Early looks a lot like wrong

Some leaders sense things early.

A campaign that's about to stall. A customer shift nobody has named yet. A team dynamic that's quietly going sour.

They raise it. And they're told they're overthinking it.

Earlier in my career, that happened to me more than once. I'd sense that something in a campaign or a team was off, say so, and have it dismissed. It took me years to realise that what I was sensing often wasn't wrong. It was early.

The problem is that in the moment, early and wrong look exactly the same.

Why "trust your gut" isn't enough

The usual advice is to back yourself. Trust your instincts. They're signal, not noise.

Sometimes they are. Sometimes they're not. Intuition is pattern recognition, and patterns can mislead, especially in a new market, a new team or a new category.

The room isn't wrong to be sceptical of a feeling. It's only wrong to dismiss it without checking.

Turn the instinct into a test

The leaders who get heard don't argue for their intuition. They translate it:

"Here's what I'm sensing. Here's how it might show up in the numbers. Here's one small test we could run."

That changes the conversation. You're no longer asking people to trust your feeling. You're asking them to check it, cheaply.

If you're right, you're early and credible. If you're wrong, you've lost a small test, not your reputation.

Make the case in their language

Be specific about what you're seeing. Not "something feels off," but "three customers mentioned the same workaround this month."

Connect it to a number someone already cares about.

Say what would change your mind. It shows you're testing, not insisting.

And build coalitions, not consensus. You don't need everyone to agree. You need enough people to run the test.

When intuition became testable

I worked with a Head of Marketing who had a strong instinct for when customer feedback was pointing to something deeper. She would notice patterns before they were obvious in the numbers: a change in the language customers were using, a repeated workaround, a question that kept coming up in different conversations.

The problem was that in leadership meetings, those observations often got dismissed as too abstract. "What does that mean for the numbers?" someone would ask. Or: "What do you actually want us to do about it?" After a while, she started second-guessing whether a pattern was real enough to raise.

We worked on changing how she brought those instincts into the room. Not by making them smaller, but by making them testable: "Here's what I'm sensing. Here's how it might show up in the metrics. Here's one small test we could run."

One pattern she kept noticing was customers asking the same questions during onboarding. Rather than treating that as anecdotal feedback, the team looked at where those questions were appearing and found a corresponding drop-off at the same stage of the onboarding journey. They simplified that part of the experience and changed the supporting messaging, and the drop-off at that stage fell.

It wasn't proof that every part of her instinct was right, but it was enough to change the conversation.

Over time, her insights carried more weight. Not because she pushed harder, or because the leadership team simply decided to trust her. They had learned that when she raised a pattern, she could explain what she was seeing, what evidence would support it and how to test it without betting the company on a hunch.

What I've learned is that you don't have to choose between trusting your perception and being rigorous.

You can trust the signal enough to test it.