Making Sound Judgement When the Rules Keep Changing

A new central bank circular lands on a Friday evening. A rule your whole plan relied on no longer applies.

Watch how two leaders react. One starts adjusting the plan before they have finished reading. The other goes quiet, panics, and makes an expensive decision that cannot be undone. They had the same information and the same intelligence.

We usually call that gap instinct. It is not. It is something you can build.

Why most leaders never build it

Gut feel can be trained, but only under one condition. You have to find out quickly whether you were right. A trader knows by the close of the market. A fire commander knows within minutes. A surgeon knows by the next morning. That fast feedback is what turns experience into instinct. Without it, experience is just time served.

Now compare that to your own work. Your market changes its rules mid-game, and your biggest decisions are judged two or three years later, if at all. By then, you have changed many other things, so you can credit the result to whichever one flatters you. Nobody shows you what the other choice would have paid.

Your judgement has never been graded. You have twenty years of decisions and no report card, and you have been calling that confidence.

The fix is to treat judgement as an input problem. There are three inputs.

Input one: your own numbers, kept honestly

The one place you can create fast, honest feedback is inside your own company, and most leaders waste it. Fraud is reviewed as a set of isolated incidents. Churn is explained after the fact. A failed launch gets a story. None of it changes what anyone believes on Monday morning.

Try this instead. Pick three numbers that would tell you that you are wrong, and review them with the same few people every week.

Before each quarter starts, write down what you expect to happen and put a date on it. At the end of the quarter, read it out loud and name one thing you will do differently.

Keep the number that embarrasses you next to the number you show the board.

You will dislike the first two rounds. After a year, you will know something almost nobody around you knows, which is how often you are right, and about what.

Input two: history, used as a guide

Show a chess grandmaster a real game for five seconds and they can rebuild the board from memory. Place the same pieces at random and they do little better than you. They were never seeing pieces. They were recognising positions they had already lived through. You cannot live through fifty thousand market cycles, but you can read about them.

Take Nigeria's naira redesign. In October 2022, the Central Bank announced new notes and a hard deadline to hand in the old ones. A cash shortage, a fight over extensions and a Supreme Court order followed. Nigeria had seen the same pattern in April 1984, under the same leader in his earlier time as head of state. Old notes were replaced, the exchange window was short and the borders were closed.

That earlier episode showed what would happen next. The deadline would move once the pain got loud, and months without cash would change how people pay for years afterwards.

History can also mislead you if you treat it as a script. In March 2024, the Central Bank told banks to recapitalise. The requirement was five hundred billion naira for an international licence, within two years, with no extension. Many people reached for 2004, when eighty-nine banks became twenty-five. By the March 2026 deadline, thirty-three banks had met the new thresholds and raised about 4.65 trillion naira. The deadline held, but banks took different routes to comply. The pattern returned without repeating exactly.

The market broke from the old script. The regulator did not. History tells you what kind of situation you are in. It does not tell you which parts will repeat. A leader who treats the pattern as prophecy gets hurt as badly as one who never opened the book.

Input three: what is moving right now

The American intelligence community once ran a tournament to find out who forecasts best. Civilians working from public news beat analysts with classified files by more than thirty per cent. The winners did not have the strongest theories. They were scored repeatedly, and they changed their minds in small steps as conditions moved. The more the ground shifts, the less your strong opinions are worth and the more your corrections are worth.

Give this one hour a week. Pick one thing that moved above your head, such as a policy, a rate, a licence or a funding window. Follow it down until it lands on somebody's job or somebody's money.

During the cash shortage, the useful question was not what the circular said. It was what a trader in Onitsha would do on day forty if they still could not get notes. The answer was that they finally accepted a transfer they had refused for years. That insight was worth more than any forecast of the policy itself.

What this gives you

Something quieter than better decisions. You stop being jumpy. Without these inputs, the loudest thing in the room wins every week and the work that compounds never gets built. Once you can tell which clock is running on what, long projects stop looking like distractions. You can hold a five-year build and a Tuesday emergency in your head at the same time.

It also changes what a plan is for. A three-year roadmap defended as a commitment is a bet that the rules will hold for three years. In this market, that is not conviction. It is inattention. Treat your roadmap as a position, because positions get repriced.

I built Chronicles of Innovation to study the historical blueprints, and I use the ZeroToAct Weekly Intelligence Brief to track what is moving now. I apply the same discipline to what we build, what I fund and what I let wait. Judgement that is never tested against results stays an opinion.

The short version

Your numbers. Pick the numbers that can prove you wrong, and check them often enough to be corrected while it is still cheap.

History. Whatever is happening to you has happened to somebody before. One afternoon spent finding out how it ended for them costs less than learning the lesson yourself.

What is moving now. Each week, follow one thing that moved above your head all the way down, until it reaches you, your work, your company or your money.

None of this depends on how long you have been leading. It works the same at twenty years and at three weeks. What matters is whether anyone is keeping score.

Sound judgement cannot be delegated, bought or faked for long. When the ground shakes, you will not be guessing where things land. You will have seen the position before.

When you have done all this and it still fails

Some calls will still fail. You can keep honest numbers, read history correctly and follow what is moving, and a decision can still go against you. Scoring makes you better across a hundred decisions. It does not guarantee the next one.

When that happens, the question changes. It stops being about inputs and starts being about what you are standing on. I have written about that separately, because it answers a different problem. Read Three Ingredients for Sound Judgement.