Why You Should Hire a 'Belgian'

On identity, expertise, fitness landscapes, and the valley every founder has to cross.

There is a question that sits beneath almost every failed marketing brief, every expensive consultant engagement, and every LinkedIn strategy that speaks fluently to the wrong audience.

It is not a marketing question. It is not a hiring question. It is not even, strictly speaking, a communications question.

It is this: does this organisation know what it is?

Not what it does. Not what it has built. Not the projects it has completed or the clients it has served or the markets it has entered. But what it is—the identity that would remain if you removed the founder's name, the inherited relationships, and the reputation that came from somewhere else and attached itself here along the way.

That question is harder than it looks. And the organisations that cannot answer it are not, in most cases, organisations that have not thought about it. They are organisations whose founder has thought about it, felt the weight of it, and—for reasons that are entirely rational—decided not to answer it yet.

The hill with diminishing fruit

Complexity theory and evolutionary economics offer a framework that is more honest about this dynamic than most management literature.

Stuart Kauffman's fitness landscape model—developed originally in evolutionary biology and extended to organizational theory—describes organisations as moving across a landscape of peaks and valleys. Each peak represents a local optimum: a configuration of practices, relationships, and capabilities that produces results in a specific environment. Getting to a peak requires effort and adaptation. Once there, the view is good and the harvest is real.

The problem is that peaks have diminishing returns. The practices that produced the climb become less effective as the environment changes. The harvest that was abundant in year three is thinner in year seven. The founder can feel it—in the deals that take longer to close, the relationships that are harder to activate, and the markets that no longer respond the way they once did.

He can also see, if he looks carefully, that there is a higher peak. A different configuration. A larger market, a clearer identity, and a team that does not depend entirely on his presence to function.

But between the current peak and the higher one is a valley.

And the valley is the part nobody talks about honestly.

The cost of the crossing

The valley between peaks is not metaphorical. It is the period during which the old practices have been abandoned and the new ones have not yet taken hold. Performance gets worse before it gets better. Relationships built around the old identity feel uncertain under the new one. Team members who were perfectly adapted to the current peak—whose expertise, whose instincts, whose entire professional identity was calibrated to the way things are—may not make the crossing. Some will choose not to. Some will find that the new configuration does not need what they offer.

The founder who built the company knows all of this. Not necessarily consciously. But he has been running an organisation long enough to understand, at some level, that change has a price. That the conversation that starts with “Who are we becoming” ends somewhere that costs something real.

And so he does not have the conversation. Not because he cannot see the next hill. But because he can also see the valley and imagine the losses crossing it will sustain.

This is why founders instinctively avoid the people who could help them make the transition. The consultant who offers to answer the identity question is also, implicitly, offering to make the cost of the crossing visible. Visible costs demand decisions. Decisions have consequences. And some of those consequences will arrive before the benefits do—in the valley, where the harvest has stopped and the new peak is not yet reachable.

Better, in a certain frame, to keep the current harvest going a little longer. Even if it is diminishing. Even if everyone can feel that it is.

What the typeform cannot find

This is the context in which the marketing brief arrives.