IV. Concrete Strategies for Cultivating Nuance
- Matthieu Sinclair
- Mar 3
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 7
This article (4/6) is part of the series Principle of Action No. 1: Cultivating Nuance, from the collection “The Other Path.”
Nuance isn’t innate. It’s worked on and perfected.
Here are a few concrete approaches, drawn from twenty years of experience with our clients and from our reading in the cognitive sciences.
1. Practice “Steel-Manning” Rather Than “Straw-Manning”
“Straw-manning” means caricaturing your opponent’s position to make it easier to knock down. It’s the national sport of social media.
“Steel-manning,” by contrast, means restating the opposing argument in its strongest, most convincing version even when you disagree with it.
Practical exercise:
At your next decision-making meeting, ask each participant to spend three minutes defending, with conviction, the position opposite to their own, seeking out the best arguments they can find.
Two guaranteed effects:
You’ll discover that the opposing position is stronger than you thought
You’ll refine your own position by incorporating legitimate objections
This is exactly what “red teams” do in military and security organizations: they play the adversary to test the robustness of plans.
A few years ago, we made small brushed-steel cards (credit-card sized) for a team of sales negotiators, simply engraved with the words: “Maybe they’re right.” The idea was to let these negotiators remember, when emotions took over or frustration flared, that opposing viewpoints are often valuable.
The mere presence of this simple card encouraged them to step back and gain perspective.
(By the way, I’m almost certain this idea came from something I once read, but I’ve never been able to track down the source. If you know it, drop me a line! Update: the inspiration comes from Bill Bernbach, founder of the DDB advertising agency. Thanks to the wonderful Olivier Sibony, with whom we collaborate at HEC Paris Executive Education, who tracked down the source for us.)
Original and incongruous, this object was a great success with our client. Beyond their aesthetics and their obvious value as a memory aid and teaching tool, these cards above all helped forge valuable connections between the different parties in the negotiation, by making visible the object — and the philosophy — behind it: more curiosity, less pressure.
(More on the importance of the “loaded” object in our Principle of Action No. 2: Thinking with Your Hands.)
2. Radically Diversify Your Sources of Information
Our information bubbles have become airtight: we read the same media, follow the same influencers, listen to the same podcasts as our peers.
Practical exercise:
Take stock of your 10 most recent sources of professional information. Then ask yourself:
How many come from your own industry? (Target: less than 50%)
How many genuinely challenge your certainties? (Target: at least 30%)
How many come from completely different disciplines? (Target: at least 20%)
The best innovations are often born at the intersection of seemingly distant fields.
Frans Johansson calls this “the Medici Effect” (The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, Harvard Business School Press, 2004): creative explosions happen at the intersection of different disciplines, cultures, and sectors.
Paradoxa’s own approach was born from this idea, proposing a dialogue between the art of illusion, techniques from the performing arts, behavioral science, and social psychology.
But to spark these fertile intersections, you first have to accept stepping outside your intellectual comfort zone.
3. Set Up “Nuance Circles”
In several of the organizations we work with, we’ve set up what we call “nuance circles”: spaces for dialogue where the rule is to reveal complexity rather than simplify it.
Practical exercise:
Principle:
Group of 6-8 people
Duration: 30 minutes to an hour
One participant brings a complex professional question
The others do NOT try to offer solutions
They ask questions that reveal hidden complexity
They identify paradoxes, dilemmas, unresolved tensions
Goal: leave with a richer understanding, not a simple answer.
It’s the opposite of a solutions brainstorm: it’s a “complexity brainstorm.”
Philosopher David Bohm, in his book On Dialogue (Routledge, 1996), describes this practice as a form of collective intelligence where thought is no longer individual but circulates within the group. No one defends their position; everyone explores the territory of the question together.
P.S.: We’ve seen leadership teams radically transform the quality of their decisions through this simple practice.
4. Create “Disorientation Experiences”
On stage, we like to produce what we call “moments of cognitive vertigo,” where your certainties waver, and what you took for granted turns out to be more mysterious than expected.
For example, we regularly present an original “inattentional blindness” experience on stage, inspired by the test popularized by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, Crown, 2010).
Our version pushes the original concept much further, and reveals something deeply destabilizing: our attention follows rules far more complex than we believe. We don’t see reality; we see a partial reconstruction, filtered by what we choose to focus on.
Why does this matter?
Because it reminds us of the humility essential to a clear-eyed awareness: everything we don’t know, everything we don’t see, our blind spots, the invisible obvious things, and those “gorillas” that walk through our meetings without anyone noticing.
Practical exercise:
Regularly organize “disorientation experiences” within your teams:
Invite an expert from a field completely foreign to your business (why not us? 😊)
Visit an organization that does exactly the opposite of what you do
Read a book that defends a thesis opposed to your convictions (we can help you find the right book!)
Try something you’ve always rejected
The goal isn’t to convert you but to keep your capacity to be surprised alive. By occasionally questioning the obvious, thought stays alive.
At Paradoxa, for example, we decided this year to bring in an expert in digital prospecting to help our growth. These 100% digital tools are exactly the opposite of what we’ve loved practicing with our clients for more than 20 years, since 99% of our business has always historically relied on enthusiastic word of mouth and in-person encounters during the 200 events we run every year.
We tried our hand at “cold email” and copywriting tools, not because we feel at home with these techniques, but precisely because they’re not part of our DNA and our way of doing things — because they are radically foreign to us.
The etymology of that word is itself a quiet reminder of its value: extraneus — that which is outside. The word “strange” shares that same root: “that which is outside the ordinary”… A lovely promise!
We’re convinced this experience will teach us a great deal and help us grow. (And maybe, incidentally, bring us new clients too 😊.)
At the heart of nuance is often a desire for curiosity.
5. Develop an “Ethics of Contradiction”
In the Talmudic tradition, rabbis practice a fascinating exercise: they argue passionately for one interpretation of a text… then, with the same conviction, defend the opposite interpretation.
The point isn’t to win the debate, but to explore the full range of what’s possible, proving, in the process, that truth is not singular, and that it often emerges from dialogue between opposing positions.
In business, we could cultivate this same “ethics of contradiction.”
That means:
Valuing those who question rather than those who nod along
Rewarding constructive dissent rather than alignment
Creating spaces where disagreement isn’t just permitted but encouraged
Psychologist Irving Janis documented in his work on Groupthink how catastrophic decisions often stem from conformism: when no one dares to contradict, when the pressure toward “unanimity” smothers legitimate doubts.
The Bay of Pigs disaster, the Challenger shuttle disaster, and the subprime crisis all share this same mechanism: people who knew, who had doubts, but who didn’t voice them — not out of fear of breaking consensus, but out of fear of being marginalized. (I can only recommend Christian Morel’s two excellent books on the subject: Les décisions absurdes I, II.)
Nuance is also the courage of contradiction.
