Hell Events — The 9 Failure Modes

Failure has a taxonomy

After years of working with founder-led businesses, a pattern emerged: the same failures kept recurring across industries, revenue levels, and team sizes. Different founders. Different markets. Same collapse mechanisms. These are not random — they are structural. We call them Hell Events.

A Hell Event is not a bad quarter or a missed target. It is a systemic failure mode that, once activated, degrades decision quality across the entire business. Hell Events compound. They interact. And they are almost always invisible to the person experiencing them until the damage is severe.

The nine Hell Events

1. The Fog

The founder cannot articulate what the business is, who it serves, or where it is going. Not because they lack vision, but because the vision has never been codified into something stable. Every pitch is slightly different. Every strategy session starts from scratch. The team receives contradictory signals because the founder is still working it out in real time. The Fog is not confusion — it is the absence of a constitution.

2. Revenue Whiplash

Income swings wildly between months. The business oscillates between feast and famine with no predictable rhythm. The founder cannot plan because they cannot forecast. Hiring decisions get made during peaks and regretted during troughs. Revenue Whiplash is usually a symptom of missing cadence — no systematic approach to pipeline, no decision rhythm around sales, no verification of what is actually generating revenue versus what feels productive.

3. Identity Fracture

The business is trying to be too many things for too many people. The service offering has expanded through opportunism rather than strategy. The website says one thing, the pitch says another, the delivery says a third. Identity Fracture happens when the founder has never made the subtraction decisions — never defined what the business will not do. Every yes without a corresponding no dilutes the brand until it means nothing.

4. The Accountability Gap

Nobody owns outcomes. Tasks get assigned but results are not tracked. The founder is the only person who follows through on anything, which means the founder is the bottleneck on everything. The Accountability Gap is not a people problem — it is a decision rights problem. When authority is unclear, accountability is impossible. People cannot be held responsible for outcomes they were never empowered to control.

5. Coherence Collapse

The parts of the business contradict each other. Marketing promises what operations cannot deliver. Sales closes deals that finance cannot support. The website describes a company that does not match reality. Coherence Collapse is a verification failure — no mechanism exists to check whether the pieces of the business are aligned before they reach the customer.

6. Burnout Spiral

The founder is working unsustainably and cannot stop because the business cannot function without their constant involvement. This is not a work-life balance problem. It is a governance problem. The founder has not transferred decision authority, so every choice — from strategic direction to what colour the logo should be — requires their input. Burnout Spiral is the inevitable consequence of missing decision rights.

7. Hire Regret Cascade

The business keeps hiring the wrong people, or hiring the right people into the wrong roles. Each bad hire creates more work for the founder, reinforcing the belief that nobody else can do it. Hire Regret Cascade is usually caused by hiring under urgency (during Revenue Whiplash peaks) without clear role definitions, authority boundaries, or success criteria. The hire fails not because of the person but because of the system they were hired into.

8. Shiny Object Storm

The founder keeps chasing new opportunities, platforms, strategies, and partnerships without completing existing commitments. Every week brings a new priority. The team has learned that today's urgent initiative will be abandoned next month, so they invest minimal effort in everything. Shiny Object Storm is a cadence failure — no decision rhythm exists to evaluate new opportunities against existing commitments before resources get redirected.

9. Decision Debt

The accumulated weight of unmade, deferred, or poorly recorded decisions. The business is slow because every decision requires re-litigating prior choices that were never properly locked. Meetings cover the same ground repeatedly. Strategy documents contradict each other. Nobody can point to a definitive record of what was decided and why. Decision Debt is the meta-event — the one that makes all other Hell Events harder to escape.

How Hell Events interact

Hell Events rarely occur in isolation. The Fog enables Identity Fracture. Revenue Whiplash triggers Hire Regret Cascade. Burnout Spiral accelerates Decision Debt. The interaction effects are what make these so dangerous — solving one event in isolation often just shifts pressure to another.

Effective diagnosis maps which events are active, which are primary (causal), and which are secondary (symptomatic). Treating a symptom while ignoring the cause guarantees recurrence.

The diagnostic approach

FORGE diagnostics assess all nine domains simultaneously. Severity is scored on a three-level scale: latent (present but contained), active (currently degrading governance), and critical (causing compounding damage). Priority markers indicate which events to address first based on causal relationships, not just severity.

The goal is not to eliminate Hell Events permanently — they are inherent risks in founder-led businesses. The goal is to detect them early, contain them systematically, and build infrastructure that prevents them from compounding into existential threats.

To map which Hell Events are active in your business, run the free diagnostic. It takes 3 minutes and requires no login.