This is an uncomfortable idea, because it asks you to treat your own judgment as something worth testing — not just your customers’ behavior. The good news is that you already have the tool for it. The same hypothesis-driven thinking you use to validate a product idea can be turned inward.
Not every business problem is a business problem
Leadership and workplace culture expert Jacqueline Cripps describes a business run by two capable partners that simply couldn’t move past a certain ceiling. On paper it was healthy. In practice, the same patterns kept resurfacing: over-servicing certain clients at the expense of profit, offering discounts and favours inconsistently, approving investments that didn’t quite match what the business needed at that moment. The leaders weren’t short on intelligence or experience. They’d had advice and coaching. Yet the patterns held.
What looked commercial from the outside was often emotional underneath. One leader, Cripps observed, placed enormous value on being needed — protecting relationships, retaining people who "felt irreplaceable" — even when the business’s economics pointed elsewhere. The deeper point is one most founders recognize once it’s named: we don’t leave our insecurities, assumptions and habits at the office door. They show up in pricing, hiring, partnerships and growth plans.
This isn’t a knock on intuition. Experience is genuinely valuable, and a founder’s gut often carries real pattern-recognition. The trouble starts when a belief stops being a hypothesis and becomes a fact you no longer question.
The disguise: how beliefs pass themselves off as strategy
The reason these patterns are hard to catch is that they rarely announce themselves. As Cripps puts it, "A discount becomes a relationship investment. A favour becomes customer service. An unnecessary expense becomes a growth opportunity. An uncomfortable conversation gets postponed because ‘now doesn’t feel like the right time’". Each decision, on its own, looks reasonable. Collectively, they steer the whole company.
Research on entrepreneurial decision-making offers a partial vocabulary for what’s happening. Under uncertainty, people lean on mental shortcuts. Confirmation bias nudges us to notice evidence that fits what we already believe. Anchoring lets an early number quietly set the terms of a later judgment. Loss aversion makes the fear of losing a client or a relationship feel heavier than the prospect of an equivalent gain. One study of cognitive bias and entrepreneurial emotion found that biases like optimism and overconfidence don’t act alone — they shape, and are shaped by, the emotions founders feel about a decision, which in turn influences whether they act. That study looked at intention among students, not at the profitability of established firms, so it’s best read as a supportive lens rather than proof of cause and effect. But the mechanism it sketches — assessment, emotional reaction, response — is exactly the loop that turns a private fear into a recurring business choice.
From surface problem to testable hypothesis
The useful move is to stop asking only "What’s wrong with the business?" and add Cripps’s sharper question: "What assumptions am I bringing into the business that might no longer be serving it?"
That reframe matters because a belief, unlike a feeling, can be tested. You don’t have to settle the question of whether you’re "too attached" to a client. You can design a small experiment that puts the underlying assumption under mild pressure and watch what actually happens. The table below shows how a few common patterns translate from vague frustration into something you can probe.
| Surface problem | Possible hidden belief | A small test of the belief |
|---|---|---|
| Chronic over-servicing of one client | "If I stop overdelivering, they’ll leave" | Scale back to the agreed scope for one cycle; measure retention and satisfaction |
| Discounts given on request | "Holding my price will cost me the deal" | Hold price on the next three prospects; track close rate, not just feelings |
| Headcount growing faster than revenue | "More people proves we’re succeeding" | Define the specific output a new hire must produce before approving the role |
| Hard conversation keeps getting postponed | "Now isn’t the right time" | Set a fixed date; note whether the delay protected the business or your comfort |
None of these tests delivers a verdict on its own. A single result can mislead, and most outcomes have several plausible causes. The aim is humbler and more honest: to reduce uncertainty by gathering evidence about a belief you’ve been treating as settled.
A decision audit you can actually run
When you catch yourself making the same call repeatedly, run it through a short audit before you scale it. The sequence is simple enough to do on a notepad.
flowchart TD A[Notice a repeating decision] --> B[Name the emotion behind it] B --> C[State the assumption as a sentence] C --> D[Design one small test] D --> E[Review: business need or self-protection?]
Start by noticing the repeat — the discount you keep offering, the conversation you keep dodging. Then name the emotional cue honestly: relief, guilt, the wish to be liked, the fear of being seen as harsh. Naming it isn’t self-diagnosis; it’s just data. Next, write the assumption as one plain sentence — "If I raise this price, good clients will walk." Now you have a hypothesis. Design the smallest test that could challenge it. Finally, review the result and ask whether the original decision was serving the business or protecting you.
A caution worth keeping: awareness alone rarely changes outcomes. Cripps notes that people attend workshops, recognize their patterns, and still repeat them. Insight is a start, not a fix. And separating a genuine commercial instinct from a comfortable habit is genuinely hard — real market facts and personal motives are often tangled in the same decision. The point of the audit isn’t to declare one of them the villain. It’s to make sure the quieter motive doesn’t get to vote in secret.
The honest limits
It would be neat to say that one belief explains your retention, or that fixing your mindset fixes your margins. It doesn’t work that way, and the evidence here doesn’t support that claim. We don’t know how common these patterns are across businesses, which beliefs most predict trouble, or how much they move revenue. This is a reflection-and-validation lens, not a diagnosis of personality.
What you can take from it is practical and modest. Treat your own beliefs as hypotheses worth testing. When a decision keeps repeating, pause long enough to ask whether you’re serving the business or protecting a fear, an identity, or a habit. As Cripps observes, businesses rarely outgrow the beliefs of the people leading them — which means the next thing worth validating might be sitting on your side of the table.