Observation 6
One observation from 25 years of building businesses and leading teams.
29 September 2026
I’ve noticed something over the years.
When results are good, we rarely question them.
When results slow down, explanations come quickly.
The market has changed.
Competition has become aggressive.
Customers are delaying decisions.
The team isn’t doing enough.
Resources are limited.
Most of the time, there is some truth in these explanations.
But put together, they can create something else.
Noise.
And once there is enough noise, it becomes difficult to see what is actually happening.
One review meeting I still remember
Many years ago, I was reviewing performance with someone who had consistently been one of the strongest members of my team.
That quarter, his numbers had dropped significantly.
As we started discussing what had happened, the usual explanations came up.
The market wasn’t great.
Customers were taking longer to decide.
Competition had become tougher.
Nothing sounded unreasonable.
But there were too many possible reasons and no clear answer.
So we stopped.
Instead of discussing explanations, we went back to the numbers.
We looked at the inputs.
Customer meetings.
Conversions.
Average order value.
And then we looked at the outputs.
One by one.
The picture started becoming clearer.
Customer meetings hadn’t reduced.
Conversion rates hadn’t changed significantly.
But average order value had fallen.
A lower-priced product had recently been introduced in his territory, changing the overall sales mix.
Suddenly, the quarter made much more sense.
The market hadn’t necessarily become the problem we thought it was.
We had been looking at the noise instead of the signal.
I’ve seen variations of this many times since.
A business slows down and ten reasons appear.
A sales number falls and everyone has an explanation.
A product launch slips and the conversation quickly moves to resources, competition or priorities.
Some of those factors may genuinely matter.
But until they are connected to what actually changed in the numbers, they remain possibilities.
I’ve increasingly found that the real story often sits somewhere between the inputs and the outputs.
Not in the loudest explanation.
Not necessarily in the most obvious one.
But in the relationship between what went in and what came out.
Looking back, that review meeting stayed with me not because anything dramatic happened.
We simply slowed the conversation down.
Separated the signal from the noise.
And looked at what the numbers were actually telling us.
When results slow down, the noise gets louder.
Just an observation.