Many small social impact organisations I’ve worked inside or consulted with had one thing in common. Somewhere in the building, one person was making the hard calls alone.
No COO. Not big enough for a board yet. No advisor on speed-dial. Just a founder at 11pm, laptop open, going back and forth on whether to shut down a programme that isn’t working or how to put out the sixth fire of the week.
I’ve been the solo founder of a small business and I've lived that version of the night.
You’re not short of answers. The same worry turns over and over and nothing in the situation makes you lay the pieces out in order. So it goes round again.
In this sector the weight is heavier, because people depend on what you decide and the people best placed to think it through with you are often the ones you can’t afford.
Today’s Permission Slip:
You have permission to stop carrying every hard call in your head and to reason it through step by step, with someone asking the questions.
Why this feels risky:
You’re the founder. You’re supposed to know. Asking for help thinking can feel like admitting you don’t have it handled.
But a good advisor doesn’t hand you the answer either. They ask the right questions in the right order and you find out what you already knew.
The Practice:
Take the one decision you keep going round, and answer these four questions in writing:
- What was this meant to achieve?
- What does the evidence actually show?
- What would you have to believe for this to be the right call?
- What are you not looking at?
The fourth one usually takes the longest.
If you’d like company while you do it, I built a tool. It’s called The Root Cause Coach. (It’s a skill, meaning a set of instructions you add to an AI assistant like Claude or Gemini.)
It’s built from my own 14 years of doing this work and it asks you those questions, and the ones that follow, one at a time. It pushes on the gaps and the things you’ve skipped. You leave with a short note in your own words, one next step and a date to check whether it worked.
It’s deliberately narrow. It does seven things:
- Keep, fix or stop something that already exists
- Sharpen a goal or KPI
- Tell a fire from a pattern
- Get decisions off your desk
- Hand something off
- Test a new idea
- Make a change stick
Bring it anything else and it tells you so plainly. It won’t make the decision for you. It won’t pretend to know whether your idea will work. It gives no legal or financial advice. I’d rather it be honest about its limits.
My real aim is for it to make itself unnecessary.
Used a few times, the questions start to become your own, until one day you don’t need the tool to ask them.
Whether it gets there, with enough founders in real decisions, is the test that matters.
It’s free to use and adapt (installation instructions are in the ReadMe): https://github.com/raghavkrishna06/founder-toolkit/tree/main/root-cause-coach
This Week’s Question:
Think of the decision you keep going round at 11pm. If a friend brought it to you instead, what’s the first question you’d ask them as their advisor?
Here’s to leading differently,
Raghav
P.S. If you’re stuck on something this week, try the Root Cause Coach. Then hit reply and tell me where it helped and where it didn’t. I read every response, and I’d like to improve it with you.
P.P.S. Know a leader making the hard calls alone? Forward this to them.
