The most dangerous moment on a project isn’t when something goes wrong. It’s when something is quietly going wrong and the team has decided not to see it.
A roundup of startup failures from June this year put a sharp number on something most of us suspect. Looking across hundreds of companies that shut down, the most common final event was running out of money – but money was the symptom, not the disease. The deeper causes sat upstream: building a product before there was real demand for it, scaling before the business worked, and, most tellingly, a failure to go looking for the evidence that the idea wasn’t landing. One analysis named it almost clinically – a deficit in seeking out disconfirming information. Founders, it turns out, are very good at gathering proof they’re right and very bad at hunting for proof they’re wrong.
I don’t think this is a startup problem. I think it’s a human one, and it shows up on every kind of project I’ve ever worked on. We fall in love with the plan. And once we’re in love, we unconsciously curate our information – we notice the signals that say it’s working and we explain away the ones that say it isn’t. The pilot that went badly was “an outlier.” The stakeholder who’s gone quiet is “probably just busy.” The number that came back soft was “a one-off.” Each individual dismissal is reasonable. Together, they build a wall between the project and reality, and the project marches confidently toward a cliff everyone could have seen.
The startups that die rarely die from a lack of effort or talent. They die from a lack of looking – from treating uncomfortable evidence as noise to be filtered out rather than signal to be acted on. And the cruel part is that the evidence is usually there, early, while there’s still time to change course. The customer calls nobody made. The hard question nobody asked. The assumption nobody tested because testing it might have produced an answer they didn’t want.
So the discipline I’d argue for, on any project, is the deliberate, structured hunt for the thing you don’t want to find. Not the optimistic review where everyone shares good news. The cold one, where you actively ask: what would have to be true for this project to be failing right now, and have we genuinely checked? Who are the people most likely to tell us something we don’t want to hear, and have we actually asked them? What’s the one assumption that, if it’s wrong, sinks the whole thing – and when did we last test it against reality rather than against our own hopes?
This is hard precisely because it feels disloyal. Going looking for evidence that your project is in trouble can feel like a lack of faith, like you’re undermining the very thing you’re meant to be championing. It’s the opposite. The leaders who actively seek disconfirming evidence are the ones who catch the problem while it’s still cheap to fix. The ones who avoid it, who protect the plan from inconvenient facts, are the ones who run out of money – or time, or trust – wondering how they didn’t see it coming. They didn’t see it because they’d arranged not to.
So build the habit of looking at the thing you’d rather not. On your next project, schedule the uncomfortable review. Ask the people who’ll be honest with you. Hunt for the disconfirming evidence as hard as you’d defend the plan. The information that saves a project is almost always available early. The only question is whether anyone was willing to go and find it.
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