He walked into the room with a two-hundred-page report from one of the Big Four consultancies, a clear recommendation, and what I can only describe as a forced conviction. Everything pointed in one direction. The analysis was thorough, the market research was current, the financials had been stress-tested. He had, by any reasonable measure, his answer. And yet he was sitting across from me.
I have learned to pay attention to that. If someone is still talking about a decision, they are not convinced by their own inclination or their analysed optimal path. They almost never say so directly, but the act of continuing the conversation is itself the signal. The interesting material is never in the recommendation. It is in the gap between what the analysis says and what the person across from me feels.
This particular executive would not call it an uncertainty, although he might, if pressed, admit he was “making sure.”
Where the signal lives
Most of the leaders I work with arrive with a bias in one direction. Some are heavily analytical, others lead with instinct. Neither type is wrong, although both types tend to believe the other one is. What matters is that they are still in motion. They have not settled. And the reason they have not settled is almost always the same: something does not line up between what the data tells them and what sits in their chest.
This discrepancy is not a flaw in the process. It is the process. Or rather, it should be. The gap between analysis and feeling is where the most important information lives, and most decision-making frameworks are designed to close that gap as quickly as possible. Push through to a conclusion. Pick a lane. Commit.
The problem is that the discrepancy, if you ignore it, does not go away. It materialises later, usually as a risk that everyone quietly sensed but nobody surfaced. I have seen this happen enough times that I now treat the feeling of forced conviction as one of the most reliable tells I know. It is the slight over-emphasis when someone says they are “confident in the direction.”
The default response
The standard reaction to this kind of internal conflict is to pick one side and suppress the other. Analytical leaders double down on the numbers. Intuitive leaders override the spreadsheet with a gut call. In both cases, the suppressed signal does not disappear. It just stops being discussed.
In trading, I learned to respect mechanical decision-making rules. Cut your losses at a predetermined point. Do not let emotion override the system. This works in trading because the environment is, in an important sense, complicated rather than complex. There are many variables, but they operate within knowable constraints. You can build rules that account for most of what matters, and the rules protect you from yourself.
I remember sitting on a Tokyo trading floor in the early 2000s, watching a colleague refuse to cut a position that every metric said was dead. He had relationships with the company’s management, had visited their factories, believed in their direction. He was not wrong about any of that. But the market did not care what he believed, and the loss deepened for three months before he finally closed it.
Business is not like that, although it took me a long time to accept the distinction. In business, outcomes depend on human emotion, on relationships, on trust that builds (or does not build) between people who are trying to create something together. Logical decisions can only create a predicted outcome. When two minds connect and create value from nothing, the outcome can frequently exceed the logically predictable value. The extreme version of this is a musical performance, where something emerges that none of the individual musicians could have produced alone. Just artists jelling.
So the trading instinct (remove the human element, protect against disaster) is exactly right in one domain and exactly wrong in another. I spent years learning to take the human out of decisions, and I now spend my time putting the human back in. Not because the analytical training was wasted, but because it taught me where analysis reaches its limit.
The room, not the report
When that executive sat across from me with his consultancy report, I was not looking at the report. I was looking at him. I look for all kinds of tells. A brief glint in their eyes when they mention one option. A slight shift in posture when they describe the alternative. The pace at which they speak about different scenarios. These are not mystical readings. They are simply information that the formal process was not designed to capture.
What I sensed was something close to forced conviction. He had the deepest domain knowledge of anyone involved in the decision, but the planning meetings were already scheduled, the consultant mandate was already paid for, the board updates were already drafted, and the weight of all that had made it structurally difficult to push back. He was not lacking courage. He was operating inside a system that made doubt expensive to express.
The Japanese have a word for this kind of structural pressure: nemawashi, the behind-the-scenes consensus-building that happens before any formal decision is announced. By the time a recommendation reaches the table, so much groundwork has been laid that dissent feels like a violation of the process itself. I have watched this dynamic play out in Tokyo boardrooms many times, but the truth is it operates everywhere. The packaging differs; the constraint is the same. Tatemae (the public position) hardens while honne (the private feeling) goes unspoken. What I do, in part, is create conditions where the private feeling can surface before the public position becomes irreversible.
The work, in that moment, was not to tell him what to decide. It was to create enough space for him to name his own reservation. Not to upend the process in some dramatic fashion, but to acknowledge, even just to himself, that conviction and compliance are not the same thing.
This is where most decision-making advice goes wrong. It treats decisions as binary. Expand or do not expand. Hire or do not hire. Go with the recommendation or reject it. But decisions are seldom either-or. The real work is finding ways for different agendas, visions and methods to coexist rather than forcing a choice that eliminates everything but one path. Once he could see that, the conversation shifted from “do I agree with the recommendation” to “what would need to be true for this to work in a way I actually believe in.”
A distinction matters here. I avoid the phrase “right decision.” A right decision implies a knowable correct answer. A good decision implies something more honest: that you understood the situation as fully as you could, that you did not hide from your own discomfort, and that you created conditions flexible enough to adapt when things inevitably shifted.
Those who make good decisions tend to have open minds about many things. A narrow and precise definition of a good outcome (this must deliver 12% growth in two years, no other metric matters) produces a very low chance of making a good decision. The narrower the target, the more you have to ignore.
There is something else, too. A good decision in the moment is often the result of a much earlier decision that created the conditions for it. I think of an organisation I advised that had invested in detailed operational reporting two years before a cashflow crisis hit. When the crisis arrived, they had visibility into dozens of small adjustments they could make. What would have been a zero-sum crunch (cut headcount or cut programmes, choose one) became a nuanced, manageable problem. The good decision during the crisis was made two years earlier, by someone who thought it was worth installing the instrumentation before it was obviously needed.
Why this is difficult to do alone
The value of a thinking partner is not that they are smarter. It is that they are not you. They can see the pattern you are standing too close to see. I include myself in this observation (perhaps especially myself). When I face my own significant decisions, I find the same blind spots, the same tendency to mistake familiarity for clarity.
There is a structural limitation to thinking about your own decisions. You cannot be inside the situation and outside it at the same time. Inside, you feel the pressures, carry the history, hold the relationships. Outside, you see the shape, notice the assumptions, question the frame. Most leaders I work with are exceptionally capable thinkers. The constraint is not intelligence. It is position.
When this works (and I should say it does not always work, or at least not immediately), there is a shift that I find difficult to describe precisely. It is like the feeling when you suddenly smash the tennis ball accurately and hard, after being told to move the grip ever so slightly. The change in the outcome is so disproportionate to the actual adjustment made. A small reframe, a doubt finally named, a possibility that was always there but never articulated, and the entire decision landscape rearranges itself.
What I find most interesting is that the capacity builds. The discomfort during the process is real (nobody enjoys having their assumptions surfaced), but the pattern recognition becomes the person’s own. They start catching their own tells. They start noticing when conviction feels borrowed rather than earned.
The executive, revisited
He did not reject the consultancy’s recommendation. He reshaped it, substantially, in ways that reflected what he knew about his market and his organisation that no external analysis could have captured. The report became an input rather than an instruction. His doubt, once he could name it, turned out to be the most useful thing in the room.
I think about that interaction when people ask me what good decisions look like. They do not look like certainty. They look like someone who has sat with the full weight of a discrepancy, who has resisted the pressure to resolve it prematurely, and who has found a way to hold what the numbers say alongside what they feel. The gap between those two things is not a problem to be solved. It is where the thinking happens.
I suspect that is most of the work: helping someone arrive at the gap a little sooner than they would have alone.
