Business decision-making can be difficult for reasons that have little to do with the decision itself.
The opportunity can be real. The commercial logic can make sense. The direction can even be clear. And still, the organisation may not move.
I have come to notice this more as my work has moved closer to the centre of the business. A decision rarely belongs to one function. It touches people who carry different responsibilities, see different risks, and are accountable for different parts of the outcome.
That changes what business ownership means. The work is not only to decide what should happen. It is to help make the decision possible for the organisation.
The idea is rarely the whole problem
Earlier in my career, I probably thought of influence more simply.
If the opportunity was strong enough and the argument was clear enough, the next step should follow.
Experience has made that view less convincing.
I have worked on platform partnerships where access had to be built through a stronger business story before a meaningful conversation could happen. I have worked on a new business opportunity where the potential was clear, but the organisation was not yet ready to operate it. And I have seen annual planning become much more than a commercial exercise once the growth ambition started to depend on what the wider organisation could actually support.
The situations were different. What stayed with me was the same underlying question:
What needs to become true for this decision to work?
That question changes the work. It moves the focus away from simply proving that an idea is good, and towards understanding what stands between the idea and execution.
Sometimes that is evidence. Sometimes it is capability. Sometimes it is resources, timing, economics or the way the business is set up to operate.
The point is not to create a list of obstacles. It is to understand the system around the decision.
People are standing in different places
This is also why I have become less interested in the idea of “convincing stakeholders”. It makes the work sound like a communication exercise.
In reality, people can look at the same business and see very different things.
A growth ambition may look like a demand opportunity from one side, a supply question from another, a financial commitment from another, and a regulatory or operational constraint somewhere else.
None of those views necessarily cancels the others out. They are simply different parts of the same business.
I have found that the more useful conversation begins when those perspectives are brought back to the same outcome.
What are we trying to make happen?
What could prevent it?
Which constraints are real, and which can be changed?
What does each part of the organisation need in order to contribute?
That is different from trying to get everyone to agree with the original idea.
The objective is not uniform agreement. It is enough shared understanding for the business to move.
Readiness changes the decision
One of the clearest examples came from working on a new business opportunity.
The opportunity itself was not the hardest part. The organisation was not yet ready to operate it in the way the opportunity required.
There were genuine constraints across the business. Pushing the same proposal harder would not have removed them.
So the work paused.
At the time, it would have been easy to see that as a delay in getting people on board.
Looking back, I see it differently.
The pause created space to understand what the original proposal was missing. When the conditions around the opportunity changed, the conversation could start again from a more workable position.
The opportunity had not necessarily become better. The organisation had become more ready for it. That distinction has stayed with me.
I pay more attention now to readiness, not just potential. Because a good opportunity at the wrong level of organisational readiness can still be a poor decision.
Growth reveals the system
Annual planning made the same idea visible at a different scale.
A growth target can look like a commercial problem when written on a planning sheet. But the ability to deliver it can sit across the organisation.
Demand needs to be created. Products need to be available. Supply needs to support the ambition. New products can open additional demand. Regulatory requirements can affect what can be communicated and how quickly it can move. Resources need to be available. And the economics still need to work.
The bigger the ambition, the harder it becomes to separate these conversations.
Growth starts to look less like something one function delivers and more like something the organisation has to make possible together.
That changes the role of planning.
It is not simply deciding where to put the budget. It is understanding what needs to be true across the business for the ambition to become executable. And that is where business ownership becomes different from functional ownership.
You may own the growth ambition from one part of the business, but you cannot make every condition around that ambition true by yourself. You have to understand where the dependencies are, bring the right people into the problem, and work out what can realistically move.
The work behind movement
I used to think strong business ownership meant having a clear answer.
I still think clarity matters. But increasingly, I think the harder part is understanding what has to happen around that answer.
The evidence may need to become stronger. The business model may need to change. The organisation may need to be ready. Different functions may need to see how their own priorities connect to the same outcome.
And sometimes the most useful thing you can do is recognise that the conditions are not there yet.
That is why I no longer think of influence simply as getting people to say yes.
Business decision-making becomes more complex as more of the organisation has to move around the same outcome.
The answer matters. But so does everything that has to move around it.
