Nature, as a rule, doesn’t do straight lines.
January is when straight lines have their annual renaissance.
New year. New goals. New roadmaps. New decks with diagonals heading bravely up and to the right. Everyone’s a little more certain than they should be, mostly because certainty looks great in a kickoff.
And look—straight lines are useful. They’re how humans compress complexity into something we can coordinate around. They’re how we turn a messy world into a shared plan.
They’re just not how the world works.
A straight line is a drawing.
Reality is a system.
Nature doesn’t grow in straight lines because nature is never operating in a vacuum. It’s always negotiating with constraints: energy, time, competition, seasonality. In other words: feedback.
You can see this in something as plain as bacteria in a closed system. In batch culture—no new food added, no waste removed—growth follows a predictable curve with distinct phases: lag, log/exponential, stationary, decline. It climbs, it levels off, it falls. Not because the bacteria “lost motivation,” but because the environment changed: nutrients get constrained, waste accumulates, and the system hits its limits.
Business does the same thing—just with different constraints.
Netflix is a public, documented curve. In Q1 2022 it reported losing about 200,000 subscribers; it also explained that pulling out of Russia had a ~700,000 subscriber impact. The story didn’t end there. In its Q4 2024 results (reported January 21, 2025), Netflix said revenue grew 16% year over year in Q4, helped by 19M paid net adds, and it finished 2024 with 302M memberships. It also reported operating income exceeded $10B for the first time.
That’s why the shapes we actually see in the world aren’t straight lines. They’re curves. They’re plateaus. They’re step-changes that look like magic until you notice the “magic” was pressure building quietly, and a constraint finally moving.
The January mistake
The mistake isn’t planning.
It’s treating the plan like the terrain.
A linear plan smuggles in a quiet assumption: outcomes will move in proportion to effort. That’s not how complex systems behave. They respond to constraints, leverage, and feedback loops.
When your plan is a straight line, feedback starts to feel like disobedience. Friction becomes “off track.” Uncertainty becomes something to hide. Teams start optimizing for the appearance of progress because the line has to stay clean.
That’s how you end up managing the picture instead of the system.
A curve is not chaos. It’s information.
A curve is the system speaking.
When progress flattens, it’s usually not a pep-talk problem. It’s a constraint becoming binding.
Adoption doesn’t stall because people are bad. It stalls because a workflow is annoying, the routine isn’t formed, the incentive is wrong, or the feedback is too slow.
Conversion doesn’t slow because customers “don’t get it.” It slows because there’s friction in the path, a missing proof point, or a trust gap.
Speed doesn’t drop because people “aren’t moving fast enough.” It drops because a dependency is blocked, a handoff is sloppy, or the system is starved of clear decisions.
You can push, and you might get motion. But motion isn’t the same as progress.
The plateau: the part people misread
Plateaus make leaders nervous because they don’t flatter the narrative.
But a plateau is often one of three things:
Capacity is being built.
Change is being absorbed. People are rewiring habit. The work is real; it’s just not photogenic yet.
A bottleneck is exposed.
The system is pointing at the limiting factor. You don’t “push through” a constraint. You redesign around it.
A step-change is loading.
Some jumps are real, but they require setup: a new capability, a new channel, a new trust layer, a new operating rhythm.
This is where a lot of “execution” conversations go wrong. They treat mechanics like morale.
What a real plan looks like at the start of the year
The plan that I have yet to see work is the promise of a line; "here’s the trajectory".
The plan that has worked for me, starts with “here’s the curve we expect, where it will bend, what will constrain it, and how we’ll know early if we’re wrong.”
That changes the posture. Less control. More navigation.
And navigation asks better questions:
- Where will friction show up first?
- What must be true for the curve to steepen later?
- What constraint is binding right now?
- What feedback would prove we’re wrong early?
- What are we changing so the system rewards the behaviour we want?
Because the win condition isn’t a clean chart.
It’s a system that learns fast enough to stay pointed in the right direction.
The only January line that survives contact with reality
Your plan will bend.
If it doesn’t, either you’re operating in a simple system—or you’re not looking closely.
So don’t write plans that require the world to be linear.
Write plans that assume the curve.
If you want a real plan, plan for the curve.