Asher's Blog

The ability to change your mind is a competitive advantage.

This sounds simple until we consider how much of a founder’s identity becomes attached to being right. A founder develops an idea, persuades people to join, raises capital around a particular story and spends years explaining why the company’s approach will work. Changing an important assumption can then feel like admitting that the entire journey was a mistake.

But building a company is not an examination in which the founder receives marks for defending the first answer. The objective is to discover the truth quickly enough to build something valuable before the company exhausts its money, time or relevance.

Changing your mind is not necessarily evidence that your judgment has failed. Sometimes it is evidence that your judgment is still working.

The founder who can absorb new information, release an outdated belief and reorganise the company around a better answer can move faster than a competitor that remains committed to being consistent. In markets shaped by changing technology, regulation and customer behaviour, this capacity is not merely a personality trait. It is a strategic asset.

Humility creates room for innovation

The ability to change one’s mind begins with humility. If I believe that my intelligence is demonstrated by always being right, I will defend old decisions long after the evidence has changed. If I understand intelligence as the ability to keep learning, I can treat correction as progress.

This is one reason I place great value on questioning. A founder should question the product, the market, the business model, the price, the distribution strategy and even the assumptions that once appeared to create the company’s competitive advantage. The purpose is not to make the organisation permanently uncertain. The purpose is to prevent an unexamined assumption from becoming a constraint on the company’s future.

Innovation is, in many cases, an organised change of mind. A team once believed a process needed ten steps and later discovered it could be completed in three. A company once believed customers needed expert training and later built a product simple enough to use without assistance. A founder once believed scarcity created value and later realised that broad accessibility would create a stronger network and a more defensible business.

The new answer does not always mean that the previous answer was foolish. It may have been correct for an earlier stage, an earlier technology or an earlier market. Humility allows us to recognise that a decision can have been reasonable when it was made and still become wrong to continue.

Important things are continuously improved

The products people consider important are rarely left unchanged. Manufacturers release new versions of cars. Phone makers improve cameras, batteries, processors and operating systems. Laptop companies revise performance, weight, security and energy efficiency. Software products may change weekly because developers can observe behaviour and deliver improvements much faster.

These companies do not keep changing their products because the previous versions had no value. They change them because relevance must be renewed.

A startup matters too much to remain intellectually frozen. Yet founders sometimes treat their earliest assumptions with more reverence than established manufacturers treat products that took billions to develop. We say that this was the original vision, this was what investors funded or this was what customers first knew us for, as though origin should permanently determine direction.

The more important the company is, the more frequently its critical assumptions should be examined. What has changed in the customer’s environment? What can technology now do that was impossible when the product was designed? What part of the process exists only because the company has become accustomed to it? What would a new entrant remove if it were rebuilding this experience today?

Products that are not improved gradually become less relevant, even if they continue to function. They are compared with newer expectations, not merely with their own earlier versions. A workflow that once felt efficient becomes frustrating when customers experience something faster elsewhere. A feature that once distinguished the company becomes ordinary when competitors reproduce it. A distribution advantage weakens when customer attention moves to another channel.

Standing still is therefore not a neutral decision. It is often a slow decision to move backwards relative to the market.

Your original advantage may not remain your best advantage

A startup may begin by creating a serious barrier to entry. Perhaps the product requires specialised expertise, proprietary relationships or a complex implementation that competitors find difficult to reproduce. At the beginning, that difficulty may appear to be the company’s protection.

Later, the founder may discover that the same barrier preventing competitors from entering is also preventing customers from adopting. The organisation has built something defensible but difficult to use. It has protected the product so successfully that it has also restricted the market.

At that point, the company may need to change its mind. Its strongest advantage may no longer be complexity or exclusivity; it may be the ability to turn that complex infrastructure into a product almost anybody can use and through which an important outcome can be delivered quickly.

The competitive advantage has changed from keeping people out to making participation easy.

The reverse can also occur. A company may begin with an accessible product and later realise that accessibility alone is easy for competitors to copy. Its future advantage may then come from deeper infrastructure, proprietary data, regulatory capability, distribution or integration into the customer’s operations.

There is no permanent formula. The founder has to keep asking what currently makes the company difficult to replace, not what made it interesting when it began.

This is particularly important in technology, where yesterday’s difficult capability can become tomorrow’s inexpensive feature. Artificial intelligence can reduce the cost of producing software, writing content, analysing data or assisting customers. A company whose advantage depended entirely on the expense of performing one of these activities must reconsider where its value will come from when that capability becomes widely available.

Competitive advantage is not a trophy a company wins once. It is a position that must be recreated as the environment changes.

Changing your mind is not the same as losing direction

There is a danger on the other side. A founder can use the language of innovation to justify constant distraction. Every new idea becomes a priority, every competitor announcement changes the roadmap and every difficult period leads to another pivot. The company never learns whether an approach works because it cannot remain committed long enough to produce evidence.

The ability to change your mind should not become an inability to make up your mind.

Founders need conviction because important results take time. A product may require patient iteration before customers understand it. A distribution channel may need repeated experimentation before its economics become attractive. Culture, trust and reputation grow through consistency, not sudden reinvention.

The question is therefore not whether the founder changes their mind frequently. It is whether the founder changes it for good reasons.

A useful change of mind is usually connected to evidence. Customers repeatedly behave differently from the forecast. The economics remain unattractive after serious attempts at improvement. A technological shift changes what is possible. Regulation alters the cost or legality of the model. An experiment produces a better result. A capable person identifies an assumption the team cannot continue to defend.

Random movement is not adaptability. Adaptability means preserving clarity about the desired outcome while remaining flexible about the route.

The company may remain committed to helping businesses pay employees accurately and remain compliant, for example, while changing the precise product, pricing, delivery model or market through which that mission is pursued. The problem can remain important even when the first solution is no longer adequate.

Strong founders know which convictions form the company’s identity and which assumptions are simply tools that can be replaced.

Make disagreement useful

A founder cannot change their mind intelligently if the organisation is afraid to present conflicting evidence. When employees learn that disagreement threatens their relationship with the founder, they will gradually stop reporting what they see. The founder may then appear decisive while making decisions with increasingly filtered information.

The leadership team should be able to say that an idea is not producing the expected result, that customers are confused or that the economics no longer support the strategy. This does not mean every opinion has equal weight or that discussion should continue indefinitely. It means the company must be capable of examining reality before authority closes the question.

The founder also needs people who can disagree with substance. Saying “I don’t think this will work” is less useful than identifying the assumption, presenting evidence and proposing a test or alternative. Good disagreement reduces uncertainty; it does not merely add another preference to the room.

This is why cheap experiments are so useful. When two strong opinions compete, the company should often find the smallest credible way to allow reality to decide. Test the message with a limited audience. Offer the new price to a segment. run the workflow manually before automating it. Measure whether the supposedly better process actually improves speed, adoption, reliability or revenue.

The experiment allows the founder to change their mind without turning the discussion into a contest of personalities.

Relevance is the real contest

One of the things I find most important about competitive advantage is relevance. The most relevant product is the product people use. A technically sophisticated product that does not solve an urgent problem remains less valuable than a simpler product that fits naturally into the customer’s life or work.

Relevance is not achieved only by adding features. A product can become less relevant as it becomes more complicated. Sometimes relevance comes from removing a decision, reducing the time required to obtain value or making a process accessible to customers who previously needed an expert.

Relevance can also come from timing. The same idea may be ignored in one period and become essential when regulation, infrastructure or behaviour changes. A founder needs enough continuity to preserve useful knowledge and enough flexibility to recognise when the moment has changed.

For a company operating in Nigeria and preparing to expand, relevance must be understood locally. Customers in different markets may share the same broad problem while experiencing it through different regulations, payment systems, workplace norms and levels of trust. The product cannot simply be exported with the assumption that what worked in one country will be interpreted identically elsewhere.

The company may need to change its mind about onboarding, pricing, partnerships, support or even the language it uses to describe the value. That is not a betrayal of the original product. It is the work required to make the product relevant to another context.

The best companies do not ask customers to admire the purity of the founder’s first idea. They keep reducing the distance between what customers need and what the company can reliably deliver.

Build a company that can update itself

The ability to change one’s mind should not reside only in the founder. A company becomes more adaptable when its systems make learning normal.

Customer feedback should reach the people capable of changing the product. Financial information should reveal whether growth is healthy. Leaders should review not only whether a target was missed, but which assumptions produced the plan. Teams should be encouraged to document what they expected, what actually happened and what they will do differently.

This creates organisational memory. Without it, companies repeat experiments, forget why decisions were made and change direction according to whichever voice is strongest in the current meeting. With it, the organisation can update its beliefs deliberately.

Leaders should also be able to retire their own ideas. When a founder publicly acknowledges that new evidence has changed their view, it teaches the team that learning is more valuable than protecting status. People become more willing to surface uncomfortable information because they know correction will not automatically be treated as disloyalty.

However, the founder must communicate the change clearly. People need to understand what was previously believed, what evidence changed the conclusion, what the new direction is and which parts of the strategy remain stable. Otherwise, adaptability feels like confusion to the people expected to execute it.

Good leadership makes a change of mind intelligible.

Hold the mission firmly and the method intelligently

The ability to change your mind is a competitive advantage because many people cannot do it until failure leaves them no alternative. Ego delays the correction, sunk costs make retreat feel wasteful and public commitments turn an old idea into a prison.

A more intelligent founder changes before the company is forced to change. The founder keeps questioning how the business can become more useful, more accessible, more reliable and more difficult to replace. They exercise their imagination rather than merely defending the imagination with which they began.

This does not mean abandoning conviction. It means placing conviction in the right thing. Be committed to the problem, the customer, the values and the outcome, while remaining willing to revise the method through which the outcome will be achieved.

The market does not reward a founder for remaining faithful to an assumption that no longer works. It rewards companies that continue to create relevant value.

Change your mind when better evidence appears. Improve the product before customers are forced to demand it. Reconsider the advantage before competitors make it irrelevant. Allow the company to become a better version of what you first imagined.

The founder who can do this is not weak in conviction. The founder has simply decided that the future of the company matters more than the preservation of an old opinion.