How Do You Think? Like an Entrepreneur or an Engineer

Give two smart people the same goal and watch what happens. One starts moving that afternoon and figures out the road as it appears. The other goes quiet for three weeks and comes back with a plan for every step. Neither is wrong. But only one of them is guaranteed to have started.

Two ways to get somewhere

After 30 years of deals, startups and spreadsheets, I’ve noticed most people lean one of two ways when they face something new.

The builder thinks like an entrepreneur. They can see the finish line clearly, but they don’t need every step mapped out. They start with what they have, build the path as they go, and when they hit a wall they go around it. They aren’t afraid to jump in.

The deconstructor thinks like an engineer. Before they move, they work backwards from the end goal and plan every step in order. When the plan is right, the work is beautiful. But the plan is never finished, so they often never start. And when the road changes, as it always does, the plan breaks and they have to go back to the drawing board.

The research says experts build

This isn’t just a hunch. Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School, spent years studying how expert entrepreneurs actually make decisions. In one study, she and her colleagues gave 27 expert entrepreneurs and 37 MBA students the same new-venture problems and had them think out loud.

The MBA students did what they were taught: research the market, predict demand, write the plan, then execute. The experts mostly didn’t. They started with the resources they already had, decided how much they could afford to lose instead of guessing how much they might win, and built partnerships with people who were willing to commit early. They treated surprises as opportunities instead of failures. Sarasvathy calls this effectual thinking, as opposed to the causal, plan-first thinking taught in business school.

The partnership piece shows up in the data, too. In EY’s 2026 survey of established entrepreneurs, 97% had pursued strategic partnerships in the past year or so, compared with 11% of large-company CEOs in the Americas. Builders find people to build with.

“The builder doesn’t know every step. They know the destination, they know the next step, and they trust themselves to handle the one after that.”

Why waiting for the perfect plan is risky

The deconstructor’s instinct feels safe. Plan everything and nothing can surprise you. The trouble is that a business doesn’t sit still while you plan. Customers change their minds, competitors move and markets shift.

The numbers are humbling. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 80% of new business establishments survive their first year, about half make it to year five, and only about a third are still operating after ten years. No plan written on day one survives ten years of that unchanged.

Deloitte put it well in a piece on leading through uncertainty: rather than deciding to act, leaders should consider acting to decide. You learn by doing small things, seeing what works and backing what holds up. Even inside big companies, decisions rarely wait for complete data. In a PwC survey, 61% of executives said their company’s decision-making was only somewhat or rarely data-driven. Everybody is moving on judgment. The builder just admits it and gets going.

But don’t fire your engineers

None of this means planning is bad. You want the deconstructor designing the bridge you drive over, the payroll system that pays your team and the financial controls that pass an audit. Some decisions are expensive or impossible to undo, and those deserve the full plan.

The trick is knowing which kind of decision you are facing:

• Easy to undo? Build. Launch the test, make the call, try the price. You’ll learn more in a week of doing than a month of planning.
• Hard to undo? Deconstruct. Signing a long lease, raising money, buying a company or hiring a leadership team deserve the careful, step-by-step approach.

The best teams I’ve worked with have both. In sales, we pair an account executive, the builder who opens doors and closes deals, with a sales engineer, the deconstructor who makes sure the solution actually works. One moves fast, the other makes it hold. Together they win more than either could alone.

A financial model is a map, not the territory

This is how I think about Excel models, too. A good model isn’t a prediction you build once and frame on the wall. It’s a map you start with today and redraw as you learn. Build it quickly enough to make a decision, then update it every month as real numbers replace assumptions. The deconstructor in you makes the model accurate. The builder in you makes sure you actually use it.

Quick quiz: which one are you?

Answer honestly. Mostly A’s means you’re a builder. Mostly B’s means you’re a deconstructor.

1. You have an idea for a business.
   A: You tell five people this week and ask if they’d pay for it.
   B: You start a spreadsheet of everything that could go wrong.
2. Your plan hits a wall.
   A: You look for a way around it.
   B: You go back and rework the plan from the start.
3. Someone asks when you’ll start.
   A: “Already did.”
   B: “Once I’ve figured out the last few details.”
4. You buy furniture that needs assembly.
   A: The instructions are optional.
   B: You lay out every piece and read the whole booklet first.
5. A surprise lands in the middle of a project.
   A: “Interesting, can we use this?”
   B: “Now the schedule is off.”

If you’re a builder, find a deconstructor to check your work on the decisions you can’t undo. If you’re a deconstructor, set a date to start, and start before the plan feels finished. It never will.

The bottom line

See the finish line. Take the first step with what you have. Go around the walls as they show up. Save the full blueprint for the decisions you can’t take back. The people who get where they’re going aren’t the ones with the most perfect plan. They’re the ones who started.

This post is for general information only and is not legal, tax or investment advice.