“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” – John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936

The Year Changes. The Logic Often Doesn’t

There’s something interesting about the turn of a calendar year. It creates a sense of movement, even when very little has actually changed. The business is still the business. The pressures are familiar. The decisions waiting on your desk look remarkably similar to the ones you were handling before the break. Yet the shift from December to January often brings a feeling of renewed intent.

What rarely changes, though, are the business assumptions that sit beneath those decisions. They remain with us, quiet and unquestioned. They feel rational because they were formed through experience. They feel safe because they once worked. And they feel efficient because they save time in a world where time is always short.

But business assumptions have a habit of outliving the conditions that made them true. That’s where the risk lies. Not in the decisions themselves, but in the logic that shapes them.

This is not a question of discipline or willpower. Nor is it a failure of intent. It is about the invisible weight of thinking that made sense once, and now exerts its influence long after the conditions that shaped it have shifted.

The Comfort of Familiar Business Assumptions

Most leaders don’t cling to old business assumptions out of stubbornness. They do it because familiar logic reduces friction. It makes complex decisions feel manageable. It creates a sense of stability in businesses where the pace rarely slows.

When you’ve built a successful business, you’ve also built a mental library of what works – a series of shortcuts, in effect. How clients behave. What pricing holds. Which risks are worth taking. Where to invest time and where to conserve it. That library isn’t a weakness, but experience condensed into usable judgement.

The difficulty is that these shortcuts were formed under conditions that may no longer exist. Markets shift. Customer expectations evolve. Cost structures change. Leadership capacity expands or contracts. Yet the logic that guided earlier decisions often remains untouched.

This isn’t complacency. Rather, it’s human nature. And in established SMEs, where leaders carry a heavy load, it’s understandable.

How Past Success Hardens Today’s Judgement

When decisions work out well, they gain credibility. Not just in the moment, but over time. They become embedded in how the business operates and how leaders think about risk, opportunity, and constraint.

Success doesn’t just validate decisions. It creates its own confirmation loop. This tendency is well documented in research on judgement and decision-making, where experience can increase confidence faster than accuracy. Growth, survival, or earlier breakthroughs reinforce certain narratives about customers, markets, people, or acceptable exposure. Those narratives become harder to question because they’re backed by results.

Over time, this hardening makes it increasingly difficult to see when conditions have shifted beneath the surface. The market may have moved. Client expectations may have evolved. Competitive dynamics may have changed. But the beliefs that delivered results in the past persist longer than the conditions that formed them.

There’s a psychological dimension to this as well. Humans are wired to favour what feels familiar and to resist questioning beliefs that have kept them safe. For our ancestors, challenging established patterns could mean exposure to new threats. That instinct still operates in modern leadership, even when the threats are commercial rather than physical. It helps explain why recognising the need for change doesn’t automatically loosen the grip of long-held beliefs.

The challenge isn’t that leaders are unaware of change. It’s that certain assumptions remain operationally active even after they’ve been intellectually questioned.

The Subtle Drift from Strategic Intent to Familiar Logic

Many CEOs begin the year with a clear sense of direction. They know what matters. They know what needs to change. They know where the business must evolve.

Yet within weeks, decisions start to look suspiciously like last year’s decisions. Not because the strategy was wrong, but because the underlying logic was never examined.

If the strategy depends on different choices, but the assumptions shaping those choices remain the same, erosion becomes almost inevitable. This is the same pattern that appears when a strategy feels sound, yet quietly loses force as it meets the reality of everyday decisions. The business returns to its familiar rhythm. Operational gravity pulls attention back to what feels known and manageable.

This is where strategic intent quietly gives way to inherited thinking, and strategy becomes aspirational rather than directive. Not through failure, but through familiarity.

For readers who want to explore this dynamic further, the earlier reflection on execution gaps offers additional texture without repeating the point.

Assumptions That Once Protected the Business

Not all inherited assumptions are constraining. Many were genuinely protective, and some still are.

Decisions to avoid certain risks, limit exposure, or maintain financial discipline often came from hard-won experience. They may have limited risk at a fragile stage. They may have preserved cash when margins were thin. They may have protected quality, reputation, or the founder’s capacity to cope. In some cases, they were the difference between survival and failure.

The issue isn’t that these assumptions were wrong. It’s that their protective value is rarely revisited as the business grows and risks change shape.

What kept the business safe during a period of vulnerability may now be limiting growth, strategic repositioning, or value creation. The challenge isn’t discarding caution. It’s distinguishing between prudence and inertia.

Prudence and inertia can both look similar on the surface. Distinguishing between them requires reflection, not urgency. It involves recognising that caution shaped for one stage of the business may quietly limit the next.

When Context Changes Faster Than Belief

Most change in SMEs is incremental rather than dramatic. Markets tend to evolve slowly. Customer expectations shift gradually. Cost pressures build over time. Team dynamics adjust in small steps.

Because these shifts are gradual, beliefs tend to lag behind reality and decisions still feel justified. Slow, incremental change is often the hardest kind for organisations to recognise and respond to. A service line that once made sense becomes a distraction. A customer segment that once drove growth becomes unprofitable. A pricing structure that once felt competitive becomes restrictive. A leadership pattern that once worked becomes a bottleneck.

Decisions continue to feel justified, even as friction builds. The mismatch between today’s reality and yesterday’s logic grows quietly, almost invisibly.

Operational gravity reinforces this mismatch. The business keeps moving. The team keeps delivering. The rhythm continues. No one actively chooses outdated logic; it simply persists.

This is particularly pronounced in established businesses, where stability itself becomes a value. The cost of re-examining assumptions can feel high, even when the cost of not doing so is quietly accumulating.

The Hidden Cost of Carry-Overs

Outdated business assumptions rarely announce themselves. They show up indirectly, through patterns rather than events.

Pricing structures that haven’t been revisited. Client relationships maintained out of habit. Operational processes that constrain capacity but are defended as “how we do things.” Service lines that dilute focus but haven’t been questioned because they generate some revenue.

This leads to slower progress than expected. Repeated debates about the same issues. Overloaded leadership. Persistent tension between strategy and execution. Growth that feels heavier than it should. Profitability that’s harder to protect than it used to be.

The erosion happens through constraint and inefficiency, not sudden collapse. Value is lost quietly, through accumulated drag rather than visible failure.

Unquestioned continuity can be as risky as disruption. Risk doesn’t always arrive as change; sometimes it comes from continuing with assumptions that no longer fit the business as it now exists. Not because continuity is wrong, but because it can mask the need for recalibration until the friction becomes too significant to ignore.

The Questions Leaders Rarely Pause to Ask

Senior leaders often skip the most important questions because they assume the answers are already known. The business assumptions beneath them go unspoken, not out of avoidance, but out of pace. The business moves quickly and decisions need to be made. There isn’t always time to interrogate the logic beneath them.

Yet strategic leadership often requires unlearning as much as direction setting. It requires noticing what is being taken for granted. It requires pausing long enough to see the assumptions shaping the year before they shape the outcomes.

These aren’t questions that feel comfortable, nor do they demand immediate answers, rather they’re interruptions to automatic thinking. And they matter.

The pressure to grow, to perform, to maintain momentum only heightens the need for this awareness. Without it, effort increases while effectiveness plateaus. The business moves, but not always in the direction intended.

Living with Uncertainty Rather Than Resolving It

This isn’t a call to abandon what’s worked or to distrust hard-won judgement. Experience matters. Past success isn’t irrelevant.

But the logic that shaped last year’s decisions may not be fit for this year’s context. That’s an uncomfortable question, especially for experienced leaders who’ve earned the right to trust their instincts.

The discomfort itself may be a signal worth paying attention to. Not as something to resolve quickly, but as something to sit with.

Recognising the question is part of strategic leadership. Living with the uncertainty it creates, rather than rushing to close it, may be where the most useful thinking happens.

What, then, might you be assuming that no longer holds true?

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