Find Your Refound

Most mornings I look at one handwritten card before I open anything else. It sits to the side of my screen, a glance away, first attempted years ago and elevated and focused with my friend and coach Hasan Khair at the start of this one, and it is the nearest thing I have to a compass.

Then yesterday something arrived on the screen above it that made me think. Or, more accurately, reflect.

It is a memo to Canva’s staff, titled “An important update on our team”, which is how every company announces a cut, and it was reported the way every cut is reported: by the number. 1,271 people, 22% of Canva, will lose their job, change role or move city. That is the headline the press picked up, of course.

But it was not the sentence that stopped me. This one did: “we need to refound Canva.”

Founders found companies. Far fewer refound them. The restructuring genre has a dozen words for what CEO Melanie Perkins is doing and has chosen each of them to avoid the one she used: realign, right-size, simplify, refocus, reset. All of those say the company stays and the people go.

Refound says the company that got us here is not the company that gets us there, and I am the one who has to say so, because I am the one who founded it.

I read initially as a marketer, and I have stopped. It is not a marketing story. It is a public, named, costed example of a discipline I have used privately for twenty years, and of the one stage I had to add to it, four years ago, when the discipline turned out not to be enough.

Three words: assess, decide, execute. ADE.

Look at the situation, make the call, get on with it, and then do it again. It served me for almost twenty years. It is a shark’s model: it never stops moving, and for ordinary productivity it is almost impossible to beat.

Four years ago I needed a refound of my own, and I found out what the model cannot do. ADE is built for speed, and a refound is not a speed problem. The moments when you have to refound something, whether a company, a team, a career, a family or yourself, are the moments that carry the most meaning, and the shark swims straight through them. You cannot always be a shark. Assess, decide, execute has no stage for asking what you are deciding on behalf of: what your core drives are, where you came from, what matters and what does not, as a filter that sits above the particular decisions of the day.

So the model I have used since has four stages, and the second is the one I had to add. Reading the Canva memo yesterday, I saw all four of them in it.

See the world as it is. Not as it was. Not as you wish it were. Not as it ought to be in the version of the argument you would win. As it is.

Almost everyone believes they have done this and almost nobody has. In August, when Canva cut its growth forecast by a third and marked its own valuation down by nearly eight billion dollars, I wrote that the action “is as unique as this Aussie unicorn is,” and the uniqueness was the assessment. Perkins did not wait for a bad quarter to be reported; she reported it. The memo does it again: “our hardest year yet”; growth “slowed for the first time in a decade”; “small changes won’t be enough.” Three descriptions of the world as it is, from the person with the most to gain from describing it otherwise.

The signal is not hard to pick up. It is squawking from every channel on the dial: an industrial revolution is under way, and too many of us are sitting in the purgatory of proof of concept, where a pilot changes nothing and therefore asks nothing. I wrote in March last year that there are three ways to meet the wind: bunkers, leaves and windmills, and that “Technology isn’t disrupting our industry. The failure to adopt technology is.” A pilot is a bunker with a slide deck.

This is the stage the shark skips, the one I added four years ago, and it has two halves.

The first is the roots. A refound is not a pivot. A pivot goes somewhere new; a refound goes back to what was true on the first day and still is, and builds forward from there. Every real one has it. Perkins’ memo says it in so many words: “getting back to our roots of small, empowered teams with the freedom to make decisions, take ownership and focus on what matters most for our community.” That sentence is the criterion for everything that follows it. Without the roots, stage three has no test.

The handwritten card beside my screen is my version. It is an ikigai, the four-circle diagram of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for, with a single line at the centre. (A purist will tell you the diagram is a Western invention and the Japanese word means something quieter and more daily. Both true. It is still the most useful card I own.) I redrafted it this year because the man it described had moved on; it is the filter every decision since has had to pass through, and I use it more now than when I first wrote it.

The second half of reflection is humility, in the practical sense: knowing how much of the world as it is belongs to you. Some things you control. Some you can influence. Everything else you can only be aware of, and the discipline is never to mix the three up. One of the fundamentals of mental health is not mixing up what you control and what you influence. I’ve made that mistake. A lot. Epictetus opened his handbook with it nearly two thousand years ago; Stephen Covey drew it as circles in 1989; I have used a plainer version for most of my career: control the controllables, influence the influenceables, and leave the rest alone except to watch it.

Read the Canva memo through those circles and its shape is clear. Perkins does not control what a frontier model costs; OpenAI and Google do, and they are also now her competitors. She does not control the market’s reset on AI valuations. What she controls is the architecture, and she rebuilt it; the structure and the locations, and she is rebuilding those. The memo says the leadership “started with our mission and future goals, then considered the structures, skills and locations needed to achieve them”, and only then looked at individual roles, which is a sentence written by someone who drew the circles before she drew the org chart. And what she can only influence, a culture of small empowered teams, which no founder can command back into existence, only invite, is what she spends the memo on.

Reflection is where the energy goes. A leadership team that spends its year on the outer circle, on model prices, on what a competitor did, has none left for the inner one.

With the world seen as it is, the roots named and the circles drawn, you decide. However hard. And the hardness is the point, because what is being decided is which part of what built you has to go. For me, a decision is an incision: it cuts off the other alternatives. And as I have reminded you ad nauseam in Brandflow, strategy is the art of choosing what not to do.

I wrote in May, in The Cannibal Strategy, that “incumbents don’t fail because they’re incompetent. They fail because they’re rational,” and that “the insight is usually present. The resolve is almost never there.” Clayton Christensen’s dilemma is nearly thirty years old and still undefeated: waiting to be disrupted is the sensible choice every single quarter. A company in Canva’s position, profitable and growing at a rate most would envy, has every rational reason to make small changes and see. “Small changes won’t be enough” is the most decisive line in the memo, and it proves the decision was made before the crisis arrived, which is the only time a decision like it can be made cleanly.

And this stage is the same at every scale. The decision a founder makes for a company is the one a person makes for themselves, for their family, for the team they lead, for the business they own. The scale changes. The move does not. In every case there is a version of you built for a world that has gone, and it has to be let go of so that a version built for the world as it is can be founded. Most of us know which version that is. Deciding is the part we defer.

The first three stages are where leaders feel most tested. The fourth is where most of those who get that far fail, and it is the one the Canva memo has most to teach.

Execution is a pointy word. It is not ruthlessness, or speed, or getting it done. Execution is how you do it: the ethics you apply, the responsibility you take personally, and whether the people on the receiving end can see both. Perkins published the memo in full, in her own name, with the number in it and the word “sorry” in it. The terms: at least six months’ salary, twelve months of healthcare, the one-year equity cliff waived for recent hires, a US$10,000 grant from a new Canva Collective Fund for anyone leaving who wants to start a business or a community project, and “we won’t take any ownership or equity in what they create.”

And “Everyone leaving will be able to keep their Canva MacBook as we know not everyone has a personal laptop.” I like that one a lot. Canva’s mission from the first day has been to empower people to create. Sending 1,271 people out of the door with the tool to create something is not a gesture beside the mission; it is the mission, executed at the moment it would be cheapest to drop. That is what the how looks like: the roots from stage two, applied hardest at the exit.

Four years ago I needed one, and it gave me the stage the model was missing. I am in the middle of another now. I am not going to describe it here; a refound is only honestly described after it is done, and this one is not. What I can say is that the four stages have held at the personal scale exactly as they hold at Canva’s. The assessment is the hardest to reach and the easiest to believe you already have. Reflection is where the arguments live, and the stage the (quite large) shark in me still wants to skip. The decision was quicker than the years spent avoiding it. And the execution, the how, is the only part anyone else will remember.

Two kinds of people fail at this, and they fail at opposite ends. The ones who never start fail at stage one: they have decided the wind will pass. It will not. The ones who do start mostly fail at stage four, because they ran the shark’s model and arrived at execution with no roots to execute from.

Perkins has shown all four stages in public, with her name on each of them, in a company she built from a kitchen table. The press counted the people. I think the rest of us should count the stages.

The shark assesses, decides and executes. Only a founder reflects, and only a founder can refound.

And you are the founder of you.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry’s table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. It was refounded itself this autumn, on a domain of its own. If this was useful, subscribe here — Brandflow lands by email every Monday and Thursday.