Your boss said yes. The board is reading a different case.

For most of my corporate career I sat somewhere in the chain a business case travels through.

A project manager writes it. The general manager gives it a go. The CEO gives it a go. Then it reaches the board, and the chair says no.

The people further down usually take that as politics. It rarely is.

Two readings of the same pages

Your manager asks: will this work, and is it worth doing?

The board asks different questions. What else could this money do? What happens to us if it goes wrong halfway? Does this fit where we said we were going, or is it a good idea that pulls us somewhere else?

A case can answer the first set perfectly and never touch the second. Nobody lower down was wrong. They were reading for a different risk.

One I remember was a document management system. It had cleared the general manager and the CEO. At the board, the questions were the overhead it would put on the whole organisation, and whether we had the maturity to deliver it. Nobody further down had been asked to think about that.

Founders have no board, and that is the problem

A solo founder’s case goes through exactly one reader, and that reader wants it to pass.

Friends read it for the project, the way managers do. The questions a board would ask – what this is costing you in other options, what failure halfway looks like, whether it fits the life you actually want – don’t get asked by anyone.

You can ask them yourself. Write down what else your next twelve months could buy. Write down what you’d be left with if it stopped at month six. Then read your plan as someone who has to protect the whole organisation, even when the organisation is only you.