Ditch the five-year plan

When I registered my company Paradigm Makers in December 2023, I did everything in the right order: business model canvas, five-year strategic plan and services guide. These documents were supposed to provide clarity.

Instead, they brought frustration, confusion and failure.

For 487 days, nothing felt right.

I kept forcing strategies that looked good on paper but felt disconnected from the future I wanted to build.

As entrepreneurs, we’re taught to “move fast and break things,” to think in five-year increments and break everything down to quarterly goals. But this logic is built on chronos time, which rewards speed, scale and control.

If I wanted to have the impact I wanted, I needed to think differently about time.

Why time was my real problem

“Move fast and break things” only works if you view time as a straight line, based on hours in and output out. That’s chronos time—measured by clocks, calendars and urgency. It’s why companies obsess over quarterly results and annual projections while ignoring strategic alignment and long-term impact.

But there’s another kind of time: kairos.

Kairos is non-linear, measuring opportunity, readiness and emergence.

There are plenty of successful examples of kairos-aligned organisations, including Patagonia, Minerva Project and Zealandia. Even if they don’t define themselves as kairos-aligned, they demonstrate that “move slow and build things” is a feasible and financially sound business model.

You act because the moment is right, not because it’s in the plan. Time becomes a strategic advantage, based on creative breakthroughs, meaningful relationships and moments of deep clarity.

If you’ve had a gut feeling you should delay a product launch for no logical reason, hold off on a decision, or start something no one else understands yet—you’ve experienced kairos.

It’s the difference between forcing your next offer and launching when the time is right.

The 2075 question

When I launched Paradigm Makers, I had one goal: redesign the invisible systems that shape how we live and work so that better outcomes become inevitable for people, organisations and the planet.

But I was trying to force that vision through the same logic I was challenging.

I realized the systems aren’t broken. They’re working exactly as designed, but the world has changed. My strategy was sound, but I was working inside an outdated time system.

Then I asked: What if I built a company that should exist in 2075?

Reframing my business around 2075 rather than 2030 gave me the missing clarity. I stopped predicting and started sensing. Instead of focusing on artificial milestones, I concentrated on what was ready to emerge today.

The kairos operating system

Working in kairos time means designing your business like a living ecosystem. Instead of thinking in quarters, think in seasons. Shifting to kairos also means rethinking how you structure your time, offers, energy and expectations.

Based on my experience, here’s the model that emerged:

Phase one: planting

Define your vision and unlearn what no longer fits.

Start by noticing the invisible systems you’ve inherited, including the beliefs, structures and rules you’ve never questioned.

Ask yourself: What impact do I want to have and what future ways of being am I here to normalize?

Phase two: growing

Design rhythms and systems that reflect your values.

Create simple systems that align with your vision from phase one.

Ask yourself:

• What tools and rhythms support this vision without controlling it?
• How can my business reflect this future, not just respond to the present?
• What will help this vision grow slowly and sustainably?

For me, this meant training a custom Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) on my 50-year vision for a future where systems are intentionally built to make better outcomes inevitable for people, organisations and the planet. The easiest way to explain this is to think of a personalized version of ChatGPT, but instead of helping me come up with recipes or write emails, it’s specifically aligned with my company and everything I defined in phase one.

I strongly believe AI is not a solution. It’s a tool to help us think more strategically, which leads to positive real-world impact for people and the planet.

This was the right tool for me because my work requires me to see how things are connected.

Some of these things are invisible (e.g. the belief that “productivity equals value”), yet they have real-world implications (e.g. high job demands that lead to burnout). Making the invisible visible allows me to challenge the existing systems and help people think differently about what the future could be.

In my day-to-day work, I use this GPT to:

• explore random ideas I have—like what the résumé of the future might look like
• identify new opportunities to respond to global issues like ethical AI adoption, or
• create a custom-GPT specifically for clients so we can visualize the invisible disconnections between their strategy, goals or values and the outcomes they are seeing

While this is the approach I’ve taken, you might find your vision requires a completely different set of tools. There’s no one specific approach that can apply to everyone and for me to suggest otherwise may create the next evolution of chronos challenges—where everyone replaces their strategic plans with a 50-year vision and custom GPTs. Find what works for you and be confident that it will help you get closer to your vision.

Phase three: harvesting

Sense what’s aligned and ready, then act accordingly.

This is the financial season and the time when things start to “click into place.”

Ask yourself:

• What signals are telling me it’s time to act?
• What clients, patterns or offers are naturally showing up?
• Who or what is being nourished by this work?

My first offer emerged naturally when I stopped forcing services.

I had a client who wanted to take a completed project we had worked on and integrate it into everything the company did. Thinking about how we could do this in a way that would create new systems that made better outcomes inevitable, I was reminded of the James Clear quote from Atomic Habits: “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

About six months prior, I’d written the quote down as something to explore, butit wasn’t until the client asked that I realized what I’d built for myself could help other companies redesign their systems to support their goals.

It was the missing link between my abstract vision for the future and the real-world tangible value I could provide others today. In that moment, I could see how everything I’d been working on had been leading me to this offer. The problem I could help solve was the disconnect between strategy and action. I could also see how, if I’d tried to implement it any earlier, it wouldn’t have worked because too many variables remained unknown.

Phase four: regenerating

Rest, reflect and compost what’s no longer needed.

Most entrepreneurs skip this part—but it’s essential.

Ask yourself:

• What do I need to let go?
• What lesson am I resisting right now?
• How can I build rest into my systems?

I stopped feeling guilty for not prioritizing revenue-generating or “productive” activities and started to design around rest.

This means listening to my body and knowing that when my mind starts to drift, it’s time to take a break from deep work. Or, as recently happened, checking my calendar to space out social interactions (like meetings). A few weeks ago, I accidentally overestimated my social battery for the week. What started as a manageable one-event week soon turned into two and before I knew it, I was attending multiple events on four consecutive days. This is usually a month's worth of work events, so I was exhausted. When clients and potential collaborators asked to meet during the week, I acknowledged I needed time to recharge my social batteries so we found a time later in the month.

As we all subconsciously know, but don’t like to admit, nothing sustainable grows when you’re stuck in the cycle of burnout. But it can be difficult to turn someone down when they want to discuss work—I get it.

Acknowledging to others that I needed to prioritize rest was a significant growth milestone. While I sometimes feel guilty when I’m “not being productive” I've noticed several unexpected benefits to my new approach.

Others began feeling comfortable declining meetings for the same reason. Instead of pushing through because it felt like we should, we discussed what rest meant for us. And the more I acknowledge my need for rest, which is maybe more than most, the more I've noticed rest is normalized in my network.

What my 2075 company looks like in 2025

Everything changed when I stopped conforming to other peoples’ timelines.

Instead of trying to fit into a niche, I’m building a new one. Even the AI models I’m using are trained on the legacy systems I’m working to replace. Every tool I use must be interrogated, retrained and reframed. This friction has become my point of distinction.

Adopting this lens:

• allowed Paradigm Makers as a company to emerge
• eliminated the pressure to hit Q2 targets
• started attracting clients ready to shape the future

I built in 60 days what I couldn’t in 487.

I’ve also learned how powerful a kairos-aligned business can be, especially in tiny moments.

Last week, I opened my profit and loss statement and it finally made sense. My small but regular salary represented the investment I was making in getting the foundations right. Despite numerous attempts, I never understood the money side of the business. But then I saw the loss column and something clicked. I’d been investing in foundations, relationships and frameworks, which demonstrated a strategic, non-financial return on investment. For chronos-aligned businesses, the only valid return on investment is financial. At that moment, I realized I needed a new profit and loss statement that allocated line items for the intentional seeds I was planting that will grow and when the time is right, I will harvest.

This shift doesn’t make it any less stressful when I don’t know how I’ll pay my bills next month.

But that small kairos moment helped me reframe how I think about time, energy and money.

I can see how failure was preparing me for something better, and how each intentional action today is shaping the world I envision for 2075.

What a kairos-aligned business might look like:

• Client work aligned with your core mission
• Slower growth, but deeper fulfillment
• Stronger long-term retention
• Less burnout, more clarity

From hustle to stewardship

Adopting a kairos-aligned approach means shifting more than just how you think about time. It requires rethinking what we want to reward and adopting new terminology to ensure alignment.

Chronos rewards control, speed and productivity, built on a logic designed for factories.

Kairos rewards trust, stewardship and alignment, built on a logic designed for living systems.

In this new paradigm, I’m advocating for these values:

• Stewardship replaces hustle
• Readiness replaces urgency
• Regeneration replaces extraction
• Coherence replaces control

This approach is slower, quieter and in some months you’ll earn less. However, the tradeoff is building with clarity, integrity and intention towards meaningful long-term impact.

Are you in a kairos moment?

Take 15 minutes and make one kairos-aligned decision for today.

If nothing comes up, here are three ideas you can draw inspiration from:

• Delay a launch that feels rushed
• Say no to a client who drains your energy
• Ask yourself: If I had 50 years instead of five, what would I do differently?

Try one kairos-aligned decision today, then share it with someone building toward that shared future.