TBM 391: You’re Not Misaligned. You’re Thinking Differently.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why some people are wired for concrete solution-thinking while others naturally gravitate toward more abstract, problem-focused, or strategy-level thinking. It’s easy to chalk this up to “command and control,” “HIPPO culture,” or a lack of autonomy and empowerment. And while those factors matter in some environments, the real story feels more nuanced.
TL; DR, if you keep tilting at windmills around empowerment, autonomy, being “problem first”, or any of these broad industry memes, you are probably missing (a big part of) the actual challenge and opportunity in your company.
Planning A Trip
Take something almost everyone can relate to: planning a trip with a partner. Sometimes, both people have the same working style, but often the conversation spirals into a familiar loop:
“I really want us to understand what we want from this vacation. What are we trying to get out of it? What’s the purpose of the trip?”
“That’s fine… but I’m actually having fun cruising Instagram and TikTok for ideas.”
“We could scroll for hours. I’d rather start with our intent and work backward.”
“I’d rather follow inspiration and trust what I’m excited about.”
Both of these are completely valid approaches to planning a vacation. Still, they reflect different personalities and cognitive traits (contextually mediated, of course, because none of us show up the same way in all contexts).
Concrete thinkers zero in on tangible details. They take things at face value, prefer clear steps, ask “how” and “what,” and anchor on specifics like flight times, budgets, or examples. Abstract thinkers reach for concepts and patterns. They ask “why,” connect ideas across domains, and zoom out to purpose, meaning, and future possibilities. The abstract–concrete divide reflects “two distinct thought processes” that people use based on their predispositions, past experiences, and context. Nothing is set in stone.
In this example, Partner 1 is a purpose-first, abstract thinker who prefers to define the “why” before moving to the “how.” Partner 2 is an inspiration-driven, concrete thinker who prefers to explore possibilities and follow what sparks excitement. You could easily see the roles flipped in a different context.
You might assume Partner 1, the abstract, purpose-driven one, would freeze if things go sideways during the trip. But instead, they snap into logic mode, mapping out contingencies like they’re solving a systems problem: “Okay, Plan A is off. Let’s model a new path based on constraints.” Meanwhile, Partner 2, the spontaneous, inspiration-led one, suddenly feels overwhelmed because their usual approach (following the fun, trusting the vibe) has no clear path forward.
Imagine what these partners can accomplish if they understand each other’s thinking styles, not just when things are easy, but also under stress!
Workshop Participation Styles
I have facilitated many workshops over the years, and one thing that always fascinates me is how differently people approach the same task. Some participants can turn off every internal filter and blast out fifty sticky notes, some barely intelligible. Others keep checking back to clarify the activity’s intent and heavily censor anything that feels like a “bad idea.” Some people need concrete examples before they can even begin. Others almost deliberately avoid the examples because they don’t want to be anchored or constrained.
For many participants, the window of being “on” is short—maybe an hour at best. For others (and I’m in this camp), they can jam for hours or even days, happily enduring long stretches where the work is messy, abstract, or not yet actionable.
I’m not a neuroscientist or psychologist, and I would never claim that these traits are set in stone, but the differences are so stark that something is going on behind the scenes. And it isn’t just experience (or any particular factor).
As a facilitator, this is your biggest challenge and opportunity, guiding people in and out of their “comfort zone” to produce amazing results.
Personal Example
Here I was, trying to figure out the actual strategy. To me, ideas were cheap. Anyone could have them, and all we had were hypotheses anyway. Heck, if you gave me twenty minutes, I could come up with a ton of them.
I didn’t feel like portraying false confidence or fabricating some sort of “conviction.” What I wanted was just to get going, start learning, and start adapting. I was sure initial efforts would fail, but I was confident we’d learn quickly. That’s where I had conviction. It wasn’t in the specific solutions. Rather, it was the belief that if we focused, all the signals pointed to significant upside.
Meanwhile, people kept asking me what solutions I had in mind. I finally cracked, put my head down, turned off the filters, and just gave them what they asked for. Suddenly, that was “just what we needed.” Suddenly, I had “product sense and conviction” in their eyes. To me, this felt like a charade. To others, it was exactly what they needed.
But if you peel away the layers, this was a classic example of mismatched cognitive expectations. It was a conflict between abstract problem framing and concrete solution signaling.
I was operating in strategy-discovery mode: focused on intent, uncertainty, and adaptive learning. But others were looking for concrete artifacts. They needed something to see, react to, and believe in. They equated solutions with clarity and leadership, even if those solutions were just working models rather than final answers.
It wasn’t about who was right!
It was about speaking different cognitive “languages”. I was in my exploratory, system-oriented comfort zone, and they were in their tangible, action-oriented comfort zone.
Our big failure in collaboration was that, instead of stepping back to understand where each other were coming from, it became a battle of styles. I was immediately triggered by what I perceived as a lack of trust and strategic thinking. They were triggered by the abstractness of my direction, which felt vague or ungrounded to them. That mismatch heightened tension and hindered progress.
The irony is, we shared the same goal: impact and great outcomes. But our default modes of thinking kept clashing instead of complementing each other. We weren’t misaligned in intent. We just couldn’t hear each other through the noise of style.
The Final Challenge
I’ll end with the final, often painful challenge.
Say you get to a point where you understand these dynamics. You know yourself (a bit better). And you understand those around you a bit better. You will start finding yourself investing a lot of energy in adapting to support the big goal or outcome (within limits, of course).
Yet you’ll have to come to grips with a tough reality. Not everyone is on this journey of self-awareness. It isn’t a priority. You will routinely encounter people who believe their way is the only way, and that somehow their perspective reflects the one and only “real world”.
That’s a tough pill to swallow.
But it is also a good reminder that all we can do is show up with good intent and be in the here and now. It likely isn’t a personal affront or attack. It’s just how it is.
Related:
Awareness of problem-solving styles (not personalities) and how they complement each other is so rarely acknowledged or addressed, so I really appreciate reading this. The way you characterize the two partners in your opening story aligns very closely with the Basadur Innovation Profile (https://www.basadur.com/the-profile/), which shows how each of us is a blend of four different thinking styles, with a stronger primary preference and a close secondary one. Partner 1 sounds like a Conceptualizer-Optimizer, someone who enjoys abstract "why" thinking but is also keen on concrete "how" modeling and planning. Partner 2 resembles a Generator-Implementer, an idea factory who is eager to put them immediately into action. You might find the research behind the profile and the whole Basadur system quite interesting: https://www.basadur.com/research/
In my own experience, having the knowledge not only of styles but how they align to the problem-solving process has helped me navigate difficult situations, but it's true that it can only get you so far. Ideally, a team and leadership should be on board and fully equipped with a shared awareness, (process) language, skills, and behaviors, but also be able to flex and adapt as needed.
About the uncertainty and concrete solutions. I think one of the reasons why it may be sometimes much easier to "embrace uncertainty" (in particular if you're one that is on the driver's seat or close to it), is that ...
Even if you do not have a specific plan yet which you're 100% confident of (and which to communicate to others), you have very likely thought of plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D, and may be even plan E. But others do not know all that, and for them the level of uncertainty is thus way higher.
I have seen this so many times myself. I am not confident yet about the detailed plan (perhaps I waiting for some pieces of information still to be available, and postpone the decision a bit to make a better decision) - but I am confident that we can find the solution, because there are enough tools in the toolbox and enough experience. However, not all others know that or they want to know the specific plan for some other reason and for them the level of uncertainty is thus way higher.