A few of my friends did a now broken start up. I stayed out of it because nothing was formalized beyond the legal documents or the vision written on their mobil

A few of my friends did a now broken start up. I stayed out of it because nothing was formalized beyond the legal documents or the vision written on their mobile friendly web-page. It started out great, but three years in they spilt in two because they didn’t agree on what was important for their product. I’ve never personally worked outside of enterprise, but the reason I wanted formalization is because even in enterprise, keeping management on the same direction is a challenge. Sure there is almost always a power structure in place with a chain of command when it comes to enterprise, but relying on that, military style is typically terrible for productivity. What we do instead is to create shared realities by talking things through and making appropriate changes before we formalize our now shared direction in the form of strategies. When I have a disagreement with the IT manager who is my counterpart, we don’t ask our shared boss to sort it out. Instead we turn to the agreements and strategies on both development and secure operations that we’ve co-written and figure out how to solve our problem with what we’ve agreed on earlier. Sometimes this leads to strategic revisions, but it’s never lead to a break up sort to say. Now, I’ve never not worked enterprise so I’m not sure how much of that stuff goes on there. It’s my estimate though that the use of social constructs like strategies isn’t really high on the agenda, especially because social constructivism is a soft humanity, but I know the lack of a shared realty is what caused my friends to break up into two competing companies. I also know it’s what led to them doing it in a shitty manner that caused customers to flee and their friendships to end. They didn’t formalize their shared reality early on beyond a vision. They never updated the foundation of their shared reality to make sure they were still moving in the same direction, and they never formalized any of the resolves they did in meetings. Which meant that they had very little common grounds to stand on when their differences grew too large and erupted into conflict.