When Being “Right” Becomes the Enemy of Strategy
The article was inspired by something ordinary: a couple arguing.
It happened on a train ride through the Swiss mountains, on the way to visit a close friend. The landscape outside moved slowly, deliberately. Snow-dusted slopes, quiet villages, long tunnels that forced reflection simply because there was nothing else to look at.
Across the aisle, a couple was in a low but intense discussion. The husband insisted he had a clear opinion. He always did. On politics, decisions, plans, almost anything. The wife pushed back. Not on the substance, but on the posture behind it. Her point was simple: he wasn’t open to alternative views. His certainty closed the conversation before it had a chance to begin.
What struck me wasn’t who was right. It was how familiar the dynamic felt.
I have seen the same pattern play out repeatedly in strategy discussions, innovation initiatives, and business model transformations. Leaders with strong opinions. Teams with well-rehearsed arguments. Decisions that feel crisp and decisive. And yet, beneath that clarity, something fragile: assumptions that are never named, alternative perspectives that are never explored, and paths that look deliberate but quietly converge toward the same outcome everyone else is choosing.
The problem is not conviction. The problem is unexamined conviction.
Strategy doesn’t fail because leaders lack opinions. It fails because those opinions are treated as facts rather than as hypotheses that deserve pressure.
The Comfort of Certainty
Certainty feels productive. It signals leadership. It creates momentum. It reassures boards, teams, and investors that someone is in control.
On that train, certainty sounded efficient too. The husband wasn’t shouting. He was composed, logical, articulate. From the outside, it looked like strength.
But certainty has a shadow.
When we are certain, we stop exploring. When we stop exploring, we stop learning. And when learning stops, strategy quietly turns into execution of yesterday’s logic.
Most organizations don’t suffer from a lack of ideas. They suffer from an excess of unquestioned assumptions. Assumptions about customers, markets, costs, scalability, technology, timing, regulation, or internal capabilities. These assumptions are rarely written down. They live in slide decks, habits, and phrases like “we know our customers” or “this is how the industry works.”
Certainty turns these assumptions invisible.
And invisible assumptions are dangerous, because they guide decisions without ever being challenged.
The Phantom You End Up Following
As the train entered another tunnel, the conversation paused. Silence filled the space, briefly. It felt symbolic.
When assumptions remain implicit, something similar happens in organizations. You think you are making strategic choices, but you are actually following a phantom.
The phantom is not a person or a plan. It is a model of reality that once made sense and was never updated. It feels real because it is familiar. It feels validated because it has worked before. But it is no longer interrogated against current conditions.
In this state, strategy becomes a form of rationalization. Every new initiative is framed to fit the existing worldview. Every signal from the market is interpreted through the same lens. Dissent is politely acknowledged and quietly ignored.
The organization keeps moving. Projects progress. KPIs are hit. And yet relevance slowly erodes.
No one decided to follow the phantom. It happened because no one stopped to ask what assumptions were doing the steering.
Local Optimization: The Easy Path
Local optimization looks smart. It focuses on efficiency, improvement, and incremental gains. It makes processes faster, products better, and costs lower. It is measurable, defensible, and usually rewarded.
It is also the path of least resistance and the obvious.
On the train, the argument kept circling the same point. Each response optimized the previous one. Sharper wording. Better logic. No real shift.
That is local optimization.
In organizations, local optimization works within the existing system. It does not question whether the system itself is still the right one. It improves what already exists instead of asking whether something else should exist instead.
The uncomfortable truth is this: local optimization is usually the same choice your competitors are making. They share similar assumptions, face similar incentives, and read the same market signals. Over time, everyone becomes better at the same thing, for the same customers, in the same way.
From the inside, this looks like progress. From the outside, it looks like convergence.
If you want to become good, it’s not about what you have been good at, but about what you can become best at—and whether there is a feasible path to get there.
Why Global Optima Are Rare
Finding a global optimum is fundamentally different.
A global optimum requires stepping outside the current system and evaluating it as one option among many. That sounds obvious in theory, but it is deeply uncomfortable in practice. It means questioning what feels foundational. It means accepting that past success might now be a liability. It means entertaining alternatives that initially look worse by existing metrics.
To search for global optima, you must make assumptions explicit.
Not as a box-ticking exercise. Not as a workshop artifact. But as a deliberate act of intellectual humility. You write down what you believe to be true, knowing that some of it will turn out to be wrong.
This is where many organizations stop. Making assumptions explicit feels destabilizing. It exposes disagreement. It slows decisions. It creates friction. And friction is often mistaken for dysfunction.
In reality, friction is the cost of escaping local optima.
Changing the Point of View
As the train climbed higher, the view widened. Valleys opened up. What looked flat before revealed depth, scale, and structure.
Perspective works the same way in strategy.
Once assumptions are explicit, something powerful becomes possible: changing the point of view. This is not about empathy exercises or brainstorming. It is about deliberately shifting the frame through which you interpret reality.
Different perspectives do two things at once. They add width and height.
Width comes from diversity of viewpoints. Different functions, roles, and experiences highlight different aspects of the system. What looks like a growth problem from sales may look like a risk problem from operations or a legitimacy problem from compliance.
Height comes from abstraction. Stepping back far enough to see patterns, second-order effects, and long-term consequences that are invisible at ground level.
Neither width nor height alone is sufficient. Together, they change what you see.
The Role of Roles
Perspective is not just cognitive. It is structural.
Different roles in an organization carry different incentives, risks, and blind spots. A product manager sees trade-offs differently than a CFO. A regulator sees different risks than a founder. A frontline employee experiences the system in ways leadership never will.
When strategy discussions are dominated by a narrow set of roles, the outcome is predictable. The strategy optimizes for the realities of those roles and ignores the rest.
Inviting more roles into the conversation is not about inclusivity for its own sake. It is about increasing the resolution of reality. Each role reveals assumptions others cannot see because they do not bear the consequences.
The more varied the roles, the harder it becomes to maintain comfortable illusions.
Divergence Is Not Indecision
One of the most common mistakes in strategy work is confusing divergence with indecision.
Divergence feels messy. It creates multiple options instead of a single narrative. It raises uncomfortable questions instead of delivering neat answers. Under pressure, leaders often rush to convergence to regain a sense of control.
But premature convergence is one of the most expensive errors organizations make.
Good strategy work is divergent first by design. It explores multiple interpretations of reality before committing to one. It tests assumptions against alternative explanations. It allows weak signals to challenge strong opinions.
This phase is not about choosing. It is about learning what is even worth choosing between.
Skipping divergence does not save time. It only postpones learning until it becomes more expensive.
Convergence Earned, Not Declared
Convergence is not the enemy. It is the goal. But it must be earned.
After divergence has expanded the space of possibilities, convergence becomes meaningful. Choices are made with an understanding of what is being excluded. Trade-offs are explicit. Risks are acknowledged, not hidden.
At this point, conviction is no longer performative. It is grounded.
Leaders can say “this is the path we choose” without pretending it is the only reasonable one. Teams can align not because they agree with every detail, but because they understand the logic and the risks.
This kind of alignment is resilient. It can absorb surprises because it was built with uncertainty in mind.
The Cost of Not Doing the Work
When assumptions remain implicit and perspectives narrow, organisations pay a quiet price.
They invest heavily in initiatives that look rational but fail to change trajectory. They mistake activity for progress. They blame execution when strategy is the real constraint. They double down on local optimization until the market makes the choice for them.
By the time the problem is visible in financials or market share, the degrees of freedom are gone.
The irony is that this outcome is rarely caused by a lack of intelligence or effort. It is caused by a lack of deliberate perspective-shifting at the right moment.
Back to the Train Ride
By the time the train reached its destination, the argument had softened. Not because one side had won, but because the conversation had shifted. Questions replaced statements. The tone changed.
That, more than agreement, felt like progress.
Strategy work faces the same choice.
You can have strong opinions and still be open. But only if you treat your opinions as starting points, not conclusions. Only if you are willing to surface and challenge the assumptions that hold them in place.
Otherwise, you may win the argument and lose the strategy.
Strategy as a Discipline of Seeing
At its core, strategy is not about plans, roadmaps, or frameworks. It is about seeing.
Seeing what others overlook. Seeing when the old logic no longer applies. Seeing how local improvements add up to global stagnation. Seeing which assumptions quietly shape decisions.
This kind of seeing does not come from confidence alone. It comes from deliberate discomfort. From slowing down when speed feels tempting. From widening and elevating perspective before narrowing it again.
The work is harder. The conversations are messier. The answers are less comforting.
But like that train ride through the mountains, it changes what you are able to see.
