You need to stop being right

The hydra you're wrestling probably won't be mollified by a mirror

Originally published via Substack, Feb 01 2025.

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Our friend Ben shared a fun prompt to get you thinking:

Thanks for the question, Ben. I know I've experienced that frustration – have you?

What do you think is up with teams arguing round and round to find out who’s right?

My thoughts coming right up.

First, housekeeping …

• Listen to my appearance on the Creative Tension Podcast: “With insights from his work, including Innovation Tactics, Tom provides actionable advice for founders, internal entrepreneurs, and creatives.”
• Fancy booking me for an event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop? Hit reply and ask about my availability.
  • Sneaking Agility Back into Agile: 3 fast and practical methods from Innovation Tactics that you can use immediately to manage risk, act and adapt.
  • Speed-to-Signal System: Enough with theoretical product frameworks! Let’s get real and make life easier. Practical process tweaks for digital projects. Get strategically aligned, ditch the debates and separate the signal from the noise.
  • Antifragile Prioritisation for AI: GenAI projects hit different. They require an adjustment in how you validate and execute. Learn how to prioritise a roadmap where you benefit from uncertainty rather than being blown up by it.
  • The Vision Chasm: Where those yawning gaps between vision, strategy and operations come from – and how to bridge them.

OK we’re back. Now why do teams get stuck arguing round and round?

Because “root cause” is usually a magic bullet in disguise

One misconception that leads teams into a bog is that it’s possible to debate your way to the “root cause” of any situation. There’s a secret expectation that there’ll be a satisfying sense of a jigsaw falling into place once you identify the real root cause. The fog will clear, and it’ll be obvious how to resolve things with a simple solution.

I know this because I spent many painful years labouring under this misconception, and I still hear this in between the lines of debates between team mates.

I thought that if we could first nail down the true problem, then we’d be able to ideate the perfect solution! I called it root cause analysis, but it was secretly magic bullet thinking dressed up to look acceptable in the office.

I blame those stories in airport business books.

You know, like the one where people are complaining about the elevators being slow. And there’s an obvious, unpleasant solution: expensively re-engineering the building infrastructure. But then our hero, in a flash of inspiration, has the idea to install mirrors by the elevators on every floor. And overnight, the complaints stop.

Maybe you think this is a candidate for Didn’t Happen of the Year 2025, or maybe it’s factual.

In either case, it’s an insanely compelling anecdote. There’s the nasty intractable problem, the surprise cunning twist, and the satisfyingly simple resolution! We love these. I bet you know loads. Behavioural Economics books are pretty much nothing but stories like this.

In either case, it’s also a deeply misleading anecdote. It presents a situation that looks a lot like the kind of messes we have to deal with, and it dangles a promise in front of us. “Psst! There’s going to be a delightfully easy solution here if you can just understand the root cause properly! Keep looking for that flash of inspiration.”

Don’t get me wrong – these kinds of situations do happen for real sometimes. I have a handful of anecdotes like this of my own, collected over a couple of decades. They’re memorable and repeatable partly because they’re bloody rare.

I’m afraid that most nasty intractable problems remain nasty and intractable. They don’t have a delightfully easy solution because they don’t have a single root cause. They have multiple, intertwined contributing conditions.

What’s even better, it’s impossible to clarify all the contributing conditions ... and the conditions tend to keep changing as you interact with them, like you’re wrestling a many-headed hydra.

Even better, there are no ideal resolutions for any of the conditions you can clarify.

All that means that most of the time, there’s no surprise cunning twist. You really are going to have to choose between different expensive, unpleasant, partial solutions. You’ll find ways to make things a bit less difficult, but they’ll come with tradeoffs.

I think you already know this. Even if you don’t love it, you live it every day. You have meetings about what a pain it is. Meetings where people say, “keep it simple!”, “it can’t be that hard!” and “can’t we just … ?”

And then after the meetings, the situation sits there laughing at your attempts at simplification and snubs its many noses at every “can’t we just”.

BUT this is not a reason to throw your hands up and declare, “it’s complex, we can’t do anything!”

Yes, this kind of situation sometimes gets given the label “complex”, and some people hear that word as some sort of excuse. It’s not.

Just because you won’t find a single root cause doesn’t mean you can’t take action.

So it’s complex? Fantastic, now we can do things.

Surprise! I have a cunning twist and satisfyingly simple resolution for you now.

Your team arguing round and round is actually good. It’s just not good for finding a root cause or one right thing to do.

• Debate is incredibly valuable for generating lists of possible contributing conditions and thinking of many options for action.
• Debate is incredibly wasteful for identifying the root cause or for choosing the right option for action.

This is why I recommend layering Signals > Stories > Options on a Multiverse Map.

1. As you debate what’s happening, capture everyone’s Stories about what might be happening and why on a Multiverse Map. Avoid debates about who’s right and wrong. Simply add everyone’s Stories to each part of the map and keep moving. (Yes, you might end up with quite a lot of Stories. That’s OK.)
2. To each Story, add Options for Action. If that Story were to describe a critical contributing condition, what could you do to mitigate it? And if you needed to identify which Stories are closer to reality, what Option for Action could generate Signals that would make it clearer?
3. Make each Option as small as you can. As each one targets just one Story, most of them tend to be quite small and achievable to begin with.
4. Choose a handful of Options for Action and get working. Don’t overthink it too much, but prioritise the Options that tackle the biggest areas of uncertainty.

(Below, I’ve included a copy of a card from Innovation Tactics that gives you even more detailed instructions.)

And there you have it.

Once you’ve accepted that you’re not going to find a magic bullet, you’re free to stop looking for one. With all the time you’re not wasting on that, you can work on multiple Options for Action instead. And that means you can tackle multiple conditions at the same time.

Doing that will either shift the situation or generate better Signals and Stories for you. You’ll either make progress or learn how to make progress.

Very occasionally, you’ll find that you really are in one of those magic bullet situations where you can just install mirrors, but the magic bullet will emerge from action and sense-making, not from arguing round and round.

Finally, I know from experience that it’s hard to really understand how freeing — and how effective — this way of working is until you’ve experienced it. For a hint of a clue, here’s what one of my clients said:

Want an introduction to this way of working?

What I described above is some of what I’ll be sharing in my Intro to Multiverse Mapping sessions. Check out the upcoming dates. Or if you’d like to mainline this way of working directly into your teams, hit reply and let’s talk.

Tom x

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