The Costly Illusion of Control: Why Business Cases at the Start of Innovation Destroy Learning
A few weeks ago, I sat with an innovator over coffee.
He told me his company had just kicked off a new innovation project — and the first thing management asked for was a business case.
Before anyone had spoken to a single potential customer, before any problem had been understood or prototype tested, he was asked to calculate prices, volumes, and revenue forecasts.
All to get the investment approved.
I asked how confident he felt about those numbers.
He laughed. “Not at all. But without Excel, there’s no go.”
That conversation stuck with me.
Because it perfectly captures how deeply companies still try to control uncertainty with numbers instead of learning from it.
And that reflex — to quantify the unknown — is one of the most expensive mistakes in corporate innovation.
The Ritual of the Early Business Case
In many organizations, the business case has become a ritual.
A spreadsheet that promises to turn uncertainty into predictability.
A tool that signals “we’re professional” — not because it reduces risk, but because it looks like it does.
It’s the corporate equivalent of taking an umbrella into a desert — symbolic, not useful.
Managers demand it because they’ve been trained to make decisions with numbers.
They believe it’s better to have bad numbers than no numbers.
But in early innovation, those numbers aren’t just bad — they’re fiction.
They reflect assumptions about:
who the customer is,
what the customer values,
how much they’d pay,
and how the market behaves.
None of that is known at the start.
Yet we build Excel models pretending it is.
The result? False confidence. Teams feel “in control.” Leaders feel “informed.”
And millions get allocated to projects that have never faced reality.
The Psychology Behind It
Let’s be fair: the instinct is understandable.
Innovation is messy, political, and full of ambiguity.
People want anchors — something to hold on to.
A business case feels rational. It gives structure. It creates a sense of order.
It allows finance to compare one innovation project against another, as if both were predictable factories instead of bets on human behavior.
But here’s the problem: you can’t spreadsheet your way out of uncertainty.
The only way to reduce it is by learning — not by calculating.
Numbers in an early-stage business case don’t describe reality; they describe beliefs.
They are proxies for confidence, not knowledge.
And as long as they remain untested, they are worthless as a decision base.
The Illusion of Control
The deeper issue isn’t the spreadsheet itself.
It’s the illusion of control it creates.
Executives see charts and curves that project growth, margins, and ROI — and they mistake those visuals for evidence.
But an early business case doesn’t predict the future. It manufactures a narrative that looks like the future.
It turns imagination into numbers and then treats those numbers as facts.
That’s not analysis. That’s storytelling in disguise.
And because it feels “rational,” it shuts down the one thing innovation depends on: curiosity.
When teams are forced to justify ideas through premature business cases, they stop asking questions and start defending assumptions.
Exploration turns into performance.
Learning turns into theater.
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The Alternative: Evidence Before Estimates
There’s a better sequence.
Not to abandon business cases — but to use them at the right moment.
In the earliest stages, what matters isn’t precision but progress in learning.
Your goal isn’t to prove an idea works on paper. It’s to prove it works in reality.
That means shifting from forecasting to evidence-building.
Ask:
What do we know about the customer’s problem?
What have we observed, not just assumed?
What prototypes have we tested?
What have people actually done — not what they said they would do?
Once those insights start to solidify, you begin to see patterns: real demand signals, willingness to pay, repeat behavior.
Then — and only then — does it make sense to build a business case.
Because now, the inputs are anchored in evidence, not wishful thinking.
When a Business Case Finally Adds Value
A business case becomes valuable once the value proposition is validated.
When you’ve confirmed:
the job customers are trying to get done,
the outcomes they care about,
the price they’re willing to pay,
and the economics of how to deliver it.
At that point, a business case isn’t a fantasy anymore.
It’s a way to test the scalability of something real.
That’s when it serves its true purpose:
helping to allocate resources from what’s been learned, not what’s been imagined.
You’re not buying certainty.
You’re investing in a proven direction.
And the logic changes from:
“What do we hope will happen?”
to
“Given what we now know, what’s the smartest way to grow it?”
The Cost of Getting It Backwards
So what happens when you do it the other way around — when you build the business case first?
You lock yourself into a story that must be defended.
You shape experiments to validate the spreadsheet, not to discover truth.
You spend more time managing expectations than learning from the market.
And the irony? The more detailed the early business case, the more expensive the failure later.
Because nobody dares to pivot from a plan that’s been approved at the board level.
That’s how innovation dies — not through lack of ideas, but through premature certainty.
Learning as the Real Currency
In early-stage innovation, learning is the only currency that matters.
Each small experiment, each conversation, each prototype gives you data that makes the next decision smarter.
You replace blind faith with informed judgment.
You reduce risk not by predicting it, but by understanding it.
If a company insists on tracking progress, track this:
What did we learn this week?
Which assumption did we invalidate?
What new evidence did we generate?
That’s how real progress looks in uncertain territory.
Business cases can wait.
Understanding cannot.
Small Budgets, Fast Learning
Some argue that skipping the business case makes innovation riskier.
The opposite is true.
Early business cases encourage big bets on thin evidence.
Small experiments encourage small bets that yield rich evidence.
It’s not about spending less; it’s about spending smarter.
When you run short, cheap experiments, you don’t need to justify them with elaborate forecasts.
You just need to justify them with curiosity and discipline.
Each test gives you an answer to a real question.
Each answer reduces uncertainty.
And after enough cycles, you have what the spreadsheet never gave you — confidence grounded in reality.
Why Corporates Struggle with This Logic
The problem isn’t intellect. It’s culture.
Large organizations are optimized for execution, not exploration.
Execution demands predictability, planning, and control.
Innovation demands curiosity, speed, and adaptation.
Both are valid. But confusing one for the other is lethal.
A product line that’s already scaling needs a business case.
A problem space that’s still being explored doesn’t.
When executives use the same metrics for both, they force innovation into a mold it can’t fit.
It’s like grading a kindergartener on MBA exams — the wrong test for the right potential.
The Middle Ground: Framing Without Forecasting
This doesn’t mean teams should wander aimlessly.
You can still bring structure — just not premature precision.
Instead of a business case, use learning cases: one-pagers that outline what you’re trying to understand next.
Structure it like this:
Hypothesis: what we believe to be true
Test: how we’ll find out
Evidence: what we observed
Next decision: what we’ll do based on what we learned
It gives direction without illusion.
It replaces “how big is the market?” with “what matters most to users?”
And it builds momentum grounded in facts, not fiction.
Why This Matters Now
The pressure for efficiency has never been higher.
AI, automation, and shrinking budgets push firms to justify every Euro.
That’s why the reflex to ask for business cases at the start has intensified — it’s a symptom of fear.
But the paradox is brutal: the more control you try to impose on the unknown, the less you learn from it.
We live in a time when markets evolve faster than planning cycles.
By the time a 60-page business case is approved, the assumptions inside it have already expired.
The companies that will win aren’t the ones with the most polished forecasts.
They’re the ones that learn faster than their competitors can plan.
The Leadership Shift
This mindset shift starts at the top.
Leaders need to separate decision comfort from decision quality.
A perfect spreadsheet can make you feel comfortable.
But comfort isn’t truth.
The real job of innovation leadership is to protect learning until evidence is strong enough to justify scaling.
That means saying:
“We don’t know yet — but we’re finding out.”
It sounds weaker. But it’s the most honest and strategic thing you can say.
What To Do Instead
If you’re leading innovation, here’s a simple rule of thumb:
At the start: No business case. Only hypotheses and experiments.
In the middle: Emerging evidence — maybe rough cost and price sketches.
Later: Validated assumptions. Now the business case makes sense.
Make it a staged progression:
Learn → understand → assume → build → validate → model → invest.
Reverse it, and you’ll pay for learning in hindsight — usually after the project fails.
The Moment of Truth
That conversation with the innovator stayed with me because it wasn’t about ignorance.
He knew the numbers were guesses. Everyone in the room did.
But the system demanded a spreadsheet anyway — a ritual sacrifice to the gods of governance.
And that’s the tragedy: not that companies lack insight, but that they refuse to admit how little is knowable at the start.
The future doesn’t ask for forecasts.
It asks for attention.
Attention to customers, signals, and changes that no spreadsheet can predict.
So next time someone asks for a business case before a single test, ask them back:
“What do we actually know?”
If the answer is “not much,” then you don’t need a business case.
You need a learning case.
Because the value of a business case, until the value proposition is validated, is zero.
If your organization still demands business cases before validation — if every idea needs a spreadsheet before a customer conversation — you’re not managing risk, you’re multiplying it.
Now is the time to rebuild your innovation logic.
I help executive teams:
Expose where false certainty hides inside their innovation process
Reframe governance from “forecasting” to “evidence-building”
Design lean learning systems that create proof before scale
👉 Book a working session today and learn how to replace assumption theatre with measurable progress.
Let’s make sure your next innovation isn’t powered by Excel — but by evidence.