— AUGUST 30TH, 2026 —

SOMETIMES THE ANSWER IS NOT YET

As founders, we spend a lot of time thinking about the future. We’re thinking about where our company could be in five years, what’s changing in our market, and what we may need to start preparing for.

Our leadership teams don’t always spend as much time out there. They’re thinking about the commitments we’ve made this quarter, the issues that need to be solved this week, or even just what has to get done today. That difference in perspective is healthy, but it can also create tension.

You can have a leadership team that believes in the same vision and still disagrees about what deserves attention right now.

I’ve come to think that a lot of these disagreements are less about the idea itself and more about the time horizon we’re solving for. Something can be important without being important now. When we don’t make that distinction, we can pull tomorrow’s opportunities into today’s priorities and ask the company to solve for too many things at once.

That’s why I like thinking in terms of Now, Next, Later, and Never. It gives us a way to talk about timing without turning every new idea into a yes-or-no decision.

Read more in How Great Leadership Teams Stay Aligned Through Change.

Some things belong in this 90-day cycle. Some deserve more thought. Some need to stay visible for the future. And some simply don’t fit where we’re going. Sometimes the answer isn’t no. It’s not yet.

PERSPECTIVES

“We don’t need to be aligned on how each department is going to get where they are going … but we do need to make sure we are all moving in the same direction." — Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

MARK MY WORDS

A little over a year ago, we brought a few groups of Ninety clients together to talk about AI and where we were taking the platform.

I was eager to talk about what AI could make possible. But our clients, generally speaking, wanted to talk about the product they were already using and what they needed from it today.

The interesting part was that neither perspective was wrong.

I was thinking about where Ninety was going. They were thinking about what was in front of them. And that reminded me of something founders have to get good at as our companies grow: Seeing the future isn’t enough. We have to translate it.

If we spend too much time talking about what’s coming, we can pull people away from what matters today. If we only talk about today, we can wake up and realize the company wasn’t ready for what came next.

Our job is to keep those two realities connected. To help people understand where we’re going and why it’s important not to lose sight of it.

ON THE CALENDAR

The Science of Scaling

This Friday, Sept. 4th Dr. Ben Hardy, author of The Science of Scaling, joins Ninety’s Kris Snyder to unpack his Frame, Floor, and Focus framework and what it takes to pursue a 10X goal.

They’ll also dig into how founders can think bigger about the goals they’re setting for 2027 and take questions live.

[Register Here]

ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD

In case you missed it, here’s more from Founder’s Framework:

Why We Built Ask Maz: Helping Leaders Build Stronger Companies

Leaders already have plenty of information. The harder part is making sense of it.

In this article, I share why we built Maz to help leadership teams connect what’s happening across Rocks, Scorecards, issues, meetings, and accountability so they can ask better questions and walk into important conversations with more context. 

[Read Now]

You don’t have to agree on everything. But you do have to know when you’re seeing things differently.