I’m in Australia for the next 10 days.
It’s my wife’s birthday. We’re seeing old friends, going whale watching, and catching the first NFL game ever played here.
And one big stage on Wednesday.
It’s a partner meeting at a firm whose entire craft is verifying things that already happened.
I’m there to talk about engaging people in the age of AI. How you manage and develop talent while the work gets rebuilt underneath everyone.
None of it can be verified as the workforce I’m describing doesn’t exist yet. That’s the job.
So who do you get conviction on something that doesn’t exist yet?
Disciplined Speculation: you make a bet underwritable by naming what has to be true, and what it costs to find out.
If something on your desk is asking you to commit ahead of the evidence, keep it nearby.
The Past Tense Is the Easy Part
Auditing is the cleaner half.
You look at what a company did and say whether it’s true, against evidence that already exists.
Then the same firm has to decide what it becomes 5 years from now. If the proof were sitting there it wouldn’t be a strategy, it’d be a schedule.
It’s a split that shows up almost everywhere I work.
A claim about last year gets a footnote and three levels of review. A claim about 5 years out gets a slide.
Nobody chose that. It’s what happens when an organization has a rigorous instrument for what already happened and none at all for what hasn’t. It still has to make the call on a Tuesday morning, with the same people who spent the previous hour checking someone else’s arithmetic.
The Number That Survives the Cut
The plan names the must-wins. Three of them, sometimes five.
Each one is defensible, and nobody argues.
Between now and those must-wins, nothing. No chain of reasoning, nothing anyone can retrace without the person who wrote it. Conclusions handed down, in a market that shifts while the document is still open.
Where a number is required, it gets sharper.
You take the number you believe and move it. Up if you’re asking, down if you’re promising. Then you defend the moved number as though it were the real one.
A padded forecast. Everyone reading the plan knows it happened, and nobody says in which direction.
It gets you through the meeting.
What it costs you is downstream. Nobody can tell which part of the plan is conviction and which is cushion, so the whole thing gets discounted at one rate.
Your real bet ends up priced like your padding.
The Cheapest Way to Find Out You’re Wrong
I’ve been spending a lot of time these days with capital allocators. VC, PE, corporate enterprise.
It comes down to two questions:
What has to be true for this thesis or investment to prove out?
How much does it cost to find out?
Run those against your own bet and you get three lines:
The claim. What you’re asserting about the future, in one sentence
The conditions. What has to be true for that claim to hold
The price. The cheapest thing that would tell you, and when you’d know
That’s the top layer, and most of the value.
A speculative bet becomes something someone else can underwrite. Not because you proved it. Because you priced it, and you said out loud what would change your mind.
The Proof You Still Owe
I keep telling people the argument was never the problem, you can add the evidence and tighten the deck and run the revisions again. The thing still won’t move.
I believe that. It’s most of what I do for a living.
And Disciplined Speculation hands the obligation back. If language can move belief ahead of proof, you owe the proof. On a date, at a price you set yourself.
And by the way, pricing it is two moves. You price the opportunity first, because nobody funds a hedge. Then you price the downside, and what it costs to bring that down to something the company can carry.
You don’t need the evidence to make the claim.
You just need to be the one who names what would settle it and what it costs to find out. That’s available long before anyone hands you a budget.
So name the price on that thing on your desk.
What would it cost to find out you’re wrong?
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