There are a lot of weeks when I end up slightly overwhelmed by how much information is around me — frameworks, research, opinions, hot takes, a podcast someone sent me to listen to, three more books in the pile beside the bed and dozens on my Kindle. A lot of it repeats what the last thing said, with more confidence and less evidence.

So I simplify. I think I have to. In my work, my clients hire me, in part, for exactly that — help them cut down whatever's cluttering the view, so they can see what matters and act on it. I suspect it's similar for a lot of us, whether we're running a team, a business, or our own attention.

Simplifying is a skill that can bring relief. Done well, it clears the path. Done badly, it turns a messy situation into a black-and-white story, strips out the texture, finds a villain, an us-versus-them version, and leaves people satisfied with an answer that isn't right.

The second one tends to happen more often. And when it happens inside a coaching conversation, or inside a leader's head on the way to a decision, it can cost money, relationships, and time.

This isn't an individual problem. We're in a moment when simple stories travel further than complex ones. Polarisation works by offering people the relief of a clean narrative — clear heroes, clear villains, no ambiguity to deal with. The coaching industry isn't immune. A lot of the most-shared coaching content flattens human situations into tidy frameworks and bullet-pointed takeaways. It's easier to share, and usually less true.

That's why, after reading a very nuanced article in the Romanian press which was part of an initiative called Complicating the Narrative, I was really curious what this was about. When I looked into it, I discovered it comes from the Solutions Journalism Network — designed to help reporters tell fuller, more accurate stories about contested issues.

I was intrigued. Being an adept of simplifying, but also aware of how simplifying can backfire, I was wondering: aren't we meant to do the opposite? Simplify, not complicate?

So I read more carefully. And it became clearer that it isn't an either/or story, but rather a tension between two good perspectives — if done at the required moment.

Complicating the Narrative — so what is this about?

Solutions Journalism breaks the practice into four pillars. Briefly, here they are, and then I'll spend the rest of this piece on what I think each one asks of coaches — and of anyone trying to work with people who don't see the world the way they do.

Pillar One — listen differently. The core technique is called Looping. Rather than paraphrasing what someone said, you feed their position back to them in enough detail that they can tell you whether you've really got it.

Pillar Two — go beneath positions to motivations. A set of questions that invite people to say what they're torn about, rather than what they're certain of.

Pillar Three — frame with complexity. Widen the geographic or historical lens. Bring in voices beyond the usual ones. Use textured, specific detail rather than abstract framing.

Pillar Four — pay attention to our own limitations and confirmation biases. Build in structured ways to notice what we've been avoiding.

Each pillar does something different inside my coaching practice — this is my take.

Looping

The parallel to coaching is obvious, and still worth examining.

Most of us were taught active listening as paraphrasing. "So what I'm hearing is..." Looping asks for more. You say the person's position back to them with real detail, and then you check, explicitly and out loud, whether you've got it.

Most of us think we do this already. At least, I know I used to. When I started recording my sessions for supervision years ago, I noticed that what I'd been calling active listening was a kind of summary, a version of what I heard that never risked being wrong. I'd paraphrase back the parts I was sure of and skip the messy bits.

Try this. Next difficult conversation you're in — client, direct report, partner, anyone — loop once before responding. Say the person's position back to them in more detail than they're expecting. Then ask whether you've got it right. Nine times out of ten they correct you, usually on something specific. That's where the conversation starts.

The questions that go beneath

Solutions Journalism groups the 22 questions into four clusters: amplify contradictions and widen the lens, get to people's motivations, listen more and better, and expose people to the other tribe to counter confirmation bias. One example from each cluster, to give a feel for the range:

Where do you feel torn?

Why is this important to you?

What's the question nobody's asking?

What do you already know, and what do you want to understand, about the other side?

These are not new questions for coaches. But it's important to catch the intent behind them — they aren't trying to make the person feel better about where they are. They're trying to make the story more accurate, which often means less comfortable.

Where do you feel torn? is the kind of question that encourages and/and thinking rather than either/or. It sidesteps two traps we hear a lot in coaching circles: what's stopping you?, and false-dichotomy questions in general. Torn opens room for people to name the pulls they're holding — the thing they want AND the thing they're afraid of, the role that pays AND the work that matters, staying AND going. Most stuckness I see in practice looks more like that than like one obstacle in the way. People aren't usually blocked by a single thing. They're holding two things that both matter and pull in different directions.

Try one question from their list this week. Use it on yourself, or on someone who trusts you enough to follow you somewhere less tidy. Notice what becomes possible.

Widening the lens, specifically

Journalism training is sharper on this than coaching training, in my experience. Solutions Journalism doesn't just tell reporters to zoom out — it asks them three specific things: where has this played out before, geographically or historically? Whose voices haven't you gathered? What piece of textured, specific detail would change the picture?

These translate well into coaching, particularly — though not only — in work with teams, where the system dimension is always live. Who isn't in the room whose perspective would change the conversation? What did this same dynamic look like in the last team that went through something similar? What specific thing — a phrase people keep using, a meeting that goes the same way every time, a pattern in who speaks and who doesn't — would describe the situation to someone who'd never met these people?

This is close to what the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) calls Systems Awareness — one of the Creative competencies in a framework I've found particularly useful for understanding how leaders actually operate. Systems Awareness shows up as the capacity to see beyond the immediate players and notice the patterns operating across the wider context. It's a capability that develops with deliberate practice, and questions like the three above are one form of that practice.

The confirmation bias pillar

This is the hardest of the four — working with our own biases.

Confirmation bias isn't something that happens to others alone and never to us. It's how all our minds work, and it's useful to remember this. Information that fits the story we already hold comes with ease — it feels true because it matches what we already believe. Information that contradicts the story comes with friction, and the mind's default is to explain it away, discredit the source, or simply not notice.

Solutions Journalism responds with structure rather than willpower. Formats that expose audiences to disconfirming evidence in ways they can tolerate. Sourcing practices and infographics that deliberately reach across the divide.

In coaching, this is extremely visible. A leader who's been sure for months that this direct report is the problem, and whose memory has been curating supporting evidence the whole time. A team locked into a story about another function being the blocker, who hasn't actually had a real conversation with anyone from that function in longer than anyone remembers. A founder whose reading of their market has narrowed, and whose information diet now consists almost entirely of sources that agree with them.

The LCP frame maps this neatly. The Reactive tendencies — Controlling, Complying, Protecting — each come with their own engine for confirming themselves. A Controlling pattern walks into a meeting and finds evidence, once again, of being the only competent person in the room. A Complying pattern picks up a hundred tiny cues that speaking up wouldn't be welcome, and doesn't. A Protecting pattern scans for the people who aren't safe, and finds them. None of these readings are wrong, exactly. They're usually sampling from real data. The problem is that they're only sampling from one part of the data that's actually available.

The Creative move isn't to override these readings. It's to notice, in the moment, which story is being fed — and then to go looking, deliberately and with some discomfort, for the evidence the story isn't collecting.

Try this as a monthly habit. In your notes, if you keep any, or with someone you trust to challenge you, pick one strong view you hold about a person or situation at work. Ask: what evidence would change my mind on this? If the answer is "nothing," that's worth staying with. If you can name what would change your mind, the next question is whether that evidence exists, and whether you've been avoiding it.

Where this practice fails

A framework like this has its own failure modes, and naming them is part of the discipline. An article praising Complicating the Narrative without applying Pillar Four to itself would be not doing what it's preaching.

One failure mode is when complicating becomes defence. If every conversation turns into a request for more nuance, more context, more perspectives before anything can be decided, you've turned complexity into an excuse not to act. A coach who keeps widening the frame when the client needs to make a call isn't coaching. They're avoiding.

Another is false equivalence. Not every story has two legitimate sides. Abuse, exploitation, harassment, clear ethical failures — these don't need their narratives complicated. They need to be named. A coach who responds to "my manager is undermining me" with "well, what's their side?" as a reflex has confused complexity with neutrality. Real harm comes from that confusion, and it's the kind of harm that gets papered over in our field because the instinct to stay neutral runs so deep.

The third failure mode is subtler. Complicating can become a kind of intellectual distance. The four pillars aren't meant to make you a cooler, more detached observer. They're meant to make you more accurate. And accuracy, in this work, usually requires being closer to what's actually happening, not further from it.

What I'm taking from this

The work that actually helps people is slower, and less quotable than what gets shared most. It involves sitting with what's genuinely complex until a more accurate story becomes available — one the person recognises as theirs, rather than one they've been handed.

Solutions Journalism calls this complicating the narrative. I'd call it something closer to listening properly. Both describe the same discipline: staying in the question long enough for the fuller story to surface, and trusting that the fuller story is more useful than the tidy one — for the reader, for the client, and for the person doing the work.

If you're a coach, a leader, or someone trying to work with people who don't see the world the way you do, the four pillars give you something to practise. More a habit of attention you build over years than a technique you deploy.

The Solutions Journalism Network's Complicating the Narrative toolkit is publicly available, including the full set of 22 interview questions and the Pillar Four resources on countering confirmation bias. Worth spending time with.