Recently, Nueva (my son’s school) rented The Guild, and each grade assembled a band to perform on stage. My son’s group called themselves the Imagined Order. Before they performed, they stepped up to the mic and explained the supposed origin of their name. They had read Sapiens last year, loved the chapter titled “Imagined Order,” and ever since have been seeing imagined orders everywhere, particularly in music.

It was such a neat, polished story that, for a moment, I wondered whether our Comms Team had media-trained them. There was only one problem. There is no chapter in Sapiens titled Imagined Order. (Yes, I checked on my phone between taking photos and videos.)

With chapter titles such as:

• Animal of No Significance
• The Flood
• Memory Overload
• No Justice in History
• Permanent Revolution

There are many chapter titles in the book that would make incredible names for punk, metal, or rock bands, but Imagined Order isn’t one of them. Which made their origin story…well, an imagined order of its own.

That realization was a fresh reminder of how powerful, valuable, misleading, clarifying, and confusing imagined orders can be. They’re everywhere. They structure how we work, what we believe, and how we act. In fact, the founders we are fortunate to partner with spend their lives challenging old imagined orders and creating new ones.

This past week, Kalshi announced its latest financing round. Much of the press focused on the headline valuation, round size, or the founder’s new paper net worth. What they missed is that Kalshi’s entire history is one long challenge against entrenched imagined orders.

• Prediction markets are only academic curiosities. Why?
• Event contracts aren’t derivatives traded on an exchange. Why?
• Election prediction markets in the U.S. must be illegal. Why?

The founders kept digging and couldn’t find satisfying answers. So they set out to rewrite the underlying assumptions and replace one imagined order with another.

Founders don’t just challenge external imagined orders. They create internal ones, too. Take Amazon’s six-page narrative memo. What started as an operating norm has become an operating religion, encoding the belief that structured writing reveals clarity of thought that a flashy deck might hide.

That may be true, but great writers can also spin a persuasive story, just like my son’s band did. Not everyone with clarity of thought is a strong writer. Yet, a founder must choose and declare a philosophy, then translate it into opinionated operating norms so the company can coordinate as it scales. That, too, is an imagined order.

Each of us operates within countless imagined orders around work, family, identity, success, failure, and possibility. Some serve us. Some limit us. Some expired long ago but persist because no one bothered to reassess them. The trick is to look around, notice them, question them, and when necessary, replace them.

What imagined orders are you challenging or creating this week?