“I Believe You. I Cannot Sign This.”

“I believe you. I cannot sign this.” Sometimes the sentence is a courteous refusal. Buyers soften a no. Investors keep a relationship warm. People avoid arguments they do not need to have. The sentence does not diagnose itself.

At other times the person means exactly what they say. They understand the proposition and accept the evidence. They may like the company, trust the team and want the thing to work, and they still cannot commit. This is a difficult moment for the company making the case, because most of the work leading up to it has been designed around belief. The technology has been explained, the market established, and the team has tried to show why the solution works and why it matters.

When belief arrives and the decision does not, the natural conclusion is that the belief must not have been strong enough, and the team goes back for more proof. The more interesting possibility is that the problem has moved, and the person now needs something other than another reason to believe.

A commitment acquires witnesses

Belief can remain private. A commitment enters an organisation. An investment, purchase order, partnership, board approval or grant creates consequences that other people inherit. They may have to fund it, implement it, approve an exception, audit the result or explain later why the decision was made. That makes commitment a different kind of event from agreement. The original meeting may establish that the proposition is credible, and a person can accept the case and still face questions about authority, timing, implementation, budget or exposure that the original argument never needed to answer.

Yvonne Jamal, co-founder and CEO of the JARO Institute for Sustainability and Digitalization, described one of those witnesses in her Brighter Future interview, published in April 2023. JARO, a Berlin non-profit built around procurement, supports clients through decisions such as writing a clause into a supplier contract that says the supplier should buy certified eco-energy products. “One of the reasons our clients have been nervous about asking for this certification at first is because there’s a chance it can break the contract.” The clause is the visible commitment. The supplier relationship is its witness, the thing that could be damaged if the decision turned out badly, and the reason clients hesitated to ask. This is an adviser describing her own clients, and it places the hesitation in the relationship the commitment would touch.

What the convinced person faces next is reconstructing the case for people who were not in the room. What Your Buyer Has to Defend After You Leave the Room follows that second journey through the buyer's organisation.

Who else is in

One of the questions that appears repeatedly in consequential decisions is “Who else is in?” It can sound like timidity. In practice it can be a rational attempt to understand the exposure created by going first.

Research on pluralistic ignorance shows how badly people can misjudge what others support. In a 2022 US study, majorities supported several climate policies while respondents substantially underestimated the scale of that support. A much larger international survey found a similar gap between respondents’ own stated willingness to contribute part of their income to climate action and what they thought others would be willing to contribute. Those studies do not show that stated willingness becomes action, and perceived support, stated willingness and behaviour remain different outcomes.

Inside organisations the evidence is thinner. One study of corporate boards found that outside directors underestimated how much colleagues shared concerns about strategy, and that larger misperceptions were associated with greater persistence in poorly performing strategies. The Belief Gap report did not identify an equivalent study of investment committees.

The studio's founder interviews hold an account from the other side of the table. Aaron Schaller, co-founder and CTO of MeliBio, which makes honey without bees, recalled the company's early fundraising in his Brighter Future interview, published in July 2023. “Getting the first couple of checks is difficult because many people don't want to go first; they prefer someone else to take the lead.” It is one founder's recollection, and it describes investors who were willing to talk and waiting for a lead before they committed.

The evidence therefore supports a limited point, that people can misread the support around them and that visible decisions take place in social settings, and it stops short of showing that social pressure drives every stalled commercial decision. Still, “who else is in?” can reveal something useful. The person may be trying to understand whether they will be alone in having judged the decision reasonable if the outcome is poor, which is a question about exposure, and more proof of the technology leaves it unanswered.

We will not answer “who else is in?” with a slide of logos that have not committed. A logo implies a decision that was never made, and the person asking will find that out at the worst moment, when they repeat it to someone who checks.

Belief does not set the size of the commitment

The commitment being requested can also be much larger than the belief required to support it. A buyer may accept that a technology works and still be unwilling to make a large, long-term purchase before supply is proven. An investor may believe the company is promising and still judge the next financing step too large for the uncertainty that remains. A board can support the direction of a strategy without authorising the entire programme immediately. The proposition can be credible throughout, and the problem sits in the relationship between the uncertainty that remains and the commitment being requested now.

Staged commitments address that relationship. Breaking a future relationship into smaller decisions leaves the uncertainty in place. What changes is that each point has a clear decision attached to it, and the rest can wait until more is known. The first commitment needs to be meaningful enough to change something and bounded enough that the person making it understands what they are accepting and what they are not. In new technology this matters more, because some of the evidence people want will only exist after someone has moved.

The work then turns from creating more certainty to making the remaining uncertainty possible to carry. JARO's clients show what that looks like. The risk to the contract was still there when they asked. What they had was support in making the decision, and in Jamal's account “they’ve taken the leap and found no problem with their suppliers”.

The organisational side of this problem continues in What Your Buyer Has to Defend After You Leave the Room. The first-mover version of it is the subject of Why Nobody Wants to Become the Precedent. Both draw on The Belief Gap Report 2026, which Brighter Future applies through the Belief Gap Diagnosis.

Sources and further reading

• Sparkman, G., Geiger, N. and Weber, E. (2022). Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half. Nature Communications, 13.
• Andre, P., Boneva, T., Chopra, F. and Falk, A. (2024). Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action. Nature Climate Change, 14.
• Westphal, J. and Bednar, M. (2005). Pluralistic ignorance in corporate boards and firms’ strategic persistence in response to low firm performance. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(2).
• Yvonne Jamal, JARO Institute for Sustainability and Digitalization, founder interview
• Aaron Schaller, MeliBio, founder interview