Built in Uncertainty: Marilyn Zakhour on our 6th Anniversary

This article is an excerpt from Marilyn Zakhour’s letter to the team on the occasion of our 6th anniversary.

Every year around our anniversary, I find myself looking in two directions at once.

Backward, at where we started and forward, at what we are being called to build next.

This year, that reflection feels different because more than anything, it made me realize this:

We didn’t just build a company. We built the capacity to keep building.

Where it started

Cosmic Centaurs was born in April 2020, at a moment of crisis. I had just been let go from my job. The world was shutting down, and everything felt uncertain. And somehow, that uncertainty became fuel. 

For two weeks, I sat with one question: What actually has value in this world?

The answer that emerged was simple, but it changed everything: If we spend most of our lives at work, then work should be a place where people can thrive and feel connected, safe, and purposeful. A place that is, quite simply, happier. That idea became our purpose: to help leaders build organizations that thrive and deliver, and to make the workplace a happier place.

On April 14, 2020, Cosmic Centaurs officially came to life. Six years later, I look back and realize something important. We did not start with a perfect plan. We started with a clear purpose and we learned forward from there.

Built-in uncertainty

What’s remarkable is not just that we built a company, but that we built the car while driving it. We were figuring out our services while delivering them, defining our culture while living it, and building structure, strategy, and systems in real time, under pressure, with clients depending on us. From day one, we’ve been operating in uncertainty. The pandemic, regional crises, a few centaur babies. and moments that were not just business challenges but deeply human ones.

Six years in, the environment is still volatile, complex, and unpredictable. But that has never been a blocker for us. If anything, it has been the environment in which we do our best work. 

From planning to learning

At times, we lacked full information. We did not always have certainty, but we kept moving, testing, adjusting, and evolving. Some of our most important moves came from signals, not plans: a conversation with a client, a pattern we noticed, or a need that kept showing up. And instead of waiting to fully define it, we acted. Some of those bets worked. Some didn’t. But over time, they shaped the direction of the company in ways that no plan could have predicted.

That is something I now deeply believe:

Resilience is about building the ability to continuously adapt, before you are forced to.

What we’ve actually built

Six is a powerful number. It is the number of creations. And over the last six years, that is what we have been doing, creating.

An organization.A community.A body of work.A way of doing things.

We have supported organizations across industries and geographies. We built frameworks, research, tools, and content. We have shared our knowledge openly because we believe it becomes more powerful when it is accessible.

 But if I am honest, what matters most is not only what we built. It is how we built it.

Because over time, those choices became something bigger than individual decisions.

They became a system, a way of listening to what is changing and making sense of it together. A way of acting, even without full certainty.

Looking back, I realize we were building resilience by design , even when we didn’t call it that.

Who we built it with

More important than what we’ve built is who we’ve built it with.

A company is defined by its people, the company you keep, and the path you travel together.

And when I look at Cosmic Centaurs, what I feel most proud of is this team.

The way everyone shows up and supports each other. 

The willingness to do hard things.The care every team brings, not just to the work, but to how the work is done.

At the end of last year’s conference, I said it was the first time I didn’t feel broken after a conference. For a long time, the weight of everything sat very heavily on me. And then something changed. The organization started carrying it. This year, this was proved again. In the middle of everything happening around us, the team showed up and delivered at a level that competes with the best , not just in quality, but in speed, ownership, and care.

For me, that is one of the clearest signals that we’ve built something real.

What this means for what comes next

So as we step into the next year, the question is not whether things will get easier or more predictable, chances are, they won’t.

If the past six years have taught me anything, it is this: Organizations that endure are not the ones with the best plan. They are the ones that keep learning, keep adapting, and keep building, even when they don’t fully know what comes next.

And what makes that possible is not certainty, It is purpose.

We have always known why we exist. What has remained flexible is everything else.

And that combination, clarity of purpose, flexibility of path , is what allows us to keep reinventing what we do while staying true to who we are.

At the heart of all of this is something simple: The gift of building an organization is not only the strategy you execute or the products you create.

It is the company you get to keep.

The people you travel with.

The fact that you don’t have to face any of this alone.

I feel deeply grateful for the centaurs, past and present, and for everything you bring to this organization.

And equally grateful for the ecosystem around us, our clients, our partners, our collaborators, our community.

You are part of this story.

You always have been.

This is an organization that can do whatever it sets its mind to.

Centaurs, assemble.

Marilyn