Ask anyone who has worked inside an innovation team and they'll recognise this pattern.

The concepts have been developed. The research has been done. Multiple options are on the table, all with some evidence behind them. And then — often without anyone naming what's happening — the decision converges.

Not necessarily on the concept with the most commercial potential. On the concept with the most internal momentum. The one the most senior person believes in. The one whose champion argues most persuasively. The one that's been in the pipeline longest and has the most sunk cost attached to it.

Nobody intends for this to happen. It's not the result of bad faith or weak process. It's what organisations do when the evidence is ambiguous: they default to conviction. And conviction, in most organisations, correlates with seniority.

This is the HiPPO problem — the Highest Paid Person's Opinion — and it's more prevalent in innovation than almost anywhere else in business. Partly because innovation decisions are genuinely hard to make on evidence alone. Partly because the stakes are high enough that senior leaders feel entitled to weigh in heavily. And partly because the research that's typically available at decision time is ambiguous enough to support almost any conclusion.

The result is a systematic bias in which the concepts that get backed are disproportionately the ones with the most powerful internal advocates — and the ones that get killed are disproportionately the ones whose advocates lack the seniority or persistence to defend them.

This matters not just because it leads to worse individual decisions. It matters because it creates an organisational dynamic in which the quality of the evidence is less important than the quality of the argument. Teams learn, consciously or not, that the job is to build conviction — not to find the truth.

The antidote isn't better process. Better stage-gates, more structured reviews, clearer decision criteria — these help at the margins, but they don't change the fundamental dynamic. What changes it is better evidence. Evidence that is specific enough, and behavioural enough, to be harder to argue against than to accept.

When a team has real data on how real consumers respond to real creative — not survey scores, but click-through rates, conversion rates, revealed preferences — the conversation changes. Not because the data is infallible, but because it introduces an external reference point that internal opinion has to reckon with.

The decision doesn't get easier. But it gets less political. And that, in most organisations, is the harder thing to achieve.