The Mind You are Trying to Influence Was Never Listening to Your Logic
You’ve built the business case. Fifteen slides. Cost-benefit clearly laid out. Risk register attached as an appendix. You walk into the steering committee, present it cleanly, and watch three executives nod — then approve something else entirely, or approve nothing, or ask for “more analysis” on a decision that was never short of analysis.
You did not fail because your logic was wrong. You failed because you were addressing a version of the mind that doesn’t exist.
The mind in that room is not a calculator. It’s lazy — it conserves energy wherever it can, which is why a fifteen-slide deck gets skimmed, not read. It’s driven far more by gut feeling and instinct than by rational sequence, no matter how rational the person considers themselves to be. It’s affected by dozens of biases stacked on top of each other, most of them invisible to the person holding them. It’s shifted by small environmental signals — who’s in the room, what mood the meeting started in, what happened five minutes before you walked in — signals that have nothing to do with your content. And most tellingly: it tends to decide first and build the rational justification after. Not the other way around.
This is not cynicism about executives. It’s how minds work — yours included. The problem is that most leaders keep responding to this reality with more of what doesn’t work: longer talks, tighter logic, another appendix. Decisions get made when they feel right, not when they are logically right. If you’re only supplying the logic, you’re arguing with a mind that has already moved on to something else.
What this looks like in an ERP program
I’ve sat in enough steering committees to see the pattern up close. The vendor presents a recovery plan with a clean Gantt chart and a risk-adjusted budget. Everyone in the room can follow the logic. And still, nothing changes — because the room doesn’t feel the drift. They’ve seen green status reports for six months. The logic says “we’re behind.” The feeling in the room says “we’re fine, we always catch up.” Feeling wins.
Compare that to what actually moves a steering committee: not a better chart, but a moment. Pulling up the actual support ticket queue live, instead of the sanitised summary slide. Reading two lines from a frontline staff member’s email, verbatim, instead of paraphrasing “user sentiment is mixed.” Naming, out loud, the exact date a milestone was quietly moved, and letting the silence in the room do the work logic couldn’t. None of that is manipulation. It’s giving the mind something concrete to feel, because concrete and felt is the only channel it reliably answers.
What this means if you’re the one trying to influence
If you lead people — a steering committee, an executive team, a council, your own staff — the practical shift is this: stop preparing better arguments and start preparing better moments.
Before you build the deck, ask what the room already believes and what would have to change in the room, not on the page, for that belief to move. If the belief is “the project is fine,” your job isn’t more data proving it isn’t. Your job is finding the one artefact — a screenshot, a quote, a number nobody has said out loud — that makes “fine” impossible to feel in that moment.
Sequence matters more than most leaders admit. A room that’s just spent ten minutes celebrating a small win will not absorb a hard truth the way the same room will after sitting with something uncomfortable for a minute of silence. Don’t fight that. Use it. Say the hard thing early, before the meeting’s mood has been set by something else, and let it sit before you move to solutions.
And be honest with yourself about the order you actually make decisions in. If you’re the sponsor, notice when you’ve already decided and are now building the business case backward to support it. Everyone does this. The leaders worth trusting are the ones who catch themselves doing it and say so out loud, rather than dressing the decision up as pure analysis after the fact.
None of this replaces rigour. You still need the business case, the risk register, the Gantt chart. But those documents persuade the two or three people in the room who were already going to agree with you. Everyone else is deciding on something else entirely — and if you don’t know what that is, you’re not influencing the room. You’re just talking to it.
