There’s a difference between being right and being believed.
Most of us try to close that gap by making the case better. More evidence, a tighter deck, extra rounds of revisions. It often never works, because the gap was never in the argument. In reality, there’s often something else going on.
Conviction Asymmetry: The side with the clearest language wins. A small team with clear language beats a large team with unclear language, and it isn’t close.
On a scale of 1-10, how clear is your strategy / ask?
How to Tell If You Have Conviction
Answer these four questions. Without any hedging.
The future. What is the pay off, in a “must have”, visceral sort of way
Why now. What makes this urgent to act on now, the stakes if you don’t
The trade off. What are you willing to say no to or give up to go after it
The rationale. What evidence do you have to support taking a big leap
Answer all four cold and you have conviction.
Now you see why conviction is the currency and often in such short supply.
One Word Can Change Your Prospects
A very large company I work with has a strategic initiative that needs funding.
One of the most important things they’ll do this decade. Yet this group has been struggling with access to next-level investment. Nobody argues against it. It just isn’t being funded at a level that matches the ambition or the needs.
An “efficiency” play.
The problem was how it was being described.
While efficiency still has its place (just ask Mark Zuckerberg in 2023), efficiency is now an AI commodified race to the bottom. People solve efficiency by just throwing AI tokens and automation at it. Efficiency is “incrementally moving the metric”. Which makes it sensible, reasonable, and nice to have. But not urgent, can’t live without.
So we’re now reframing the work from efficiency to underlying infrastructure. The data rails that ensure the company can deliver on an existential big bet. Now it’s a must-have, can’t-live-without. With a more direct path to oversized funding.
From nice-to-have to must-have.
That’s part of conviction asymmetry. The clearer size wins.
Why Conviction Gets Watered Down
Two things erode it, and both are ambient right now.
The first is decision by committee. Legal takes a pass, comms takes a pass, three stakeholders take a pass, and what comes out the other end is defensible and completely inert. Nobody degraded it on purpose. Each person removed the one part that made them nervous.
The second is vanilla beige, it sounds like everything else. Competent language is in infinite supply now and costs nothing, so the market is flooded with sentences that say nothing at all. Saying nothing is the fastest way to sound like everyone.
Clarity has an edge to it because it requires choice.
POV is the new currency.
When the Honest Answer Is No
Conviction can’t be faked or manufactured.
But it can be drawn out, distilled, and developed. It’s sourced from the inside out, which means the move is to go find whoever already holds it, usually the most senior person with the widest view of the business, and get the story out of them.
It’s one of the requirements we have at Storied.
We only work with CEOs, founders, or an executive in charge. Because a narrative has to index for conviction. And typically that’s where it concentrates.
But conviction asymmetry challenges this precept.
At a time when people don’t know which way is up, down, left or right…
Conviction fills the vacuum.
You don’t have to be “in charge” to have conviction. In fact, conviction is the greatest career-accelerating move you can work on. You just have to make sure that your conviction is legible - meaning that others can understand what’s underneath it.
Be that person.
What’s more likely, you getting fired for high conviction or for low conviction?
Michael
P.S. When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help:
If you want a second set of eyes on your narrative, reply and tell me more
If you need narrative architecture, I help CEOs & operators do just that. Apply for Q3
If you need a keynote speaker, I do them on a select basis. Let’s talk