The real game isn’t balance, it’s the dance around it.
Every founder eventually learns that building is less about stability and more about managing the oscillations.
Not preventing motion, not freezing the system in equilibrium, but designing it so when things inevitably move, when customers shift, teams misalign, or models drift, the system returns. Returns not perfectly, not identically, but rhythmically ever so predictably and sharpened through motion.
Let’s break it down: the Illusion of Stillness. We all need to see Stability as a Systemic Minimum. In physics, stability isn’t peace; it’s potential energy minimized. A marble resting at the bottom of a bowl when jiggled, it rolls back.
That’s the kind of “safe chaos” you want in a company. Not a frozen structure, but a landscape where energy injected into the system.. through risk, change, or even failure.. doesn’t spiral out but loops back in.
Take the case of product iteration we all go through. The initial release is almost never correct. But a stable system absorbs user feedback as force, pulls itself toward improvement.. then overshoots, corrects again. It oscillates around the user’s true need.
That’s what most founders miss: iteration is oscillation, and stability enables it. If you find oscillation in your life, it's the signature of a learning system. Oscillation is feedback in motion.
You launch a feature, then feedback hits, your entire org adjusts, the markets respond, and your roadmap shifts. That back-and-forth is your pendulum swing. Now zoom out.. this isn’t noise; it’s how the system breathes.
In Agentic systems, this shows up as continuous feedback loops between LLM outputs, user interaction, and backend memory refinement. You want the loop tight, you want it to correct but not stall. Too much damping (over-control), and you kill innovation. Too little, and the system spirals as hallucinations grow, tasks fail, costs balloon.
Every healthy agent oscillates, not because it’s confused but because it’s learning.
There is another shift we need to adopt, the one where we see leadership as a dynamic equilibrium. Now bring this into org dynamics. Leadership isn’t about eliminating conflict or locking in structure. It’s about designing systems where friction becomes fuel, where interpersonal disagreements, missed OKRs, even failure, do not destroy the org but pull it back toward alignment.
Is there an unstable team? One miscommunication, and trust collapses. Is there a neutral team? It drifts with no real force to correct. But a stable, oscillating team? It misses a step, then autocorrects, every time faster, smarter, and closer than before.
Same with the GTM strategy, when you overextend, you burn cash like crazy. When you over-optimize, you miss all the opportunities. The magic isn’t in either extreme. It’s in how fast and how you oscillate between them as needed.
This is why most startups fail in my not-so-humble opinion. They misread their energy landscape. (I did too once.)
The root is building systems that are unstable. Unstable systems look fine until they don’t. They are like a marble on top of a hill; they need constant control to stay balanced. One disruption in flow? Down they go faster than you catch them.
I’ve seen this with companies chasing hype cycles without any self-control or cognizance. There are no feedback loops, no energy damping, unchecked positive feedback. Funding feeding growth feeding delusion until the correction breaks them.
Some teams over-control. Every move is second-guessed, every deviation punished, and that’s overdamping. It kills the learning rhythm, it kills morale, and worse, it kills the insight.
What you want is this:
Stability at the core (values, vision, architectural backbone, of course, your mental health)
Oscillation at the edges (product, market, messaging)
The best companies pulse like living systems; they vibrate and adjust their frequencies, not shatter.
Stability without motion is death, and motion without stability is chaos.
In life, it’s the same.. You can become grounded and still change your mind. You can be steady and still swing hard. The goal isn’t to avoid oscillation. It’s to own the waveform.
The final question isn’t whether you want motion or stillness. It’s whether you’ve built a system that knows how to move without falling apart. That’s the real game.
Stable equilibrium gives you the base, and oscillation gives you life.
Get both right, and your system becomes anti-fragile, learning through movement, not in spite of it.