Stop Chasing the Ball. Start Anticipating It.
Andrea Sorensen · RizeCon 2026 · Pocatello
Most business failures aren’t caused by bad intentions — they’re caused by moment-by-moment behaviors that quietly undermine the goals leaders are sincerely working toward. Andrea Sorensen drew on her master’s thesis research, twenty-five years of studying change, and a TaeKwondo black belt earned over eight years alongside her son to introduce the Infinity Model: a framework for understanding exactly where businesses break down and how to become the trusted guide customers desperately need in a world of infinite noise.
The statistics are discouraging on the surface — 90% of startups fail, 90% of New Year’s resolutions fail, and organizational transformation follows the same arc. But Andrea’s argument is that odds are irrelevant. What matters is whether you understand the principles that determine success, whether your moment-by-moment actions align with your actual goals, and whether you can see the gaps your competitors are missing.
What she covered
Subtle Sabotage. The thesis behind the session and Andrea’s actual master’s research. She studied leaders implementing change who were, by every outward measure, botching it. She expected to uncover bad intentions. Instead she found something more unsettling: their intentions were good, but their moment-by-moment behaviors consistently pointed away from their stated goals — and they couldn’t see it. Subtle sabotage is the gap between what you want and what you’re actually reinforcing through your daily actions. Andrea named eight of these traps in the session, all of them common in growing businesses.
The Infinity Model — broken side. Andrea’s visual framework maps a business from the leader’s vision (node one) through team execution (node two), a critical but often missing guide role (node three), into the customer journey: discovery, exploration, decision, action, and return. Word-of-mouth referrals carry 75% more impact than any other form of marketing — but only if the loop closes. The problem is that most of the customer journey lives in what Andrea calls dark metrics: data you don’t have, silence you aren’t listening for, and drop-offs you never see because you only count the ones who showed up.
