The first time my startup faced real change, I thought I could muscle through it. We’d just closed a small round, and instead of breathing, I immediately started re-architecting our roadmap. We were chasing a new market segment, onboarding a batch of hires, and learning a new regulatory framework—all in the same quarter. In my head, I treated it like a sprint: push hard for three months, get through the chaos, and then it would settle. Of course, it didn’t. That quarter rolled into another, then another, and the “change” I thought we were enduring turned out to be our new normal. The worst part? My team was burning out, and I was the one who had set the pace without testing whether we could sustain it.
When you’re a founder, change feels like an adrenaline hit. It makes you feel alive, relevant, in motion. But when it’s not a one-off—when it’s constant—you start to see the cracks. The energy spikes are followed by deep valleys. Teams get tired of “just one more push.” You start losing your best people, not because they can’t handle hard work, but because they can’t live in permanent transition mode. And you, the founder, end up trapped in firefighting because the system can’t adapt fast enough without you holding every lever.
The situation in my case was pretty straightforward on paper. We had an opportunity to expand into a Gulf market through a strategic partner. The contract looked great, the potential revenue was tempting, and it matched our product direction—at least in theory. We didn’t stop to stress-test what that would mean for our operational load. The team had been delivering for a stable, familiar customer base in Southeast Asia. Overnight, we were adding a market with a different language, compliance requirements, and sales cycle. I convinced myself that the team’s general adaptability would cover the gaps. It didn’t.
In the early weeks, we were running on excitement and caffeine. Sales was buzzing with new leads. Product was tweaking features to match market expectations. I was on flights twice a month, alternating between investor updates and customer visits. It felt like momentum. But two months in, the strain started to show. Our response times slipped. A product release was delayed because a compliance check took longer than expected. The new hires we’d onboarded for the Gulf market were still finding their footing, and their learning curve meant our experienced team members were carrying double the load. The narrative of “we’ll get through this adjustment period” was breaking down. This wasn’t an adjustment. It was the new operating environment.
The breakdown wasn’t a single dramatic moment—it was a slow erosion. One key account in our original market started complaining about bugs that weren’t getting fixed. A senior engineer quietly told me she was thinking about leaving because she no longer knew what “done” looked like. My cofounder and I started snapping at each other in meetings, frustrated not by the work itself but by the fact that every week felt like we were behind. The team had lost its rhythm, and we hadn’t given them a way to build a new one.
What made me see it clearly was a conversation I didn’t expect. We were in a retro meeting, and one of the newer team members—still polite, still cautious—asked, “Is this pace permanent?” There was no sarcasm, no complaint, just an honest question. The silence that followed told me the truth: nobody in the room knew. Not even me. We were acting like the chaos was temporary, but our calendars, our metrics, our decisions were all pointing toward sustained change. And we hadn’t prepared for that.
That’s when it hit me. We treat change like an event. Something to endure, like a storm. But sustained change is not a storm—it’s a climate shift. You can’t outlast it. You have to adapt to living in it. And adaptation is not just mindset. It’s practice. It’s rehearsal.
In theatre, you don’t just learn your lines once and hope you’ll nail it on opening night. You rehearse, over and over, in conditions that mimic the real thing. Not because you can predict every variable, but because you want muscle memory for the moments that matter. The same applies to startups facing ongoing change. If you only react when the shift happens, you’re already behind. But if you rehearse for the environment you’re heading into—building scenarios, pressure-testing your processes, and making small adjustments before the stakes spike—you give your team a chance to perform without burning out.
When I finally stopped to think about what rehearsal could look like for us, it wasn’t about role-playing fake crises. It was about running small experiments that mirrored the pressure of the new market. We started by limiting our Gulf market team’s reliance on our SEA team for execution. That meant deliberately creating short-term friction so they would learn to navigate compliance and product tweaks independently. We also shifted from long planning cycles to shorter, two-week sprints focused on a single measurable outcome, so we could spot bottlenecks early. It wasn’t comfortable. People complained at first. But it was controlled discomfort—designed so that when the real peaks came, they didn’t feel impossible.
What I learned is that rehearsal does two things for a founder. First, it surfaces fragility when the cost of fixing it is still low. You see who’s unclear about priorities, which handoffs break under stress, where documentation is missing. Second, it builds trust. Teams stop feeling ambushed by change because they’ve seen versions of it before. Even if the scenario is different, the rhythm of adapting becomes familiar.
If I had to boil it down, the biggest mistake I made was waiting for “normal” to return. In early-stage life, there is no “back to normal.” There is only the version of normal you create by design. And that design happens in the in-between moments—before the next market launch, before the next funding round, before the next crisis. That’s when you decide whether your team is going to just survive change or actually operate well inside it.
Rehearsal also changes you as a founder. It forces you to think less like a firefighter and more like a director. Instead of running into every problem, you start setting the stage so that your team can solve more without you. It’s humbling because you have to let go of the illusion that you can personally carry everyone through. And it’s liberating because when the pace accelerates, you’re not the only one who knows the moves.
There’s a temptation to think rehearsal is a luxury, something you do when you have extra time. The truth is, you never have extra time. You make it. In our case, that meant blocking off one afternoon every two weeks where no one was allowed to work on live tasks. Instead, we ran scenario drills: how to handle a compliance request in 24 hours, how to launch a micro-campaign with half the budget, how to onboard a client without a single in-person meeting. Some of these scenarios came from real events; others we invented to stretch our systems. The point wasn’t to get them “right.” It was to get better at moving together under shifting conditions.
The first few times, people were skeptical. But after a couple of months, I noticed something. The same engineer who had been thinking of leaving started leading a scenario session herself. A sales lead who used to panic when timelines shifted began suggesting adjustments before being asked. The team wasn’t just reacting faster—they were anticipating. That’s the real benefit of rehearsal: it changes the posture of the team from defensive to proactive.
If you’re a founder staring at a horizon full of uncertainty, the instinct will be to bunker down and brace. But if you treat sustained change like a storm, you’ll exhaust yourself waiting for it to pass. Treat it like a climate shift, and you’ll start thinking about the systems and skills you need to thrive in it. That’s not about resilience in the abstract. It’s about very specific practice in the conditions you expect to live in.
Looking back, I wish I had started rehearsing the moment we signed that Gulf market deal. I wish I had asked the team what they needed to feel prepared, instead of assuming I could translate the playbook from our home market. I wish I had noticed sooner that the people who thrive in short bursts of chaos aren’t always the same ones who thrive in a marathon of adaptation. But I’m glad we learned it before the damage was irreversible.
If I had to give one piece of advice to a founder walking into the same fire, it’s this: don’t wait for your team to “get used to it.” They won’t. You have to give them the reps. Create the conditions in miniature before they arrive in full scale. Let people try, fail, and adjust without the whole business on the line. It’s slower in the short term, but it’s the only way to go faster without breaking.
The truth is, most of us don’t fail because the change was too big. We fail because we treated it like an interruption instead of the environment itself. Rehearsal doesn’t make change easier. It makes you better at living inside it. And for a founder, that’s the difference between constant survival mode and building something that can grow, even when the ground never stops moving.
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