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# Honoring instinct

**James Walls** · June 19, 2026 · 5 min read

Years ago, in a previous career running sales for IT managed services, a major proposal request would land on my desk – the kind worth several million dollars over three years – and three of us would read it: me, a senior executive from delivery, and the regional VP. We read it separately, and then each wrote a single number on a blank piece of paper. That was our bid: no workload model, no headcount plan, no costing of the externals, because we’d done none of that yet. Just the number, cold, from the gut.

Then we’d turn the pages over, and the three numbers usually sat within a few percent of each other. If we agreed the thing was worth chasing, we’d spend two, three, sometimes four weeks building the proper bid – every deliverable scoped, every resource mapped, every external cost priced – and the number we landed on at the end was usually within five percent of the one we’d scrawled before any of it started.

The number was never the work; it was the result of the work, arriving before the work had been done. Instinct couldn’t show its working or defend a single line of the figure, and you can’t bid several million dollars on a number you can’t stand behind. But it wasn’t guessing. It was seeing something real, fast, out of years of having done this before, and the analysis that followed didn’t overturn it. It gave it a body.

## The part that isn’t wrong

A business owner’s instinct is almost never the part that’s wrong.

The owners we sit with carry aims, whether they’ve said them out loud or not: the plateau they want past, the hours they want back, the version of the business they could finally step out of. And they carry instincts, about what to do next or about what’s quietly going wrong. Those instincts are not casual opinions. They are the compressed experience of years spent inside the business every day, in a way no outsider ever will be.

Which is why contradicting that instinct is the fastest way to be ignored. Walk in with two weeks of analysis and tell an owner their gut is wrong, and what they hear, rightly, is that you’ve set a spreadsheet against their lived experience of their own business and decided the spreadsheet wins. They’ll dismiss you, and they’ll usually be right to.

So we start somewhere other than the analysis. We start from the assumption that the instinct is signal, and that the work is to find what it already knows.

## Home base

Instinct is home base. It’s what the owner can see from where they’re standing, and however rough it is, it points at the thing they’re really trying to reach.

That is what makes it more reliable than it looks, because the gut can be badly wrong about the number while being entirely right about the direction. Our bid could have come back thirty percent out after three weeks of work and the instinct still wouldn’t have failed, because what it was telling us was whether the proposal was worth our time at all – whether it carried us toward where the firm was trying to go. The figure was negotiable. The direction was not.

There is a home truth behind every instinct, if you treat it as a symptom rather than marking it right or wrong. The symptom is pointing at a cause. So when an owner comes in certain about something, the move isn’t to go away and test whether they’re correct. It’s to stay in the conversation and ask what they’re seeing that the rest of us aren’t: what changed, what it feels like, when they first noticed it, what they’re afraid it means. You’re not agreeing with their conclusion, and you’re not flattering it either. You’re working backward from the feeling to the thing underneath it, because that thing is almost always more useful than the conclusion sitting on top of it.

Instinct can be wrong about the detail and still be *right about the direction*.

## What the numbers are for

Instinct can’t lay out the path and it can’t validate itself. On its own it is still a hunch you’d be reckless to bet several million dollars, or a business, on. The job of the analysis is to inform the instinct and shape it against what the numbers actually say.

What the analysis is not is a verdict. When the numbers and the instinct pull in different directions, that gap is not proof the owner was wrong. It is the most useful thing in the room. It is the clearest sign of the home truth underneath – the aim the instinct has been quietly steering toward the whole time.

And that aim is the entire point of the work. The real axis is the owner’s life measured against the future they are trying to reach, and the owner cannot see that axis on their own from inside the daily fire. This is where it first surfaces: not as a goal written on a form, but as a hunch they can’t fully account for. Honoring instinct means taking that hunch seriously enough to ask what it is protecting, long before anyone has put the aim into words.

So the first move isn’t analysis. It is listening to the instinct closely enough to hear the aim inside it, and holding off on the spreadsheet long enough that the owner is still in the room when you find it. The number on the blank page was never the answer. It was the star we set out toward, before anyone had drawn the map.

## Two questions to sit with

- What is my gut currently telling me about the business that I have not yet tested – and what would it cost to be wrong about it for another year?

- When the numbers last disagreed with my instinct, which one did I follow, and what happened?

### See how your own numbers are being run

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[See Where You Sit →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/financial-scorecard/)

The scorecard places you on the same axis: [instinct, insight or outcomes →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/financial-scorecard/)

First published in The Stoneforge Newsletter on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/honoring-instinct-james-walls-kymne), June 19, 2026. Revised for this edition.

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