Nobody is arguing about the decision

Watch a leadership team disagree for an hour and you will notice something. The argument never resolves, but it also never really engages. Two people talk past each other with total conviction and neither changes position.

That is almost never a disagreement about the decision. It is a disagreement about causality, conducted entirely in the language of the decision.

What it sounds like

The chief revenue officer wants to hire. The chief financial officer wants to wait a quarter. On the surface they disagree about timing. They do not. The CRO believes pipeline responds to coverage within one quarter. The CFO believes it responds in three, if at all, and that the cash gap in between is the real risk.

Those are two different models of the same business. Neither has been written down. Neither person could state the other’s version, and probably could not state their own, because it has never needed to leave their head before.

Why the meeting cannot settle it

Because the thing being disputed is not in the room. The deck has the proposal and the numbers; it does not have the mechanism either person is reasoning from. So the discussion defaults to whoever has more credibility this quarter, which is a perfectly rational way to break a tie and a terrible way to be right.

The move that works

Stop arguing about the answer and get both models onto one page. Not a financial model — a causal one. What drives what, in what direction, with what lag. It takes twenty minutes and it usually ends the argument, because once the two chains are side by side, you can see that they disagree about exactly one link.

Then you have a real question with a real answer: which of us is right about that link, and what evidence would settle it? That question is testable. “Should we hire?” never was.

One of five short notes on why decisions miss. Back to the others, or tell me where I'm wrong.