The Nervous System of Business

“The space between impulse and action is the nervous system of any company.” — Nick Gray

At IGU, this is often where the work begins. Not with the strategy. Not with the metrics. Not even with the customer journey.

But with something else.

With nearly every brand or retailer I engage, I notice it early, the space between their impulse and their action. Why that space exists and that creates it. What keeps it open. It’s never just about slow decision-making or internal friction. Most often, it’s a sign of something more human, a hesitation, a misalignment, an instinct unacknowledged or untrusted.

That gap tells me more than most reports ever could. It’s where I always begin, not just to understand what’s happening, but to see what’s possible. For me it has to start here and it tells me so much about what's actually going on but also the opportunity. In my opinion this clarity is crucial, crucial before the strategy, crucial before the customer walks through the door and long before the meeting or the metrics ever arrive.

It begins with something smaller and less obvious but way more essential.

It's the thing that happens long before your thinking mind even has the chance to interpret it. That space between what we feel and what we do, is everything.

Every person has a nervous system: the thread between stimulus and response. In business, it’s the same. Beneath the tools and systems lies a deeper one, connecting emotion to action, presence to decision, people to outcomes. Few know how to read it or recognise it and even fewer know how to strengthen it. Most of the time we are too busy, running down KPIs, building out tech stacks, optimising funnels to hear the hum underneath. The tension. The quiet signs that something’s off. The hesitation before a “no.” The sigh after a “yes.” The idea that never materialised and not for lack of merit or value, but simply because something went missing in that space between.

That’s where real business lives for retailers and brands.

Not in the board report. Not in the campaign postmortem. But in the unseen seconds and the moment a customer feels something and moves… or doesn’t. The moment a team member senses a misstep and chooses not to speak. The moment a founder knows what must be done… and hesitates. Or acts too fast.

You can’t teach these moments in a playbook. You can’t drop them into a dashboard. Why? Because they’re too fluid, too emotional and too human. And yet they shape everything we do both internally and externally as retailers, quietly, constantly and like a current below the surface.

I’ve sat in enough boardrooms, shop floors, and creative chaos to sense when a brand has a healthy nervous system. It’s not about speed. It’s not about being first. It’s about coherence and the way people move together without being told. The way action emerges from instinct, not fear. The way energy is picked up, understood, and used.

You can feel it in the way a store breathes and in the tone of team conversations when no one’s watching. Always in leadership’s presence and not just its authority and always in the way decisions are made when the data is murky, but the direction still feels clear. Neuroscience tells us most decisions are made in the emotional brain before logic even enters the picture. In business, we see the same thing and the nervous system responds before the strategy does. That’s why these moments matter, because they reveal not just what's happening, but how things move through a business.

And the customer? They have a nervous system too. One that responds before logic steps in. A feeling hits and a scent, a story, a sentence that lands differently and something shifts or sparks emotion either positively or negatively. 

Studies in behavioural economics and neuroscience have consistently shown that up to 95% of consumer decision-making actually happens subconsciously, driven by emotional cues and by pattern recognition before rational thought is engaged. As Gerald Zaltman famously wrote, “the unconscious mind knows first.” In retail, this means what customers feel often matters more than what they think and by the time logic catches up, the decision has often already been made.

For some reason, maybe because it’s not tangible, this isn’t the moment most brands focus on or understand. We chase the beginning and things like awareness, impressions, reach etc. Or the end with things like conversion, transaction, retention. But the magic and spark happens in the middle. The space where attention becomes intention. Where something moves inside the customer. Or it doesn’t.

Those brands that get this don’t have to push harder. They don’t collapse the funnel but instead they create space, space for the nervous system to settle, for emotion to rise, for the impulse to become action and not through force or persuasion, but through trust. That trust isn’t earned by urgency, but by being disciplined in restraint and giving the customer space to feel. All while you subtly reinforce the path forward without ever closing it too soon.

This isn’t about soft skills either, it's about structure and the human kind. Where nothing happens unless it’s felt and nothing lasts unless it connects.

We don’t have to name it. But you have to feel it.

The most powerful systems in business aren’t actually the ones you can see. They’re the ones holding everything else together. Quietly. Invisibly. Inescapably. The nervous system doesn’t shout and it certainly doesn’t reward the loudest voice. It responds to attunement and awareness. The intelligence that knows when to act and when to wait.

And when that system is strong, everything else clicks. Campaigns resonate. Teams move cleanly. Leadership feels lighter and most importantly our customers respond, not because they were targeted, but because they were understood.

It’s not that frameworks and formulas don’t exist, I know them well. But this isn’t about that. This is about the clarity to recognise the space that matters most and the one between impulse and action. That’s where business truly lives. In the quiet, often-unseen moments that shape everything else. And that’s where the best brands begin.

Nick Gray

Founder, IGU Global