# Psycho-Logic *Logic should close this. It won't.* --- You're in a meeting room with a procurement team and your champion, the ops director who brought you in. The demo went well. The business case is clean: their current process burns forty hours a week across the team, your platform cuts it to four, and the ROI pays back in under six months. Your champion has said, twice now, that the numbers speak for themselves. The CFO nods politely, asks about implementation timelines, then says they'd like to revisit it in Q3. The head of IT asks whether the existing system could be extended instead, and someone mentions a failed migration three years ago. Your champion looks at the table. The conversation drifts into parking-lot language: "circle back," "more due diligence," "broader alignment." You leave with a follow-up scheduled for a date that will get pushed twice. --- Nothing in that room was about your numbers. The ROI was never in dispute, nobody challenged the forty hours or the six-month payback, and the objections that surfaced were procedural, not analytical. The real ones were never spoken aloud. The CFO is eighteen months into the role. A failed technology investment lands on the P&L and on their reputation. The IT head has spent two years stabilising the current stack and has no appetite for a project that might unravel it. The person who mentioned the failed migration remembers the blame that followed. Your champion, who stuck their neck out to get you in the room, just watched the energy drain out of their own proposal. Nobody in that meeting was evaluating your platform. They were evaluating what happens to them if it goes wrong. --- The instinct is to come back with more evidence. A stronger deck, tighter numbers, a reference customer in the same sector, maybe a pilot proposal that lowers the perceived risk. All of this is logical, and all of it misses the point. What they lack is safety. In B2B, the fiercest competitor is almost never another vendor. It's the comfort of the status quo. Committees slow things down, risk aversion dulls urgency, and waiting feels safer than deciding. The current system is painful, everyone agrees it's painful, but pain you already know is less frightening than change you don't. Nobody ever got fired for sticking with the existing process. --- The useful question is what would make the current state feel more expensive than the change. Your champion already told you the answer, though probably not in those words. The forty hours a week isn't just a number on a slide. It's the ops team staying late on Wednesdays to reconcile data that should flow automatically. It's the monthly board pack arriving two days late because someone has to re-key figures from three systems into a spreadsheet. It's the IT head fielding tickets for workarounds that exist because the current platform can't do what the team needs it to do. "This system saves ten hours a week" gets a nod. "You get home in daylight instead of burning another evening on spreadsheets" gets a signature. Same fact, different frame: one lands in a spreadsheet, the other lands in someone's evening. --- Behaviour comes first; attitude follows. If you can get the team using a pilot, even a narrow one, they'll supply the justification themselves. People need their actions to make sense retrospectively, and a small commitment that works creates the conditions for a larger one. They've convinced themselves. You just gave them the raw material. Logical people assume you persuade first and then people act. The sequence runs the other way round. Get them to act, and the persuasion follows. The reasons people give for their decisions are rarely the ones that actually produced them, and [[The identity constraint]] runs underneath all of it. The CFO needs to see themselves as the kind of leader who made a smart call, not the kind who approved a project that blew up. A sound business case is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. --- [[Alchemy|Rory Sutherland]] calls this psycho-logic: the actual operating system of human behaviour, which follows rules that look irrational from the outside but are internally consistent. The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. In physics, the opposite of something true is generally false. In psychology, scarcity and abundance can both increase desire, high prices and low prices can both signal quality, speed and slowness can both convey care. Context determines which works. Back in that meeting room, the people around the table are managing risk, identity, and comfort. The reasons they give you are press releases, not the real story. The conscious mind thinks it's the Oval Office. Really, it's the press office, constructing rationalisations for decisions made elsewhere. ---