Patterns
These are the patterns I see repeatedly in climate tech organisations. Each one is a mechanical problem, not a motivational one — the system is generating the behaviour, and different people in the same structure would produce the same outcomes. Each pattern below is a specific mechanism, with the diagnostic signal and the specific intervention that addresses it.
Your strategy exists in a deck. Your team is executing something else entirely. Every advisor has told you it's a communication problem. It isn't — the decision infrastructure that translates strategic intent into daily choices doesn't exist.
Read the diagnosis →At ten people, the founder IS the operating system. At fifty, the founder's bandwidth is the binding constraint. The organisation scaled the headcount without scaling the operating model.
Read the diagnosis →Your organisation is more complex than it needs to be, and the person who made it that way is you. Technical founders model complex systems for a living.
Read the diagnosis →Your process map is a geological record of every failure the organisation has survived. The layers compound, nobody removes the old ones, and the people who navigate the workarounds are the ones who defend them.
Read the diagnosis →You're treating a structural problem as a people problem, and it's costing you talent, time, and money. The underperformer you're about to fire.
Read the diagnosis →Organisations hit predictable structural walls at 15, 30, 50, and 100 people. Each breakpoint invalidates the operating model that got you there. The symptoms look like people problems. They're physics.
Read the diagnosis →Nobody stands up and says 'we're pivoting to defense.' It's the quarterly revenue review where the defense contract is the only deal that closed, so engineering resources shift. Then the next quarter. Then the mission is narrative, not operational.
Read the diagnosis →You're optimizing a model whose assumptions no longer hold, and every improvement is making you more efficiently wrong.
Read the diagnosis →Nobody in your organisation knows who can say yes. The org chart says one thing. The actual decision flow says another. The result is high latency, low quality, and zero accountability — and the fix isn't 'empower people.'
Read the diagnosis →The board sees one company. The team is running another. The gap isn't deception — it's structural. Quarterly reporting compresses operating reality into a format that filters out the information investors need most.
Read the diagnosis →Your climate tech company has completed fourteen pilots and closed zero commercial contracts. The technology works in every pilot. The organisation was never built to convert pilots into revenue.
Read the diagnosis →