Every Project Has Its Own Vibe. Not Every Project Has a Northstar.

The Word That Started This

Not long ago, I was in a conversation with someone about real estate. At one point she said, “I feel like we’re really vibing on this.”

She wasn’t wrong. We were aligned. The energy was good. Ideas were flowing. But something in that moment made me stop and think: do we both know what phase we’re actually in right now?

That question became this article.

When Tech Terms Go Mainstream

In technology, “vibing” has a precise cousin: vibe coding — a term coined in early 2025 by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy to describe generating software through conversational prompts rather than writing traditional code. By 2026, it had become one of the defining trends in software development, with over 92% of U.S. developers using AI coding tools daily and an estimated $4.7 billion market built around the concept.

But “vibing” — as a cultural term — predates all of that. And it’s everywhere now. In boardrooms. In real estate negotiations. In startup conversations over coffee. In Slack threads between founders.

And that’s fine. Language evolves. But here’s the problem: when a term travels from a precise context into everyday use, it tends to shed its edges. What was once a specific mode of working becomes a vague feeling of alignment.

And feelings, however good, don’t finish projects.

The Three Phases Nobody Teaches You

After years as a CEO, consultant, and executive coach working with SMBs and emerging leaders, I’ve watched the same pattern play out repeatedly. Projects start with energy and end in frustration — not because the people were wrong, not because the idea was bad, but because they conflated three distinct phases of any project and never knew the difference.

Those three phases are:

1. The Vibe
2. The Upfront Contract
3. The Execute

Each one has a job. Each one requires different behaviors. And getting them out of order — or skipping one entirely — is quietly one of the most expensive mistakes in business.

Phase One: The Vibe

The vibe phase is real, valuable, and necessary. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

This is the generative, expansive, unconstrained space where ideas are born. It’s where you ask “what if money and time were no object?” It’s where a SWOT analysis flows naturally — not as a formal exercise, but as an organic conversation about possibilities, threats, opportunities, and strengths. It’s the “ifs and thens” phase. It’s dreaming out loud.

In my coaching work, I sometimes call this ideation without a ceiling. You take a concept and you talk about everything it could be. You’re not promising anything. You’re not committing. You’re exploring.

This is where real innovation lives. And the people who are great at vibing — the big thinkers, the visionaries, the ones who can hold ten possibilities in their head at once — are genuinely rare and valuable.

But here’s what vibing is not: it’s not a plan. It’s not a commitment. It’s not a process. And it doesn’t have a finish line.

Vibing has no manifesto. No framework. No defined checkpoints.

The Agile Manifesto, by contrast, came directly out of frustration with exactly this kind of ambiguity. In February 2001, seventeen software developers gathered at a ski resort in Utah, fed up with documentation-heavy, rigid development processes that were consistently failing to deliver. What they created wasn’t anti-planning — it was structured adaptability. Discipline in service of creativity.

The vibe phase needs to end. Knowing when it ends — and what comes next — is the skill.

Phase Two: The Upfront Contract

This is the phase nobody talks about. And it’s the one where most projects actually fail.

Not in the vibe. Not in execution. In the gap between them.

The concept of upfront contracting has roots in Transactional Analysis, the psychotherapeutic framework developed by psychiatrist Eric Berne in the 1950s and 60s. Berne defined a contract as “an explicit bilateral commitment to a well-defined course of action.” The coaching world adopted this concept as the foundation for any effective client engagement: before you do the work, you align on what the work is, what success looks like, and what happens when things go sideways.

Applied to business projects, upfront contracting is the bridge between dreaming and doing.

It’s not a legal document. It’s not a 40-page requirements spec. It’s an explicit, shared agreement — however simple — that answers the questions the vibe phase left open.

Think of it this way.

The Backpacking Analogy

Imagine you and a group of friends are planning an adventure. You spend an evening talking about it — the mountains you could explore, the routes that sound exciting, the gear you might need, the destinations that feel dreamy. That conversation? That’s the vibe. Pure, energizing, generative. You need it.

But at some point, someone has to say: Okay. Where exactly are we going? How many days? Who carries the food, who carries the tent? What’s our turnaround trigger if the weather turns? Who do we call if we don’t come back on time?

That’s the upfront contract. The plan before you hit the trail.

And then — you pick up your pack and you start walking. That’s execution.

Most groups do some version of this. The difference between a good trip and a disaster isn’t whether they talked about it. It’s whether they got specific enough before they started moving.

The Part Nobody Anticipates: The River at Mile 25

Here’s where it gets important.

Even a well-planned trip can hit something unexpected. You planned the route, you packed the right gear, you notified someone at home. And then at mile 25, you discover that the little spring on the map is actually a 30-foot wide river crossing you didn’t see coming.

Now what?

If you have an upfront contract — if you discussed how you make decisions when the plan meets reality — you’re not paralyzed. You have a framework. You already agreed that safety overrides schedule. You already agreed that the person with river crossing experience leads. You already agreed that if you can’t cross safely, you turn back without blame.

If you don’t? You have the world’s most expensive argument in the middle of the wilderness.

This is the psychological dimension of upfront contracting that most project frameworks miss. It’s not just about the plan. It’s about defining the decision-making process for when the plan breaks.

And plans always break. Not because people are incompetent — because reality is more complex than any plan can fully anticipate.

Why It Gets Done Loosely

Let me be direct here: most business owners and leaders do do upfront contracting on some level. This isn’t a case of complete ignorance. The problem is more subtle.

They do it piecemeal. They do it informally. They do it in bits and pieces across different conversations, different emails, different assumptions — and nobody ever stops to say, “Let’s make sure we all have the same map before we start walking.”

The result is that everyone thinks the contract exists. But it lives in five different people’s heads in five slightly different forms.

The data reinforces this. Consider what research tells us about why projects actually fail:

70% of projects globally fail — with poor planning and unclear goals cited as leading causes. (TeamStage, 2024)
Only 42% of organizations report high alignment of projects with their strategic goals — directly increasing the risk of failure. (Mosaicapp, 2026)
Poor planning accounts for 39% of project failures. (Electroiq, 2026)
A KPMG survey of 500 project managers found 52% of projects failed to achieve intended benefits, primarily due to poor strategic alignment. (Gitnux, 2026)

Notice the pattern: it’s rarely the idea that fails. It’s the alignment around the idea.

What a Real Upfront Contract Looks Like

A good upfront contract doesn’t have to be formal. But it does have to be explicit. Here are the questions it answers before the project moves into execution:

What is the mission? Not the vague goal — the specific outcome. What does success look like?
What is the MVP? What is the minimum version of this that we’re committing to deliver?
Who does what? Roles, responsibilities, and decision rights — clearly assigned.
What are the constraints? Budget, time, resources. What are the hard stops?
What are the triggers? If we hit $X in costs, we stop and reassess. If we miss milestone Y, we regroup.
How do we make decisions when things change? Who has the authority? What’s the process?
What does “done” look like? How will we know when the project is complete?

Think of it as the Northstar document. Without it, even a motivated, talented team can drift. Not because they’re doing the wrong things — but because no one defined what “right” looked like before they started.

Phase Three: The Execute

Once the upfront contract is in place, execution can begin. And here, structured frameworks like Agile, Scrum, or Waterfall do exactly what they’re designed to do: keep momentum, surface problems early, and ensure the project is progressing toward the agreed goal.

Agile, in particular, was built to handle the unexpected. Its sprint-based structure creates natural checkpoints — not to slow things down, but to ask: Are we still heading toward the Northstar? Or have we drifted?

But — and this is critical — Agile only works when there’s a Northstar to orient to. The framework is not a substitute for the upfront contract. It’s the engine that drives the car. You still need to know where you’re going.

This is the misuse I see most often in SMBs: teams adopt Agile (or some version of it) thinking the framework will create the alignment. It won’t. Agile assumes alignment exists. It maintains and protects it. It doesn’t create it.

The Hotdog Stand Principle

Here’s a simple way to think about what happens when upfront contracting fails.

Say your goal is to sell hotdogs on a corner in New York City. That’s your mission. That’s your MVP. Your budget is lean — enough for a cart, a license, and inventory.

If you vibe well and execute well but skip the upfront contract, here’s what can happen: one person thinks the hotdog stand is a starting point toward a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Another thinks it’s the whole business. A third has already been pricing commercial kitchen equipment online.

Nobody is wrong, exactly. But nobody is aligned.

And by the time the misalignment surfaces? The hotdog budget is gone. And you have nothing — not a restaurant, not a stand, not a business.

The upfront contract is what keeps the hotdog stand a hotdog stand — until everyone explicitly decides together that it’s time to evolve into something more.

The Mirror

Here’s the honest version of this article:

You probably do some form of all three phases already. The vibe happens naturally in any collaborative relationship. The upfront contract happens in some form, even if informal. Execution happens, one way or another.

But here’s the question worth sitting with:

Do you know which phase you’re in at any given moment?

Because if you’re in vibe mode when your team thinks you’re in execution mode — you’re going to have an expensive misalignment.

If you move into execution before the upfront contract is solid — you’re going to hit that river at mile 25 with no plan for crossing it.

And if you stay in upfront contracting too long — if you plan and refine and align endlessly without ever picking up your pack — you’ve missed the window. The market moves. Momentum dies. The opportunity closes.

Each phase has a job. Each phase has a time limit. And none of them is more important than the others. What matters is knowing which one you’re in, and having the discipline to transition when the moment calls for it.

For the SMB Owner and the New Leader

If you’re running a small business, you know what it’s like to learn by fire. There’s rarely time to do things perfectly. You move fast, you figure it out, you adapt.

That’s not a flaw. That’s survival. And it works — until it doesn’t.

The projects that go sideways rarely fail because of bad ideas or incompetent people. They fail because somewhere between the dream and the doing, nobody stopped to ask: Do we all have the same map?

Every project has its own vibe. Not every project has a Northstar.

Build one before you hit the trail.

A Simple Framework

Phase	Mode	Key Question	Danger if Skipped
Vibe	Generative, expansive	What’s possible?	You never develop real ideas
Upfront Contract	Alignment, agreement	Do we all have the same map?	You execute against different visions
Execute	Structured, iterative	Are we still on course?	Nothing gets done

References

Keith Dragon is an executive coach, consultant, and former SMB CEO. He works with business owners, founders, and emerging leaders to help them operate at their highest potential. Connect with Keith on LinkedIn or visit SolutionDragon.com.