There's a pattern that always emerges in every corporate planning meeting I talk to. At first, everything feels like it's in line. The growth assumptions are reasonable and the spending feels justified. The CEO is in agreement, the product is excited about the roadmap, sales is confident in the pipeline, and marketing is confident in the campaign. This plan feels inevitable.
The treasurer then asks a simple question like, “What happens if this goes down by a quarter?”
That doesn't mean it's a challenge. It's usually an honest attempt to understand how fragile the plan is. But you can feel the change in the room. This question makes it seem as if finance is questioning the team's beliefs.
This dynamic is now everywhere, showing deeper rifts.
- CEOs know the story and think about momentum and market traction.
- Products are about what you can build.
- Sales considers what will sell.
- And finance is about what happens when assumptions match the real world.
Because everyone solves different problems and works with different mental models, this gap between narrative and reality tends to cause companies to fail, especially during times of instability. The CEO is trying to move the company forward, while the CFO is trying to keep the company healthy. And until those perspectives converge, strategy feels like negotiation and true collaboration doesn't occur.
The moment we find ourselves in puts both roles even more into question. It requires CEOs to internalize constraints early and reason about cause-effect relationships and second-order effects before committing to a story. And they're asking CFOs to not only report on what's already happened, but also to help companies navigate uncertainty in real time, without blindly navigating it.
This doesn't mean CEOs become financial experts or CFOs become visionaries. It's both about running the same underlying model of business, strategy and finance are just different ways of describing the same reality. This shared model allows us to move quickly without losing momentum or the company itself.
The CFO mental model CEOs are starting to adopt
The best CEOs I see today are starting to embrace the traditional CFO mindset. In other words, they are learning to see the business through its constraints.
You can see that from their questions. Instead of “Can I afford this?” they ask, “Can I afford this?” “What needs to be true for this to work? How quickly will we know if it doesn't work?” That shift is important. It transforms risk from implicit to visible and transforms the CEO-CFO relationship from a discussion to a shared problem-solving exercise.
The core of this mental model comes down to a few things that finance teams internalize early on (and that most CEOs only learn when they're paid to do so).
1. Know what's really constraining your business.
Most CEOs can tell you about their biggest opportunities. Far fewer people will be able to name a single constraint that actually governs progress. Is it cash? What is the return on CAC? What is the hiring speed? Onboarding ability? Holding back the organization?
CFOs tend to know the answers because they observe how businesses actually work in the real world. They see where bottlenecks are forming and where things start to quietly become strained as they scale. For them, constraints are the limiting factor behind every decision, whether the leader admits it or not.
CEOs who adopt this perspective therefore stop treating constraints as financial concerns. And when you do that and start treating constraints as reality, your priorities change. Capital allocation changes. Recruitment will change. The strategy becomes less about chasing the upward case and more about respecting what the system can actually absorb.
2. Understand how the downside is amplified.
Some decisions have immediate effects. For example, if outbound is slow, your pipeline will dry up within a few weeks. Other situations develop slowly. As customer success bandwidth erodes, churn increases after a few months.
CFOs live within these timelines. They monitor changes in leading indicators before earnings are reflected. Great people look far beyond the first-order effects to see what happens next. If you miss your pipeline goals, you'll need to hire more quickly to make up for it, prolonging onboarding and reducing productivity, delaying the launch of the next cohort. The company is several quarters behind before this problem is reflected in its sales. CFOs typically already have that sequence running in their heads. CEOs often don't because they're still focused on making the first move.
CEOs who have learned this way of thinking will ask about second-order effects before committing to first-order actions. This sense of anticipation is actually more important than speed.
3. Know which decisions cannot be undone.
This is one of the most easily underestimated.
Some decisions can be undone. Others don't.
Some moves close doors, like hiring 50 people or moving from product-led growth to enterprise sales. Even if they could be eliminated, the financial and organizational costs are significant.
CFOs tend to clearly recognize what is irreversible because they are the ones who model what it takes to undo mistakes. CEOs often don't because they're busy optimizing momentum.
The question that changes behavior is, “How quickly can I know if this is wrong, and if so, can I undo it?”
Path dependence is not an abstract theoretical concept. It is power that determines which options remain open and which ultimately disappear. And CEOs who instill this mindset treat strategy as deliberate navigation, intentionally choosing which doors to walk through and which to leave open.
How the CFO's role is evolving beyond reporting
Traditional CFO strategies were actually built for a much more stable world. So for a long time, its role was clear. It's about closing the books, accounting for discrepancies, making sure the company isn't short on cash, and keeping the board informed. CFOs are scorekeepers and guardians of the past. That effort is still important, but now it's a gamble.
In volatile markets, financial values are changing. The new job is to help companies reason out what will happen next and do it early enough that decisions can still change.
This evolution manifests itself in several concrete ways.
1. Funding as an early warning system.
The strongest finance teams notice patterns. They pay attention when renewal conversations start to take longer before the actual cancellation progresses. Recognize extended implementation timelines before they impact revenue recognition.
Most companies manage lagging indicators such as revenue, ARR, burn, and retention. These numbers are important, but they are retrospective. So by the time they get going, the underlying decisions are already built in. Finance recognizes things faster. Signals like pipeline speed and win rate per segment can be noisy by themselves. Together, they tell the story of where the business is headed. And in volatile environments, that foresight can be the difference between responding to problems and preventing them.
But just seeing the signals isn't enough. The real job is to help the rest of the leadership team understand why what seems small now will be important later and what can be done about it.
2. Finance as a bridge between ambition and reality.
Every function speaks its own language. CEOs talk about vision and narrative, product talks about roadmaps, sales talk about pipeline and deals, and finance talks about constraints and cause and effect.
Increasingly, CFOs sit in the middle, interconnecting these perspectives and answering questions like, “How much does it really cost to launch a new product line in terms of time and organizational capacity? What are we implicitly sacrificing by adopting aggressively now instead of maintaining the runway?”
Great CFOs don't wait to be asked these questions. Surface trade-offs before decisions become entrenched. It helps you reframe your choices from “Should I do this?” “If we do this, what are we saying no to? And are we happy with it?”
In that sense, finance is about creating clarity. Risk-taking becomes safer because everyone understands the consequences if things don't go as planned.
3. Partner funding on where to turn.
This is the most difficult change because it goes against stereotypes. Finance has long been seen as a function that slows things down or says no. Discipline remains important in volatile markets.
But today's most valuable CFOs are involved early on, before decisions are actually finalized. they are doing scenario planning and Stress test investments with your CEO to help your team understand which bets will speed up the feedback loop and which will lock the company into a longer path. This allows businesses to act faster in light of reality, making finance essential.
What happens if alignment does not exist
When the CEO and CFO disagree, companies typically don't discuss it openly. Instead, something more subtle happens. Two versions of your company will start running in parallel. One version lives in the story of what the company is building and why it matters. The other exists within the model and focuses on what the company is constrained by and what the numbers suggest is actually happening.
It actually looks like this: For example, consider geographic expansion.
- From a CEO's perspective, the logic is simple. The demand is there, the product works, competitors are already here, and the board is wondering why the company isn't moving yet.
- From the perspective of the financial industry, a different picture emerges. Deployment schedules are already behind schedule and customer success is at its limit. A new region means localization, hiring, onboarding, and more strain on teams that are barely keeping up. And if it doesn't work, it's not a complete rollback either. It's months of distraction and organized chaos.
In companies that are not coordinated, budget negotiations will take longer. Eventually, a compromise solution emerges that satisfies no one. That means launching with half as many people, moving slowly, and hoping it works. No one is surprised when you fail, but everyone is tired. Conversations sound different in a well-aligned company. The CEO and CFO are still in discussions, but they are discussing the same thing. “How quickly will we know if this market supports our sales cycle? What will tell us it's not working? If it's wrong, where's the exit?”
If this adjustment is not made, the symptoms will recur. The strategy team announces plans to quietly rein in funds after the quarter. Finance departments add controls and companies circumvent them with late-night modeling that no one else sees. There are no bad actors. Finance sees a 15% increase in customer churn and wants to reduce growth spending. Products exhibit normal variations. Sales recognizes competitive pressures and wants to double down on outbound. Each perspective is meaningful on its own, you're just operating from a different map.
There's a simple test to quickly reveal this. If planning meetings are spent explaining numbers instead of deciding what to do, coordination has already broken down.
What is convergence (and why is it important)?
The goal is not for the CEO to be GAAP-savvy or for the CFO to be a product visionary. Both roles need to function from the same fundamental business model, which connects strategy and execution to create a single picture of how things actually work.
Companies that get this right tend to share several practices.
- One shared rhythm. Rather than relying on quarterly planning as the key moment of alignment, we frequently (often weekly) check a small set of assumptions that drive most outcomes, such as pipeline coverage, win rates by segment, etc. So when reality changes, the next action is something your team has already thought through.
- One common language. Decisions are framed as trade-offs. “If we do this, we're going to front-load our spending and have less flexibility later on. Are we happy with that?” This works because unlimited resources make every decision arbitrary, but constraints force clarity.
- A common attitude towards tools. AI helps with stress testing scenarios and asks, “What if?” A hundred times in the afternoon. However, the power of judgment still lies with both the CEO and CFO. That's because while AI can reveal possibilities, it can't tell you which constraints are most important. your specific context. A company with a 24-month runway will make different choices than a company with an 8-month runway. Context is what turns information into decisions.
The real strength is simplicity. One shared mental model built around different titles and constraints that actually govern your business. Only that adjustment complicates matters when everything else is uncertain.
