Hell Events
The 9 failure modes you cannot see from the inside
Every founder thinks their problem is unique. It is not. These nine patterns destroy businesses run by people too smart to see the pattern. Recognition is the first act of governance.
The Fog
You cannot name your top 3 priorities with confidence.
The Fog is decision paralysis disguised as keeping options open. Everything feels equally urgent. You start each week without a clear hierarchy of what matters most. Your team watches you for signals and gets noise instead.
The cost is invisible at first. Meetings take longer because nobody knows what to prioritise. Projects drift because there is no declared north star. Energy disperses across twelve things instead of concentrating on three. The Fog does not feel like a crisis. It feels like busyness. That is what makes it dangerous.
Symptoms
Inability to answer "what are your top 3 priorities?" without hesitation. Constantly shifting focus. Team members working on different versions of what they think matters. A calendar full of activity but no sense of progress.
Governance fix
A declared priority stack reviewed weekly. Written decision rights that specify who owns which domain. A verification cadence that asks: are we still working on the right things?
Revenue Whiplash
Income swings between feast and famine. Every month starts from zero.
Revenue Whiplash is the absence of a predictable revenue engine. Some months are excellent. Others are panic. The pattern repeats because there is no system beneath it, only effort and luck cycling through good and bad quarters.
The compounding damage is not financial. It is psychological. You cannot make long-term decisions when you do not know if next month will be profitable. You hire cautiously, invest cautiously, and plan cautiously. The business stays small not because you lack ambition but because the revenue pattern makes ambition feel reckless.
Symptoms
No ability to forecast next quarter with confidence. Revenue dependent on founder sales effort. No recurring revenue engine. Emotional cycle tied to monthly revenue swings.
Governance fix
Revenue architecture: recurring revenue streams, pipeline systems, and lead-to-close tracking. Decision cadence around pipeline health, not just revenue outcomes.
Identity Fracture
You are the business. Nothing moves without you.
Identity Fracture is the fusion of founder identity with company identity. You do not just run the business. You are the business. Every client relationship, every decision, every piece of institutional knowledge lives inside your head. The company is a one-person dependency disguised as an organisation.
This is the most dangerous Hell Event because it feels like strength. You are indispensable. You are the expert. You are the one everyone relies on. But indispensability is not a moat. It is a cage. You cannot take leave, cannot delegate meaningfully, and cannot sell the business because there is nothing to sell without you in it.
Symptoms
Business would effectively stop if you took 30 days off. No documented processes. Team asks you for permission on routine decisions. You describe yourself and your company interchangeably.
Governance fix
Written decision rights that delegate real authority. Process documentation. Identity separation protocol: what is yours, what is the company's, what is shared.
Accountability Gap
People agree to things and do not deliver. Commitments dissolve.
The Accountability Gap is the space between what people commit to and what actually happens. It starts small: a missed deadline, a forgotten follow-up, a deliverable that arrives late and incomplete. Over time, the pattern normalises. You stop expecting follow-through because you have been disappointed too many times.
The root cause is almost never laziness or incompetence. It is the absence of a system that makes commitments visible, trackable, and consequential. When commitments live in emails and meeting notes, they disappear. Accountability requires infrastructure, not willpower.
Symptoms
Recurring pattern of missed commitments. You have stopped expecting follow-through. Action items from meetings evaporate. You end up doing things yourself because it is faster.
Governance fix
Commitment registry: written, tracked, and reviewed. Verification cadence that surfaces broken commitments early. Consequence protocols that are structural, not personal.
Coherence Collapse
Your brand says one thing, your delivery says another, your team says a third.
Coherence Collapse is misalignment between what you say, what you do, and what your team communicates. Your website promises one experience. Your sales process delivers another. Your team describes the company differently depending on who you ask. The customer receives mixed signals and loses trust.
Coherence is not branding. It is governance. It is the alignment between stated values, operational behaviour, and external communication. When these three diverge, every interaction erodes credibility. The fix is not a rebrand. It is an alignment audit.
Symptoms
Customers get mixed signals. Team describes the company differently. Stated values do not match operational behaviour. Brand refresh did not fix the underlying problem.
Governance fix
Coherence audit across brand, operations, and team communication. Alignment protocols that verify consistency. Regular review cadence to prevent drift.
Burnout Spiral
Working harder is the only strategy. Rest feels like falling behind.
The Burnout Spiral is normalised exhaustion. You have been running at an unsustainable pace for so long that it no longer feels abnormal. Working 60-hour weeks is just what it takes. Rest feels like laziness. Taking a day off creates anxiety because nothing moves without you (see HE-003).
Burnout compounds with every other Hell Event. The Fog gets worse when you are exhausted. Revenue Whiplash feels more destabilising when you have no recovery capacity. Decision Debt accumulates faster because you lack the cognitive bandwidth to address it. Burnout is not a standalone problem. It is an amplifier of every other failure mode.
Symptoms
Exhausted most days but keep pushing. No protected recovery time. Working harder is the default response to any problem. Rest creates anxiety rather than restoration.
Governance fix
Capacity governance: defined operating rhythm with built-in recovery. Decision delegation that reduces founder cognitive load. Energy audit alongside the business audit.
Hire Regret Cascade
You keep hiring wrong. Each bad hire costs more than the last.
The Hire Regret Cascade is a pattern of hiring failures that compounds over time. Each wrong hire is expensive: recruitment costs, training investment, opportunity cost, and the cultural damage of a bad fit departing. After several cycles, you lose trust in your own judgement about people.
The root cause is rarely poor interviewing skills. It is hiring without decision infrastructure: no written role architecture, no verification protocol for cultural fit, no structured onboarding that tests alignment early. You hire on instinct and hope, then wonder why the results are inconsistent.
Symptoms
Multiple bad hires in recent history. Lost trust in your hiring judgement. High turnover in key roles. Hiring decisions made under pressure without structured evaluation.
Governance fix
Written role architecture before hiring. Structured evaluation protocol. 90-day verification cadence. Decision rights around who approves hires and at what threshold.
Shiny Object Storm
New ideas arrive faster than old ones get finished. Nothing ships.
The Shiny Object Storm is a pipeline overflowing with started-but-not-finished initiatives. New ideas are exciting. Existing projects are boring. The founder keeps starting things and the team keeps context-switching until nothing gets completed. Everything is 70 percent done.
This is often mislabelled as a discipline problem. It is a governance problem. Without a system that forces prioritisation, limits work-in-progress, and verifies completion, the natural human tendency toward novelty will always win. The fix is not willpower. It is a constraint system.
Symptoms
More active initiatives than capacity to finish. New ideas constantly interrupting existing work. Everything at 70 percent completion. Team exhausted from context-switching.
Governance fix
Work-in-progress limits. Initiative approval protocol. Kill criteria for stalled projects. Verification cadence that asks: what shipped this week?
Decision Debt
Decisions you did not make are compounding. The backlog is massive.
Decision Debt is the accumulation of unmade decisions. Every deferred choice, every "we will deal with that later," every problem kicked down the road adds to the backlog. Unlike financial debt, decision debt has no visible ledger. It compounds silently until the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of being wrong.
Decision Debt is the meta-Hell Event. Every other failure mode generates it. The Fog creates indecision. Revenue Whiplash defers strategic investment. Burnout reduces the capacity to decide. The backlog grows and the cognitive weight of unmade decisions makes every new decision harder. It is a compounding spiral.
Symptoms
Massive backlog of deferred decisions. Avoidance has become the default. The cost of inaction is now higher than the cost of being wrong. Feeling paralysed by the volume of things that need deciding.
Governance fix
Decision audit: surface every deferred decision. Triage protocol: decide, delegate, or kill. Decision cadence that processes the backlog systematically. Decision memory that prevents re-deferral.
Which ones are active in your business?
The free diagnostic takes 3 minutes. Identify your active Hell Events before you finish your coffee.
Run the Free Diagnostic