Greg Stevenson describes a company turnaround decision where data said wait but his instinct said act now. He argues that CEOs sometimes need to trust an internal sense of self over incomplete information, calling it an "interior game" of steady confidence rather than data confidence.
There was a point in the turnaround when I had to make a decision I could not fully justify with the data available. The data said wait. The instinct said act. And I understood in that moment what I had only partially understood before. The CEO role asks you to act from your interior, from who you are and what you believe. When the external picture is incomplete, You have to act. That is not reckless. That is the interior game under pressure. The decision turned out to be right, but what I remember most is not the outcome. It is the interior experience of making it, the clarity that came from having done the work, the steadiness that was not confidence in the data. It was the trust in myself.
