Proof Arrives After the Decision

Boards want proof before they commit, and it's easy to see why. They're spending other people's money, and they'll be held to account if it goes wrong. The difficulty is that for Unobvious Growth, the proof only exists after you've acted. If an opportunity could be proven in advance, someone would already have taken it. Asking for certainty up front is, in effect, asking for obvious growth.

The answer isn't to lower the bar but to change what the board is being asked to believe. I call it “staged conviction”, and it rests on two things. The first is a picture of the future vivid enough that people can see themselves in it. The second is a path to that future broken into steps small enough to approve with confidence, each one testing the assumptions that would kill the idea if they turned out to be wrong.

The first of those is the part most business cases leave out. I worked with the executive team of one of the UK's biggest banks, which years earlier had been forced by regulators to sell a business in a very valuable part of the payments market. They'd watched its new owners buy it cheaply, ride a wave of growth and make a fortune. Persuading them to re-enter the market was hard. They wanted assurances about customer lifetime economics, about the wider regulatory landscape and about how the market would change, and none of those things could be proven in advance.

So rather than trying to prove the unprovable, we helped them see the world that should exist for payments, through a series of experience analogies. Onboarding as simple as joining a gym. A merchant portal as intuitive as a car dashboard. A business marketplace as familiar as the software they already used every day. Each analogy borrowed credibility from an experience the executives already knew and trusted, and together they made the future concrete. We designed it so that believing in the experience meant believing in the business. The numbers still mattered, but they became a way of testing a future the team could already picture, rather than a substitute for it.

The second part is about how you fund that future. Instead of a single business case asking for approval of the whole bet, you write down everything that would need to be true for it to pay off and test the riskiest assumptions first. In one ratings business I worked with, that meant an assumption log of more than two hundred items, with the investment case presented plainly as indicative. Funding comes in stages, each one buying down the biggest remaining uncertainty and ending in a gate where the board decides again with better evidence. Early on, it often makes sense to let two or three competing ideas run side by side and let evidence rather than seniority pick the winner.

This is hard for most businesses because their investment processes were built for obvious growth. The annual business case and the precise five-year forecast assume you know enough to be precise. For unobvious bets that precision is theatre, and experienced board members know it. What they need is a future they can believe in and an honest plan for finding out whether it's real.