Why Entrepreneurs Need a Thinking Partner, Not Just Another Advisor

Research & Sources / Leadership & Decision-Making

In a rally race, two people sit in the car. One drives. The other reads the road book out loud: “Left four, tightens, over crest, keep middle.” The driver is excellent. The driver is also going 150 kilometres an hour through a forest, which is exactly why someone else reads the map. Running a business is a lot like that rally. And most entrepreneurs are driving it alone.

The driver cannot read the map

Picture the car without the co-driver. The driver is just as skilled as before. The engine is just as strong. But every few seconds the driver has to glance down at a map on their knee, guess what the next bend looks like, and look back up. Nothing is wrong with the driver. The job has simply become two jobs, and one person is trying to do both at full speed.

That is the daily life of many entrepreneurs. You are steering the business: clients, team, cash, product, fires. And at the same time you are supposed to look ahead and decide where the road should go next. Steering wins every time, because steering is urgent. The map stays on your knee.

An advisor is not the same as a co-driver

Most entrepreneurs already have advice. A lawyer, an accountant, a banker, maybe a board, maybe a friend who built a company once. Advisors are useful. But notice what an advisor usually does: you bring a question, they bring an answer from their field. The accountant answers like an accountant. The lawyer answers like a lawyer. Each one looks at one corner of the map.

A co-driver does something different. The co-driver is in the car with you, looking at the whole road, and their job is to help you drive better. They do not take the wheel. They do not tell you which race to enter. They make sure you see the next bend before you are in it.

That is what a thinking partner is: someone who helps you think the whole question through, instead of answering one slice of it.

What the research says about how decisions go wrong

This is not just a nice picture. Researchers have looked closely at how important business decisions are made, and the results point in the same direction.

A team around Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony studied more than a thousand major business decisions. They compared two things: how good the analysis behind each decision was, and how good the process was, for example whether people openly discussed what could go wrong and whether opposing views were actually heard. The quality of the process mattered about six times more for the result than the quality of the analysis.¹

Read that again, because it is surprising. Better spreadsheets helped a little. Better conversations helped a lot.

The same researchers, together with Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, later wrote a guide for leaders on how to check a big decision before making it. One of their main points: we are very good at spotting mistakes in other people’s thinking and very bad at spotting them in our own.²

Psychologists even have a name for this. They call it the bias blind spot. In a series of studies at Stanford, people readily agreed that others are influenced by biases, but rated themselves as much less affected, and kept believing that even after the bias was explained to them.³

So the problem is not that entrepreneurs are careless. The problem is built into every human head. You cannot read the map and drive the car at the same time, and you cannot see the road behind your own eyes.

What a good thinking partner actually does

A thinking partner does not need to know your industry better than you. Usually they will not. What they bring is a second seat in the car. In practice that looks like this:

They ask before they answer. “What is the actual decision here?” sounds like a simple question. Very often it changes the whole conversation, because the real decision turns out to be a different one.

They say the uncomfortable thing. Your team may not tell you that your favourite project is eating everyone’s time. Your family may not want to worry you. A thinking partner has no reason to stay quiet.

They keep the whole map in view. When you are deep in a sales problem, they remember the hiring problem you mentioned last month, and they notice that both are the same problem.

They leave the wheel with you. This matters. A thinking partner does not make your decisions. Their job is that the decision you make is clearer, calmer and better tested than the one you would have made alone.

The British writer and teacher Nancy Kline built a whole method around this idea. Her central observation is that people think better when someone listens to them with real attention, without interrupting and without rushing to fix things.⁴ It sounds small. In a busy week, it is rare.

Why entrepreneurs wait too long

Most entrepreneurs look for a thinking partner only when something is already on fire. A partner leaves. Cash gets tight. A big client walks. Then they want help fast.

That is like hiring a co-driver after the car has left the road. Much more value comes earlier, on an ordinary Tuesday, when the decision still looks small: which client to take, which hire to make first, which of three good ideas gets the next six months. Those quiet decisions shape the business far more than the dramatic ones.

What this means for you this week

• Write down your open decisions. Not tasks, decisions. Anything you have been “thinking about” for more than two weeks belongs on the list.
• Pick the heaviest one. The one that would change the most if you got it right.
• Explain it out loud to someone outside the business. Ask them to only ask questions, no advice, for twenty minutes.
• Notice where you stumble. The point where your explanation gets vague is usually where the real decision is hiding.
• Ask one person to argue the other side. If nobody ever disagrees with you, that is information too.

You are allowed to be an excellent driver and still need someone reading the map.

Sources

1. Lovallo, D. & Sibony, O. (2010). The case for behavioral strategy. McKinsey Quarterly. mckinsey.comStudy of more than 1,000 major business decisions: the quality of the decision process mattered about six times more than the quality of the analysis.
2. Kahneman, D., Lovallo, D. & Sibony, O. (2011). Before You Make That Big Decision. Harvard Business Review, June 2011. hbr.orgWhy leaders struggle to see biases in their own thinking, plus a 12-question checklist for testing big decisions.
3. Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y. & Ross, L. (2002). The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369-381. doi.orgPeople see biases in others far more easily than in themselves.
4. Kline, N. Time to Think and the Thinking Environment. timetothink.comA practical method built on the observation that the quality of attention we receive shapes the quality of our thinking.