Notice when you reach for a simple story
Catch the moment you explain a messy event with one tidy cause and a confident prediction, and write the story down as a story.
Why it works
In Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps the first of five traps is “the desire for simple stories”. This page’s inference, not the book’s: writing the explanation down as one account, instead of as what happened, makes room for other accounts that fit the same facts, and that room may change what a leader does next.
How to do it
- When you have settled on an explanation for a setback, write it in one sentence.
- Ask what that sentence leaves out.
- Write one other account of the same event that would also fit the facts you have.
- Hold the account you prefer as a working guess until something tests it.
Evidence
The trap is named on a Cultivating Leadership book page for Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps (Garvey Berger, 2020). The writing exercise and its effect are this page’s inferences. No outcome study of this exercise was found. (anecdotal)
The practice is not a claim that every explanation is wrong. A simple cause is sometimes the right one. The practice asks only that the explanation be checked against other accounts.
Sources
- Garvey Berger, J. (2020). Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity. Stanford University Press.
- Cultivating Leadership, book page for Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps (Garvey Berger), accessed 2026-10-15.
Common mistake
Treating the practice as a general distrust of your own judgment. It targets the feeling that one tidy cause explains a whole mess.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Jennifer Garvey Berger’s Simple Habits for Complex Times
- Ask what can we learn here
Before you give an answer, ask what can be learned from the situation in front of you.
- Hold feedback as one partial view
Treat each piece of feedback as one partial view of the situation, not the final verdict on it.
- Take a view you disagree with seriously
State a position that clashes with yours in terms its holder would accept, and find what it shows that yours does not.
- Map the system around a problem, not its single cause
Trace the people, rules and feedback loops (chains in which an effect feeds back into its own cause) around a recurring problem, and where its boundary seems to sit, before you settle on its cause.
- Sort the situation by its domain before you decide
Before you choose a response, decide whether the situation is simple, complicated, complex or chaotic.
- Act on what the present shows and let the next step appear
Take the next small action you can see, observe what it does, and let that observation decide the step after it.
- Test the sense that you are right
Treat a strong feeling of being right as a claim to check, and name in advance what would show you were wrong.
Related concepts
- Vertical Development Practices: How Adults Grow, Not Just Add Skills
Heat, colliding perspectives, and sense-making — and what the research can and cannot promise
- Torbert’s Seven Action Logics of Leadership
Seven ways leaders make sense of pressure, how common each is, and how to work with your own
- Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
Distinguishing adaptive challenges from technical problems — and leading accordingly
- Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory (AQAL), Made Practical
Five elements for catching what your view of a situation leaves out, held as a map rather than a truth
- The Immunity to Change Process, Step by Step
Why a change you truly want keeps not happening, and the step-by-step way Kegan and Lahey take it apart
- Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory, Made Practical
Moving from being run by your assumptions to being able to examine them
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