When Simone Biles arrived at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, she carried expectations few athletes had ever experienced.

She was already one of the most successful gymnasts in history.

Years of preparation had led to this moment.

The world expected more medals. Her teammates depended on her. Sponsors, broadcasters and millions of supporters were watching.

Then, during the women’s team final, something changed.

Then, during the women’s team final, the problem became impossible to ignore. Biles was experiencing what gymnasts call the “twisties”: a loss of spatial awareness while rotating through the air.

For most athletes, losing confidence might affect performance.

For an elite gymnast, losing awareness of where your body is in relation to the ground can be physically dangerous.

Biles withdrew from the team final and several individual events.

The reaction was divided.

Many people praised her honesty and courage.

Others thought she had quit when the pressure became too great.

From the outside, continuing might have looked like a brave decision.

She had trained for years. Her teammates needed her. The entire world was watching.

Walking away meant disappointing people, inviting criticism and leaving opportunities behind that might never return.

However, the conditions on which the original plan depended had changed.

Biles later returned to compete in the balance beam final and won bronze. Three years later, at the Paris Olympics, she won three gold medals and one silver.

Those later medals cannot tell us what would have happened had she continued competing in Tokyo.

However, they demonstrate something important.

Pausing did not mean abandoning her ambition.

Changing the plan did not mean the original goal no longer mattered.

She did not walk away from her ambition. She walked away from the assumption that she had to continue regardless of what had changed.

The Information Had Changed

Her plan to compete in Tokyo rested on several reasonable assumptions. 

• She would be physically prepared
• She would retain the spatial awareness required to perform safely
• She would be able to execute skills she had completed successfully many times before

When one of those critical assumptions was no longer true, the decision had to be reconsidered.

The original objective had not changed.

The evidence had.

Of course, the consequences of most business decisions are not physically comparable with those faced by an elite gymnast.

However, the underlying decision-making pattern is familiar.

A business commits to a growth plan because:

• Demand appears strong
• The financial return looks attractive
• The business seems to have sufficient capacity
• The investment is expected to repay within an acceptable period
• The founder believes the team can deliver it

Then reality begins to test those assumptions.

• Customers take longer to decide
• Recruitment costs more than expected
• New employees take longer to become productive
• The anticipated contribution does not materialise
• The cash exposure becomes greater
• Delivery requires more founder involvement
• The market changes

At that point, the business has new information.

Instead of reopening the decision, it often continues with the original plan.

“Let’s Give It Another Month”

There is one sentence that appears whenever a growth initiative begins to underperform:

“Let’s give it another month.”

Sometimes that is entirely reasonable.

A new service may need time to establish itself.

A recently recruited employee may still be learning.

A sales campaign may not yet have produced enough evidence to judge properly.

The problem is not giving something more time.

The problem is giving it more time without being clear about what is expected to change, what evidence is required and what will happen if it does not.

One month becomes two.

Two months become six.

More cash is committed.

More management time is invested.

More of the founder’s reputation becomes attached to making the decision work.

Eventually, changing direction feels more difficult than continuing.

Not because the evidence supports the original decision, but because the business has already invested so much in it.

This is how sunk costs begin to influence future decisions.

The founder is no longer asking:

What is the right decision based on what we now know?

They are asking:

How can we avoid admitting that the original decision may no longer be right?

Continuing can feel courageous.

Changing course can feel like failure.

However, continuing with a plan after its underlying assumptions have changed is not necessarily persistence.

Sometimes it is simply a refusal to make the next decision.

A Decision Is Not Finished When You Say Yes

Growth decisions are often treated as single events.

• Should we recruit?
• Should we launch the new service?
• Should we enter the market?
• Should we accept the large customer?

Once the answer is yes, attention moves towards implementation.

However, saying yes should not close the decision.

It should open a period in which the assumptions behind it are tested.

A well-designed growth decision should establish:

• What the business expects to happen
• Which assumptions matter most
• What evidence will be monitored
• Who owns the decision
• When it will be reviewed
• What would cause the business to accelerate, adjust, pause or stop

Without those elements, the business is not managing the decision.

It is simply hoping that the original forecast proves correct.

Establish Growth Guardrails

A growth guardrail is a boundary agreed before the business is under pressure to cross it.

It defines how much exposure the organisation is prepared to accept and what evidence will justify the next commitment.

For example: Do not recruit permanently until a defined level of revenue is secured, or protect a minimum cash reserve.

The purpose of a guardrail is not to remove judgement.

It is to improve the quality of judgement when emotions, pressure and sunk costs might otherwise take over.

The greater the commitment, the harder it becomes to interpret the evidence impartially.

Accelerate, Adjust, Pause or Stop

A review does not have to produce a simple choice between continuing and giving up.

There are four possible responses.

1. Accelerate when the evidence is stronger than expected
2. Adjust when the objective remains attractive, but part of the plan needs to change
3. Pause when the evidence is s incomplete and the next commitment is difficult to reverse.
4. Stop when the assumptions no longer support the return or exposure.

Simone Biles did not decide in Tokyo that she would never compete again.

She decided that continuing under the conditions she was experiencing was not the right decision at that moment.

What Would This Look Like in Practice?

Return to the agency from last week that was considering a new service.

The one-way-door decision would be to recruit the permanent team, invest heavily in marketing and build the supporting infrastructure before the demand has been proved.

A more controlled plan might begin with a series of paid pilots.

Before starting, the agency could agree the following guardrails:

• Secure three paid pilot customers by a specified date
• Achieve a minimum gross contribution from each engagement
• Deliver the work within the planned number of days
• Keep the Growth Funding Gap below an agreed amount
• Avoid excessive reliance on the founder
• Demonstrate repeat or referral demand before permanent recruitment

Those guardrails create several possible decisions.

If demand and contribution are strong, the agency can accelerate.

If customers value the service but delivery takes too long, it can adjust the process or price.

If the evidence is promising but incomplete, it can pause before recruiting.

If customers will not buy at a commercially viable price, it can stop before building expensive infrastructure around an unproven idea.

Without those guardrails, every positive signal risks being interpreted as proof that the service will succeed.

Every negative signal can be dismissed as evidence that it simply needs more time.

The business remains committed not because the opportunity is still attractive, but because no one established what would justify changing direction.

Turning Visibility Into Decisions

Over the last few months, I have written about The Nuvem9 as a way of understanding the health of a business.

This final stage is where that visibility becomes most valuable.

The measures across its three layers can test whether the assumptions behind a growth decision are proving correct.

• Today’s Control shows what the decision is doing to cash, current commitments and financial exposure.
• Tomorrow’s Scale shows whether demand, contribution, capacity and delivery are developing as expected.
• Future Resilience shows whether the resulting business is becoming more predictable, valuable and independent, or more reliant on one customer, employee, source of funding or the founder.

Green helps us understand why the conditions remain supportive. Amber tells us which assumptions need investigation. Red tells us that a new decision is required. 

Colour should create curiosity, not criticism.

A red measure does not necessarily mean the original ambition was wrong.

It means reality has introduced new information and the business now needs to decide what to do with it.

That is the purpose of the Decision Loop:

SEE → QUESTION → DECIDE → OWN → REVIEW

The loop does not end when the original growth plan is approved.

The decision must continue to be owned and reviewed as its assumptions meet reality.

Reopen One Growth Decision

Think about the most significant growth decision currently being considered, or already underway, inside your business.

1. What decision have we made?
2. What outcome is it intended to create?
3. Which assumptions matter most?
4. What evidence would make us accelerate, adjust, pause or stop?
5. What is the maximum exposure we will accept?
6. Who will review it, and when?

If the plan underperformed over the next three months, would you know when a new decision was required?

Or would the business simply give it another month?

The Growth Decision Review

This month, I have asked four questions about growth:

• What are you actually trying to grow?
• Who will finance the gap before the customer pays?
• Which commitments can be tested before they become difficult to reverse?
• What evidence would make you change the plan?

For founders considering a material hire, a new service, a large customer commitment, market expansion, premises or a significant technology investment, I am introducing a Growth Decision Review.

The review examines one specific growth decision and brings together:

• Intended outcome and critical assumptions
• Growth Funding Gap and maximum exposure
• Reversible and irreversible commitments
• Base and downside scenarios
• Nuvem9 measures and decision guardrails
• Ownership, review timetable and 90-day actions

The purpose is not to provide certainty. No serious growth decision offers that.

The purpose is to understand the commitment, test the assumptions and establish how the business will respond when reality differs from the plan.

Where the decision is sufficiently significant or complex, the CFO Partnership provides ongoing support as those assumptions change and the leadership team decides whether to accelerate, adjust, pause or stop.

If you are considering a growth decision that would be costly or difficult to reverse, reply and tell me what decision you are facing. 

The Plan Changed. The Ambition Did Not.

Simone Biles made her decision under circumstances most business leaders will never experience.

There is an important lesson in what followed.

Changing a plan does not necessarily mean abandoning the ambition behind it.

Pausing does not always mean losing momentum.

Walking away from one course of action does not mean walking away from the outcome you still want to achieve.

Sometimes the evidence changes.

Sometimes the conditions change.

Sometimes continuing is no longer the brave decision.

Good decisions are not the ones that are never changed.

They are the ones that are reopened early enough when the evidence changes.

The purpose of a growth plan is not to prove that you were right. It is to help you make the next right decision soon enough.