On a sunny August Saturday morning, a headline darkened my mood: trade talks between the U.S. and Canada had broken down overnight. Fifty percent tariffs, billions of dollars in goods at risk, and retaliation measures already promised. My first reaction was emotional. I had been carefully weighing some future options. For a few minutes, what had seemed possible now felt reckless.
If you are reading this essay, you have probably felt some version of this emotion too. A funding round that suddenly looks less secure. A sales cycle that just got longer. A growth plan thrown into doubt. Assuming the worst first is a normal response to bad headlines. Pretending otherwise only adds shame to anxiety that is already there.
But emotion is not strategy. Strategy starts with a reframe that matters more than the headline itself.
The trade collapse did not make the world more unpredictable than it was a day earlier. It confirmed what should already be your default belief: that you operate in a BANI world — brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. Supply chains can break suddenly. Negotiations that seemed nearly settled can collapse within hours. Cause and effect no longer follow the patterns a spreadsheet assumes. This is not a temporary disruption in a stable system. It is the system itself, and it has been this way for a while now.
Once that reframe lands, the question changes. It stops being about how do I predict what happens next and becomes what do I do regardless of what happens next? That second question has a real answer, and it comes down to three disciplines for building in a world that refuses to hold still.
Most founders operate with a plan built on assumptions they have never documented, such as steady revenue growth, predictable client renewals, and a favourable market. Uncertainty becomes overwhelming when it stays vague, because vague fear offers nothing to push back against. The fix is straightforward: name your hypotheses, assumptions, risks, and dependencies, one by one, in writing. A list of ten specific risks is manageable. A cloud of general dread is not. This is the difference between anxiety and analysis, and it is available to anyone willing to write the list.
Every shock closes a door for someone and opens one for someone else. The defensive move is obvious: build cash reserves, extend runway, protect the downside. But the more useful move often gets skipped in the scramble to defend. Ask what this disruption makes possible that was not possible last week. A competitor pulling back from a market you can now enter. A customer whose old vendor just became unreliable. A supply gap that rewards whoever fills it fastest. Surviving a constraint is only half the job. The other half is noticing where opportunity has shifted, because most people are too busy in defensive mode to see it.
Execution is the one lever fully within a founder’s control, unlike trade policy in Washington or Ottawa. When the macro picture turns volatile, the leverage is in how well you run what is already in front of you. Tighten the process that has been sloppy for months. Close the gap between what your team could deliver and what it actually delivers. This kind of progress does not depend on the news cycle cooperating. It is available to you every day, regardless of what happens next in trade talks.
Headlines are built to hold your attention, not to inform. Left unchecked, they can make you feel like a bystander, reacting to someone else’s story instead of building your own. When you treat headlines as a verdict on your vision, you hand control to people who have no stake in your success. The smart strategy is to assume your agency: controlling what you can by doing the real work of naming your assumptions, recognizing the opportunities the disruption is creating, and improving your execution week by week to build the future you want.
This trade deal will get renegotiated, or it will not. Either way, the founders who come out ahead will not be the ones who guessed correctly. They will be the ones who kept building while everyone else was doomscrolling the news.
Davender’s passion is to guide innovative entrepreneurs in developing the clarity, commitment, confidence and courage to enter, engage and lead their markets in a world that refuses to hold still, by thinking strategically and acting tactically.
Find out more at https://coachdavender.substack.com/about and https://linkedin.com/in/coachdavender
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.