For a long time, I struggled to explain why our work feels so different from consulting, not better, different.
The problem wasn’t about the type of strategy, it was the starting point.
Most people assume that creating a new market begins with an answer — a strategy, a framework, a point of view.
After decades of doing this work, I’ve come to believe the opposite.The journey begins earlier than that and usually, it begins quietly.
Over time, I’ve learned to listen for a very specific moment. It’s the moment when a leader realizes the world they’re operating in no longer quite makes sense. When the explanations they’ve been using feel fragile or a little off, the comparisons feel wrong, and forward motion stops producing confidence.
It doesn’t always sound dramatic. Sometimes it sounds like we’re stuck. Sometimes it sounds like we keep getting compared to the wrong things. Sometimes it shows up right before a financing, when the story suddenly feels harder to tell.
Often different words, but the same moment.
A moment of anxiety, frustration, irritation, disorientation, anger or fear.
The Search Is Already Underway
In July of 2016, I was sitting in Provo, Utah with Ryan Smith, the founder and CEO of Qualtrics.
At one point he leaned back and said, almost offhandedly,
“You want to know something that really pisses me off?”
I said yes.
“Being called SurveyMonkey on steroids.”
I’d heard that tone before. It’s what irritation sounds like when the world you’re in can no longer fully see you, when the category you’re placed in no longer reflects the work you’re actually doing.
Ryan didn’t say he needed a new positioning, he didn’t say he needed a rebrand. What he was really saying was: this world no longer fits.
Looking back, he and his brother Jared were already searching for another place, a market that valued what Qualtrics actually enabled, not just the surface-level tool it resembled.
Most journeys start this way.
Why Maps Fail
Years later, I watched a similar moment unfold in a very different context.
Founders I deeply respect were trying to understand why their company didn’t appear on a prominent AI list. They were anxious. The question was reasonable because visibility matters. Categories shape perception and lists signal legitimacy.
But something felt off to me because they weren’t trying to win a known race. They were trying to create something that didn’t yet have coordinates. Borrowing someone else’s map, especially one designed for a different terrain, would have quietly pulled them back into a world they were already outgrowing.
The danger with maps isn’t that they’re wrong, it’s that they’re backward-looking. They describe places that already exist. New markets don’t already exist.
When you’re trying to reach a place no one has named yet, external validation becomes a false north star. You start steering toward recognition instead of your true orientation. You optimize for being seen rather than becoming true.
This is usually the moment people ask for answers and it’s often the moment where answers on where to head do the most damage.
Orientation Before Answers
When these moment signals appear, the pressure to perform certainty is real.
Founders want to move. Teams want decisions. Boards want confidence. The temptation is to step in and tell people what to do, to name the category, draw the map and deliver the answer.
But that’s not navigation, that’s theater.
When you’re off the edge of the known world, the most important thing you can do is slow down and re-establish orientation. Help people understand where they are, before deciding where to go. Not because you’re being evasive, but because direction matters more than speed.
I’ve learned that if you can hold belief long enough, the answer tends to surface on its own.
The answer is usually already in the room.
Burning the Boats
At Qualtrics, after weeks of building belief around a new point of view — one we would eventually call Experience Management — Ryan did something extraordinary.
He looked around the table and said, plainly,
“This is an audacious idea. I could lose my job over this. I need to know you’re all with me.”
Then he went around the table. One by one.
At the time, we didn’t call it anything, but in retrospect, it was a burning-of-the-boats moment, a shared acknowledgment that there was another world out there, and that returning to the old one would no longer be an option.
What followed wasn’t smooth. There was a mutiny. A senior sales leader demanded they revert back to surveys or lose the team. Some people left, others stayed.
The ones who stayed did very well.
Belief, once chosen, has a way of testing itself.
The first time that belief left the four walls of their Provo office was at their Qualtrics’ Insights Summit in early 2017. Ryan stood on stage and said something that made the room go quiet.
“You think you deliver a great experience 80% of the time. Your customers say it’s closer to 8%.”
He named the villain, the Experience Gap; a new kind of data - X-Data; and introduced a new way of seeing the world.
That was their first Lightning Strike and they didn’t land on the shores of this new world that day. But they set their bearings and sailed toward it. Eventually it rose above the horizon in front of them.
The market responded and everything that came after, the growth, the IPO, the crown, followed from that moment.
Staying Present After You’ve Arrived
What people don’t talk about enough is what happens after you become the king of a new world.
Years later, I had a conversation with Robert Chatwani, the President of Docusign. He was having a different kind of moment.
DocuSign wasn’t searching for legitimacy. They were the undisputed king of eSignature, the category was theirs. The real question wasn’t how to defend the island, it was whether they could stay present long enough to sense what came next.
Every category either evolves or declines. Success doesn’t remove that law, it just disguises it.
What struck me wasn’t urgency, it was patience and a willingness to loosen the crown just enough to keep navigating.
Latecomers can copy language, they can mimic products and they can land on the outskirts and claim proximity.
But leadership isn’t about arrival, it’s about endurance.
Kings don’t win by declaring victory, they win by staying on the water longer than everyone else and discovering new lands that expand their kingdom.
A Different Way of Moving
Over time, I’ve come to believe that creating a new market is closer to wayfinding than to strategy practiced by McKinsey, Ogilvy or leading consultants.
The ancient Polynesian navigators crossed vast distances without maps or instruments. They oriented themselves by stars, waves, wind, and birds. The canoe remained the center of the world. If they held their bearing long enough, the island would eventually reveal itself.
That may sound abstract, but it isn’t. It’s a discipline of presence, of belief, of orientation over answers.
This is why most consulting models struggle with our kind of work. They are built to deliver certainty, not to hold uncertainty. To import answers, not to surface them.
The work I’ve been part of has taught me something quieter and more durable.
If you’re searching for a new world, you’re not lost, you’re early.
And if you’re willing to stay oriented long enough — to notice moment signals, to resist false maps, to build belief before strategy, to let the market talk back — the destination has a way of appearing.
Not because you planned it, but because you kept sailing.
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