stance of the customer and the team around change and focus.

Here’s an updated Mindset section with:

Siren / shiny objects

Effectuation

Tyranny of small decisions

Clear link to complexity and abandonment

Plus a richer question set

I’ve kept as much of the original flow as possible.

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Mindset (yours, the customer, the team – and the Siren)

When strategy execution stalls, most founders look first at tools, processes, or people. Underneath all of that sits something quieter but more powerful: mindset. Not the generic “growth mindset” from LinkedIn, but the very specific ways you, your customers, and your team think about focus, trade‑offs, and change. Those mental models, more than any software, decide whether strategy makes it off the wall and into daily work.

As a founder, you probably built the business the way Mintzberg describes strategy: like a potter at the wheel. You had an intention, you worked with the clay that was in front of you, and you adjusted as you felt what was possible. That mix of intention and emergence is what got you here. The problem is that, as the business grows, that pattern lives mostly inside your head. The team sees the finished pots; they don’t see the thousands of small adjustments you made along the way. If your instinct is to stay in control and keep the pattern to yourself, you become the only person who can “feel the clay” – which guarantees bottlenecks and slows every decision.

On top of that sits the Siren: shiny object syndrome. Early on, effectual thinking kept you alive – you tried things, followed opportunities, and said “yes” because any revenue was better than none. You were doing what Sarasvathy calls Effectuation: starting from what you had and seeing what you could make of it, rather than running a five‑year plan. That effectual mindset is still valuable for sensing opportunities – but in a mature SME, unfiltered yes becomes a growth killer. The Siren shows up as new product ideas, new tech, new channels, new partnerships, and “can we just add this one thing for this one client?” Each one looks small on its own. Together, they quietly drag the ship off course.

Economists have a name for this: the tyranny of small decisions. It describes situations where lots of individually sensible, local choices add up to a big outcome that nobody would have chosen if they’d voted on it explicitly. That is what happens when a founder keeps saying yes to one more feature, one more exception, one more “quick” experiment. No single yes is the problem. But taken together, they create a business model, an operating system, and a workload you would never design on purpose. Effectuation got you here; the tyranny of small decisions is what happens when you never pause to step back and decide what to stop.[

everydayconcepts⁠

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Your customers bring their own mindset to this. If you’ve spent years saying yes to every request, many of them now assume that you’re a custom shop, not a focused business. Their mental model is: “If I ask, they’ll make it work.” That expectation quietly multiplies complexity. It creates edge‑cases, special deals, and bespoke processes that your systems were never designed to handle. Until you change how you position your value – and where you’re willing to draw lines – your customers will keep pulling you away from the strategy you say you want.

Then there is the mindset of your team. Most SME teams are full of capable people who have been trained to follow instructions, not to understand strategy. They know what to do, but not why you chose those customers, those standards, or those trade‑offs. When the why is missing, people fill the gap with their own assumptions. Some play safe and escalate every decision back to you. Others improvise in ways that feel helpful locally, but quietly pull the business off course. In both cases, the result is the same: you spend more time firefighting and less time on the future.

The goal here is not to attack anyone’s mindset. It is to make it visible. Once you can see how your own default patterns (including the Siren), your customers’ expectations, and your team’s assumptions interact, the Wall‑to‑Wallet gap stops being mysterious. It becomes something you can name, discuss, and eventually redesign. Effectual instincts are not the enemy. The task now is to keep the curiosity and experimentation, but run it through a simple filter: “Does this new idea strengthen our chosen position, or distract from it?” The chapters on simplification and abandonment will give you the tools to turn that filter into a habit.

Questions to test for mindset and Siren traps

In the last 12 months, how many new offers, features, services, or “one‑off” exceptions have you added – and how many have you deliberately retired?

When a “great new idea” appears (new tech, new niche, new partnership), what filter do you use before saying yes – or do you mostly decide based on enthusiasm and gut feel?

If your three best clients sat together and described what you are brilliant at, would they say the same thing – or three different things?

When your team brings you ideas, do you mainly reward more (new projects, new initiatives), or do you also reward people for protecting focus and saying “no”?

Right now, are you training people to think and decide with your “why” in mind, or mostly to follow tasks you hand them?

If you paused all new ideas for 90 days and only doubled‑down on what is already working, what would actually change in your results – and in your stress?

You won’t see yourself in every question, and you don’t need to. The point is to surface the mental models that are quietly adding complexity, so later in the book you can decide, deliberately, which ones to keep, which to refine, and which to abandon.

Mindset quotes from Simon Synek

Rather than shiny object syndrome

https://coda.io/d/Tropical-MBA_d_m7Mbwa-9V/742-Shiny-Object-Syndrome_sub7SxXk#_luS2zDAh⁠

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“Earlier, in the Building Sandcastles chapter, you saw how key‑person dependence is the number one risk in your house. VRIO’s ‘O’ – organisation – is really asking the same question: have you converted critical tacit knowledge into capabilities the business can run without you?”

May actually shift this after value chain

Option 1 & 2

5. Mindset: Yours, the Customer’s, and the Team’s (400 words)

Execution requires alignment across three mindsets:

Founder: clarity on what success looks like

Customer: what they actually value (not what you assume)

Team: understanding how their work connects to strategy

Quick diagnostic: Where’s the misalignment?

There’s a name for what the Siren does to a growing business: the tyranny of small decisions. Economists use it to describe situations where lots of individually rational choices quietly add up to an outcome nobody wanted. That is what happens when a founder keeps saying yes to one more feature, one more exception, one more “quick” experiment. No single yes is the problem. But taken together, they create a business model, a tech stack, and a workload that you would never choose if you sat down to design it from scratch. Effectuation got you here; the tyranny of small decisions is what happens when you never pause to step back and decide what to stop. everydayconcepts +1

Drucker’s idea of planned abandonment is the antidote to this tyranny. It forces you to make big, explicit choices about what to keep, what to refocus, and what to stop, so that a thousand tiny decisions don’t keep deciding the future of your business by accident. drucker +1

Pivot post reasearch

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/14f0cc5CkWKSioRsjdNtnX-3AcehvgyC_DTOuAEqiOdc/edit?usp=sharing⁠

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You don’t need to segue on the page; you’re right to just change the chapter content and move on. The reader never saw the earlier framing. What matters is that this topic now does three jobs for C = Clarify:

Shows how their starting point → founder mental model.

Shows how that mental model shapes team culture and customer experience.

Leaves them with a clear self‑diagnosis of what’s running their business and what may need to change.

Here’s a concrete way to do that, using your Iceberg doc and staying close to the tone of your LinkedIn piece (the “architecture of your decisions” idea).

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1. Keep customers in, but as a mirror

Rather than dropping “customer” entirely, you can make a short, sharp link like this in the chapter:

Customers absolutely have their own mindset. But in an SME, what they believe about your business is mostly a reflection. Your starting point as a founder – and the mental model it created – shapes the culture, and your culture shapes how you speak to customers, what you promise them, and what you tolerate from them. Over time, that’s what trains their expectations.

So you still name customer mindset, but you don’t try to analyse it in full here. You simply show:

Founder mental model → culture / team behaviour → customer expectations. Deeper work on “ideal customer mindset” can then live in the business‑model chapters.

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2. Short link from “how you started” to “which mental model you’re running”

You already have this in the Iceberg as the seven entry narratives and the four primary mental models.

docs.google⁠

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For this chapter, you want a very light version:

Step 1 – Start with the entry story

A short paragraph plus 3–4 questions, something like:

Most founders don’t sit down with a blank sheet and design a business. They arrive through a story: the bootstrapper who funded everything from margin, the side hustle that grew, the corporate escapee, the franchise owner, the management buy‑out, the equity‑funded scale‑up, or the external buyer who purchased someone else’s system.
docs.google⁠
That story matters because it quietly selects a mental model – a set of beliefs about what business is for and how it should be run.

Then a couple of quick prompts (not the full appendix):

“Did you primarily fund the business from your own savings and early revenue, avoiding debt where possible?”

“Did the business grow out of a side project or craft you never originally intended to turn into a company?”

“Did you leave a larger organisation to ‘do it properly’ on your own?”

“Did you buy into an existing system – a franchise, a buy‑out, or an acquisition?”

docs.google⁠

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The reader doesn’t need to label themselves perfectly; they just need to see “this is the slope I’ve been standing on.”

Step 2 – Map that to the four mental models

Once they see the entry story, you can give a short, punchy description of each mental model, just enough for this chapter:

Lifestyle Founder – business exists to fund and protect the life I want; growth is welcome until it threatens that.

docs.google⁠

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Performance Founder – business is an asset I’m building; growth, scale, and enterprise value are the measures of success.

docs.google⁠

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Designed Founder – makes explicit choices about who we serve, what we offer, and what we won’t do; protects constraints.

docs.google⁠

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Drifted Founder – says “we adapt to whatever the market needs”; the business is a history of yes‑decisions rather than a design.

docs.google⁠

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You don’t need the full tables here, just the core belief + one or two visible symptoms for each.

Then one or two diagnostic questions per model, in plain language, so they can self‑place:

“When a new opportunity appears, is your reflex to take it and figure out delivery later – or to test it against a clear ‘no’ list?”

“Do you define success more in terms of personal income and freedom, or in terms of growth and building an asset?”

docs.google⁠

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This is your C = Clarify moment: “Which mental model has been running your show?”

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3. Show quickly how that mental model shapes team and customer reality

Here’s a short pattern you can use in this chapter:

Lifestyle + Drifted → flat org, high founder dependency, informal processes, lots of exceptions.

Team learns: “We go to the founder when things get hard; we say yes to keep people happy.”

Customers learn: “If I push, they’ll make it work for me personally.”

docs.google⁠

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Performance + Drifted → push for growth, over‑hiring or over‑tooling, systems lag behind ambition.

Team learns: “Targets matter more than boundaries; we add more rather than pruning.”

Customers learn: “This company is ambitious but inconsistent – sometimes world‑class, sometimes chaotic.”

docs.google⁠

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Lifestyle + Designed → small but tight: clear boundaries, good margins, limited scale.

Team learns: “We know exactly what we do and don’t do; we protect the owner’s lifestyle.”

Customers learn: “They’re great at a few things; if you want more, they’ll say no – or refer you.”

docs.google⁠

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Performance + Designed → the healthiest scaling base when done well; still at risk of over‑complexity if pruning stops.

Team learns: “We are building something bigger than any one person; we follow clear design, not heroics.”

Customers learn: “They know who they are and they deliver consistently.”

You can then explicitly link this to Wall to Wallet:

If you’ve ever felt that your team and customers “pull” the business away from the strategy on the wall, it’s usually not because they’re stubborn or misinformed. It’s because the mental model you started with quietly trained them, over years, to think and behave that way. Strategy execution struggles not because the plan is bad, but because the underlying mental model and culture weren’t designed to support it.
docs.google⁠
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4. Ending the section in “C” mode: what they may need to consider changing

You’re right: you want to end this topic with clarity, not a full solution.

A simple close could be:

The goal in this chapter is not to rewire your personality. It is to see, clearly, which mental model has been running your business so far – and how that has shaped your team, your culture, and what your customers believe about you. In later chapters, we will redesign structures and business models. For now, the most strategic move you can make is to be brutally honest about which parts of your current mental model you want to keep – and which parts will have to change if you want the strategy on the wall to ever reach the wallet.
docs.google⁠
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Then 3–4 questions, e.g.:

“Which of the four founder mental models feels most like home to you today – and which one would you need to lean into more for your next stage?”

“Where do you see your mental model showing up visibly in your org design, processes, or ‘this is how we do things’ stories?”

“If your best customer described what you are like to work with, would their description match the business you think you’ve designed?”

docs.google⁠

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That keeps the customer reflection in view, without making this chapter do the full ICP psychology job.

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If you paste your current draft of the Mindset section (even rough), I can help you refit it to this pattern: brief entry‑story hook → 4 mental models in plain language → short culture/customer reflection → sharp Clarify questions at the end.

Founder starting point

How it usually starts

What it quietly teaches you about business

The Bootstrapper

Self‑funded from savings and early margin; growth paid for from cash flow

Control everything, avoid debt, patch systems instead of investing in proper infrastructureFounder_Mental_Models_SME_Iceberg_V2.md.md

The Side Hustle That Grew

A skill or craft becomes paid work; clients arrive before a business is “designed”

Keep saying yes, let offers follow client requests, the business is you and your personal timeFounder_Mental_Models_SME_Iceberg_V2.md.md

The Corporate Escapee

Senior employee leaves to “do it properly” in their own firm

Good structure matters; big‑company processes feel like what “real” business should look likeFounder_Mental_Models_SME_Iceberg_V2.md.md

The Franchise / Licensed Owner

Buys into a proven system or brand with a defined playbook

Follow the playbook, don’t break the model, execution of the system beats invention from scratchFounder_Mental_Models_SME_Iceberg_V2.md.md

The Management Buy‑Out (MBO)

Existing management team buys the business they were already running

You “know” the business, but you also inherit all its legacy drift, habits, and politicsFounder_Mental_Models_SME_Iceberg_V2.md.md

The Equity‑Funded Founder

Raises investment to grow faster than organic cash flow would allow

Speed is everything; structure can wait; growth and capital will cover growing complexityFounder_Mental_Models_SME_Iceberg_V2.md.md

The External Buyer (MBI)

Buys a business they didn’t build or previously work in

You bought a machine that should work; your job is to “run it better” before really understanding itFounder_Mental_Models_SME_Iceberg_V2.md.md

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