You’ve made a decision. You’ve considered the options, consulted the right people and committed to a direction. Your team is doing the work and making good progress.
Then something happens.
New information makes you question some of the assumptions behind your decision. A different path starts to look more appealing, and you wonder whether you should change course.
But it’s not that simple.
You’ve made commitments and built collective confidence in the decision. Changing risks undermining that confidence. Your Board might wonder what you missed. It may mean your team is less committed to following your direction.
It requires some deep self-reflection. Is sticking with your original decision conviction or reputation management? Has the evidence really changed? If so, is holding your position a defence of a decision you no longer believe in?
You’re caught between two different versions of lost credibility.
Change direction too readily and people stop trusting your decisions. Hold your position, and they stop trusting your judgment.
So how do you know when to hold, and when to change course? The answer depends on the cost of getting it wrong.
The cost of getting it wrong
Consistency and adaptability both matter, but both can become liabilities when overplayed.
Think about working for someone who is constantly changing their mind. It’s natural to hold back on committing resources or investing too much energy in a new direction because it probably won’t last. In this situation, I’ve even heard team members say, “I wait for <my leader> to ask me three times before I act on it”. Even when that change makes sense, there’s a cost in rebuilding motivation and momentum, redirecting effort and bringing people along.
Conversely, a leader who sticks to a decision might create a sense of stability, but that doesn’t mean people have confidence in the thinking behind it. If challenging decisions is consistently fruitless, people stop raising concerns. The decision holds, but the team loses opportunities to reconsider whether it’s still the right one. That leakage comes at a cost.
These patterns often coexist in the same organisation. Some decisions become almost impossible to shift, while others are repeatedly revisited. In both situations, it’s difficult to know how much confidence to place in the decisions being made. And that uncertainty affects how willing people are to commit, challenge and take responsibility themselves.
What are you actually responding to?
Part of the challenge is distinguishing between new information and evidence that should change a decision.
We have access to more information and analysis than ever before. AI is accelerating this, making it easier to test assumptions, explore scenarios and develop alternative interpretations.
Generating another interpretation doesn’t necessarily make it a better one. Incomplete, unreliable or irrelevant information is more common than we care to admit. Being able to mount a compelling argument isn’t necessarily a reason to change direction.
The real challenge is to determine whether something material has changed, and whether that change is worth acting on.
More often than not, we’re faced with uncertainty. We don’t have all the information we need, and waiting for more isn’t always an option. Equally, acting on every new piece of information can create random movement rather than progress.
Good judgement requires us to understand the basis of our decisions, including the assumptions we’re making and the things we’re uncertain about. It also means having some sense of what would cause us to reconsider our position, rather than waiting until we’re uncomfortable with the direction or someone presents a more persuasive alternative.
Calibrating conviction
The level of conviction required also depends on the context and what’s at stake.
In a startup, pivoting can be a necessary part of finding a viable business model. In a more mature, larger organisation, a similar change is likely to require substantial investment, cross-functional commitment and significant trade-offs. The risk of changing course is different, as is the evidence needed to justify it.
This doesn’t mean established organisations should be less willing to change their minds. It means that the decision to change requires different analysis.
I think this is where we sometimes confuse conviction with certainty. They’re not the same thing.
Certainty is about how confident we are that we’re right. Conviction is about how confidently we’re prepared to act on our judgement. We can have conviction without certainty, and in leadership we often have to.
Most significant decisions are made with incomplete information. There are assumptions to test, risks to weigh and outcomes we can’t fully predict. Waiting until we’re certain would mean waiting too long, or perhaps never making the decision at all.
Conviction is what allows us to commit despite that uncertainty. It’s the confidence to make a call, explain the reasoning behind it and give others a clear direction to work towards. It doesn’t require us to believe we’ve got everything right, or that our decision will remain right as circumstances change.
This is also what makes changing our minds compatible with strong leadership. If our conviction is grounded in the quality of our reasoning rather than our attachment to a particular decision, we can reconsider our position without losing our sense of direction. In fact, being willing to change when the evidence warrants it is part of exercising that conviction.
The challenge is helping others understand that distinction too. When people know why a decision has been made, what assumptions underpin it and what might cause us to revisit it, they have something more useful to work with than an expectation that the decision will never change.
When a decision does change, we need to be able to explain why. What have we learnt? What has changed in our understanding? Why does that mean a different course of action is now warranted?
Perhaps the measure of conviction isn’t how firmly we hold our position. It’s whether we have the judgement to know how firmly to hold it and the confidence to change it when the reasons for doing so are sound.