The Enemy of Progress: How Your Brain Kills Strategy Before It Starts

“Confirmation bias is twisting the facts to fit your beliefs. Critical thinking is bending your beliefs to fit the facts.” — Adam Grant

There’s a silent killer in business — more dangerous than competition, more persistent than inflation, and more costly than poor hiring decisions.

It’s called confirmation bias.

In our work helping business builders move from Strategy to Action, we’ve learned that the real enemy isn’t bad ideas — it’s bad thinking. That’s why we teach wolves and eagles. Let me explain.

Seeing what’s there, not what we wish was there

In our model, the wolf represents instinct — low to the ground, alert, attuned to patterns, ready to hunt. The eagle represents perspective — soaring above the chaos, seeing the full landscape, catching what others miss.

We train business builders to become both wolf and eagle — to live in the tension between ground-level action and high-level vision.

But even wolves and eagles have a weakness: the human brain.

Our brains weren’t built for truth. They were built for survival — and often, survival meant staying loyal to your tribe and your beliefs, not adjusting to new data.

“Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments, not to help us discover the truth.” — Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason

This is where confirmation bias sneaks in. It’s the tendency to seek out, favor, and remember information that confirms what we already believe — while dismissing or avoiding anything that contradicts it.

The Strategy Quadrant and the blind spot of bias

In our Strategy Quadrant, we help leaders distinguish between:

• Clarity and confusion
• Action and avoidance

At its core, the quadrant is about closing the gap between what you say you want and what you’re actually doing. It helps you identify where you're stuck and what’s driving your behavior.

But none of it works — none of it — if you’re not willing to question your beliefs. And here's the kicker: the smarter you are, the better you are at justifying your bad ideas.

“Belief perseverance: even when evidence undermines our beliefs, we tend to cling to them.” — Richard E. Nisbett

Why this matters for business builders

We all love the idea of being visionary leaders. But vision without honesty is delusion. And action without clarity is just noise. If you’re serious about building a business — not just running fast in circles — you have to make one of the hardest pivots of all:

You must choose truth over comfort.

This doesn’t mean abandoning your instincts. It means sharpening them — using your inner wolf to notice what others don’t, and your inner eagle to question the view from above.

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin

You must become the kind of leader who sees clearly. Who invites disagreement. Who challenges your own assumptions before the market does it for you.

The truth most entrepreneurs miss

“People generally see what they look for and hear what they listen for.” — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

That quote says it all.

Want to grow? Want to scale? Want to lead?

Then you must train yourself to see what’s actually there, not what your ego wants to see. Let go of needing to be right. Instead, be relentlessly committed to reality.

Train your inner Wolf. Sharpen your inner Eagle.

When we work with leaders, our job isn’t just to help them build better businesses. It’s to help them build better habits of thought.

That’s what strategy really is: a conversation between who you are now and who you’re trying to become.

So next time you feel certain about something — pause.

Ask:

• What would prove me wrong?
• What am I not seeing?
• Who disagrees with me — and what if they’re right?

Because the greatest threat to your future isn’t the competition. It’s the comforting lies you tell yourself.

Stay sharp. Stay open. Build wisely.

“Once people take a position, they tend to look for evidence that confirms it, and ignore or dismiss evidence that doesn’t.” — Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

We’re circling through our webinar series again

Use the link to register and reserve your spot for the second of our three-part series

Moving From Strategy To Action - May 21st 2025

In all that we do, let us seek wisdom, discipline, courage & justice.

‍