The Invisible Threat Holding Back Your Startup’s Success

In a recent post, I explored the concept of sculpting in meetings — how the leader acts as a sculptor, shaping raw ideas into something tangible that everyone can see and align on.

But sculpting doesn’t stop when the meeting ends. In fact, one of the most crucial, yet often overlooked, areas where sculpting needs to happen is in the day-to-day work of a startup.

Startups live or die on execution. But more often than not, that execution is filled with undocumented processes, workarounds, and ad-hoc decisions that live only in people’s heads.

This is a huge problem — just as it’s a problem when ideas in meetings remain abstract. Without documentation—without the “sculpting” of how work is done—a startup risks building on sand.

When people leave or the company attempts to scale, everything crumbles because nothing was ever concretely defined.

But there are ways to fix this, and they mirror the sculpting metaphor I used for meetings.

The Worst Way: Letting the Sculpture Live in Your Head

The worst-case scenario for any startup is when someone does important work, but nothing is written down.

No processes. No documentation. Everything is tribal knowledge.

If the person leaves or tries to delegate their work, all they can do is describe the elephant they’ve sculpted in their mind. And just like in a meeting where everyone imagines a different elephant, the interpretation of that work will vary wildly depending on who hears it.

Even worse, the person doing the work might not accurately remember what they did.

Memory is fallible, and when it comes to explaining a complex series of tasks, memory is almost always wrong.

Like eyewitness testimony in court, what people think they remember and what actually happened often diverge.

So when they try to explain their process later, it’s not just that others will misinterpret it — the process itself might be wrong in the first place.

Slightly Better: Sculpting After the Fact

The next step up is what most startups do: the work gets done, and later, the worker sits down to document what they did.

There are two key flaws here.

First, it’s still prone to memory error. Think about writing down the steps of a complex sales call days after it happened, or trying to document how you’ve been managing a social media account after months of running it.

Even with the best intentions, you’ll inevitably miss details or misunderstand what was important.

Second, and more critically, most people never get around to writing it down at all.

Documentation becomes a task for “later,” and in a startup, “later” often means never.

The day-to-day hamster wheel always takes priority, and that documentation gets pushed to the bottom of the list.

The Right Way: Sculpting as You Go

The best way to document work in a startup is to sculpt as you go. As you’re doing the work, you’re simultaneously documenting the process.

This is real-time sculpting, just like in meetings. It’s continuous and evolving.

As you figure out what works, you shape it, mold it, and document it in real time.

Not only does this ensure that nothing is forgotten, but it also creates a feedback loop where the documentation itself improves the work.

So what’s the problem here?

Over-documentation.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of every step, turning what should be a flexible, living process into a rigid script.

Think about documenting how to tie your shoes: you could list every micro-step, but in doing so, you risk missing the point.

What matters is that the shoes are tied securely, not that you followed an exact sequence of motions.

The Fourth Level: Sculpting for Flexibility

To create a truly effective process, the goal is to capture the why behind it.

Why are you tying your shoes in the first place? What is the desired outcome? This allows others to continue sculpting, adapting the process without losing sight of the end goal.

The final level of sculpting goes beyond simply documenting and aims to embed purpose into the documentation.

You’re not just recording what you did — you’re explaining why you did it and what the ultimate goal is.

This is the equivalent of creating a living sculpture, one that others can pick up and reshape as needed.

Processes in startups shouldn’t be static. They should evolve as the company grows.

The danger is that, over time, a company can become calcified by the very processes that once helped. This happens when the sculpting stops—when people forget to question the underlying value of what they’re doing.

The best startups are constantly sculpting, not just the processes but the outcomes. They measure everything against the ultimate goal: creating value.

If a process is no longer creating value, it needs to be revisited, re-sculpted, and improved.

Just like in meetings, startups need sculptors in the day-to-day work: people who can take raw actions and turn them into something tangible that others can build on.

The worst thing you can do is let that sculpture live only in your head. The best thing you can do is continuously shape the work in real time, documenting as you go, but with a focus on why the work matters and how it creates value.