I Had a Feeling This Was Going to Happen

I knew this was going to happen, I said it for a while, and now I’m walking into an opportunity I’ve been planning for weeks with a website held together by three hours of panic, gaffa tape and a wing and a prayer. To say it’s far from ideal is an understatment.

I have been building towards a summit for over a month now. A room full of the right people to launch contAIn with, the kind of opportunity you want to maximize.

The only thing I needed that I could not build myself was a website. Not the content, or the pitch, and certainly not the preparation. I had all of that. Just a website, you know possibly the most important thing when you are launching an online business. The front door, the place where the journey starts, where the person who shares a breakout room with me or hears me speak goes next.

I handed that to someone else, not because if I had the time I would have been able to do it, no because I trusted they had my interest at heart, understood its importance and would deliver for me.

Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough with my instructions, maybe they didn’t want to do the job, they wanted me to fail, or were jealous. Any one of those is a possibility, none of them may be true, perhaps life just got in the way - who knows? The reason is immaterial, the result is the same.

The only thing I hadn’t done myself and was relying on to be finished, tested, and ready was not finished, not tested, and not ready. Yes I could have used AI to build me a website, yes I could have done a lot of things if I had known it wasn’t going to be done, but the could haves are more immaterial than the result - the point was I had a feeling this was going to happen.

I knew. I said it out loud, more than once. “This is not going to be done.” Not a guess, a gut instinct built on pattern recognition, on thirty years of watching projects stall in exactly this way. The project manager in me was reading the signs the way a project manager does, because three decades of delivery teaches you what a stalling contractor looks like. You don’t need the confession. You just need the silence.

But I overrode that signal. Because the social contract says you trust people to do what they said they’d do, because pulling the plug feels like an overreaction when the words coming back sound reasonable. Because there is a version of polite professionalism that tells you to give people space, give them time, assume good faith.

And whichever one of those I chose cost me my launch setup.

Last night, hours before the summit opens, I sat down with someone I trust and we tried to contain the damage. We built what we could from scratch, in a few hours. The design is wrong, the funnel is not set up, I still do not fully understand how half the moving parts connect because there was no time to learn the platform properly, only just time to make it exist.

It exists. That is the best thing I can say about it. It is live, it partially functions, and it is a very, very long way from what I had planned.

I will walk into this summit today with the best of intentions, and a front door that looks like it was assembled in the dark. Which, if we are being precise about it, it was.

This is not a woe is me, nor a story about one person letting another person down. That happens, people overcommit, underdeliver, have their own lives and their own chaos, sometimes your project is not their priority, and simply nor are you.

The question is not whether it was disinterest, jealousy, sabotage, a million other reasons, or just life getting in the way. The question is: does the reason matter when the result is the same?

Because, this morning from where I am standing, the result is identical regardless of the cause. The website is not what it should be, the funnel is not built, and the thing I have spent weeks working on looks like a dogs dinner on a bad day. I’ll get over it and it will be fixed, but the launch plan I had is destroyed, no amount of praying can fix it today, it is logistically impossible - today, and just for today, neither the mountain or Mohammed moves.

The only person who carries that consequence is me. Not the person who didn’t deliver. Me.

That is the bit that matters. The consequence always falls on the person who needed the deliverable, not the person who was supposed to deliver it. The contractor who misses a deadline does not lose the client relationship. You do. The supplier who ships late does not lose the launch window. You do. The person who said “I’ll have it done” and didn’t, walks away from the wreckage. You sit in it.

I instinctively knew. That is the part I keep coming back to. I knew, and I overrode what I felt.

Not because I am naive, cannot read a project plan, or am too trusting. Because something in the social programming tells you that pulling the plug on someone who says they are handling it is rude, premature or even aggressive. That it makes you the difficult one, that good people give others the benefit of the doubt.

And maybe that is true, but in delivery, trusting someone who is showing you every sign that they will not deliver is not kindness, it is a failure of governance, my governance, over my own critical path, and that is squarely on me.

My gut instinct was right, the signal was clear, and regardless, something trained into me long before I ever managed a project, overrode the thing I actually guessed was going to happen.

That is what I term the feed loop, not the AI kind, the human kind. The version where your own pattern recognition, your own lived expertise, your own ability to read a situation gets overridden by a social script you did not write and never consciously agreed to follow.

You were not forced to trust. You were funnelled into it.

The summit starts today. I will walk in with what I have, not what I planned. The content is mine, the pitch is mine, the preparation is mine, the sleepless nights and hundreds of hours have already been spent. The website is a mess, but I am not. Disappointed yes, destroyed? Most certainly not.

If you are reading this and you have a critical dependency sitting with someone else right now, something you need, something with a deadline, something that matters, if your gut is telling you it’s not happening, listen to it, save yourself the pain and allow yourself that critical time to fix it.

If the signal is telling you something is it telling you it for a reason? If so what consequences could overriding it have for you? Trust yourself, it might just save your launch.

Sam

configure YOUR system. contAIn™ the chaos. control YOUR outcome.

This article was originally published on Substack.