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 desk and dozens on my Kindle. Some of it presents or recycles information with unsupported confidence, camouflaged as evidence.

So I try to simplify. In my work, my clients hire me, in part, to do just that: help them cut down whatever is cluttering the view, so they can see what matters and act on it. I suspect it is similar for a lot of us, whether we are running a team, a business or our own attention.

Simplifying is a skill that can bring relief. If we do it well, it clears the path. If we do it badly, it turns a messy situation into a black-and-white story. It strips out the texture, finds a villain or an "us-versus-them" version, and leaves people satisfied with a simplistic answer that may also be wrong.

Oversimplifying is easy. 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 is also a collective problem. We are living at a time when simple stories travel further than complex ones. Polarisation works by offering people the relief of a clean narrative, with clear heroes and villains and no ambiguity to deal with. The coaching industry is not immune. A lot of the most-shared coaching content flattens human situations into tidy frameworks and bullet-pointed takeaways. It is easier to share, but further away from what might work in a specific situation.

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

I was intrigued. I have often been told that I tend to complicate things, so I have learned to become a strong supporter of simplifying. I am also aware that simplifying can backfire. So how do we know when to simplify and when to complicate?

As I read more about the concept, it became clearer that this is not an either/or choice. Both have their place, but not necessarily at the same moment.

Complicating the Narrative — so what is this about?

Solutions Journalism breaks the practice into four pillars. Briefly, here they are, and then I will spend the rest of this article on what I think each one asks of coaches - and of anyone trying to work with people who do not 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 have really got it.

Pillar Two - go beneath positions to motivations. A set of questions that invite people to say what they are torn about, rather than what they are 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 have been avoiding.

Each pillar does something different. Below is my take.

Looping

The parallel to coaching is obvious, but 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 in real detail, and then you check, explicitly and out loud, whether you have got it.

Try this in your next difficult conversation - with a client, direct report, partner or anyone else. Loop once before responding. Say the person's position back to them in more detail than they are expecting, then ask whether you have got it right. They will often correct you on something specific, giving you clues about what matters in that conversation.

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 sense of the range:

Where do you feel torn?

What makes 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. What matters is the intent behind them. They are not intended to make the person feel better about where they are. They are intended to make the story more accurate, which often makes the conversation 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: what's stopping you?, and false-dichotomy questions in general. Torn gives people room to name the pulls they are holding - the thing they want AND the thing they are 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 are not usually blocked by a single thing. They are holding two things that both matter and pull in different directions.

Try one question from the list this week. Use it on yourself, or with someone who trusts you enough to follow you somewhere less tidy, and notice what changes in the conversation.

Widening the lens, specifically

Solutions Journalism does not just tell reporters to zoom out. It asks them three specific things: where has this played out before, geographically or historically? Whose voices have you not gathered? What piece of textured, specific detail would change the picture?

These questions translate well into coaching. Who is not 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 does not - would describe the situation to someone who had 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 have found particularly useful for understanding how leaders operate. Systems Awareness is the capacity to see beyond the immediate players and notice patterns across the wider context. It develops with deliberate practice, and questions like the three above are one way to practise it.

The confirmation bias pillar

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

Confirmation bias does not happen only to other people. It is part of how all our minds work, and it is useful to remember that. Information that fits the story we already hold comes easily. It feels true because it matches what we already believe. Information that contradicts the story comes with friction, and our default response may be to explain it away, discredit the source or simply not notice it.

Solutions Journalism responds with structure rather than relying on willpower: formats that expose audiences to disconfirming evidence in ways they can tolerate, and sourcing practices and infographics that deliberately reach across the divide.

In coaching, this is extremely visible. A leader who has been sure for months that a 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, which has not actually had a real conversation with anyone from that function in longer than anyone remembers. A founder whose reading of the 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 would not be welcome, and does not. A Protecting pattern scans for the people who are not safe, and finds them. None of these readings are necessarily wrong. They are usually sampling from real data. The problem is that they are sampling from only one part of the data available.

The Creative side asks us to notice which story we are reinforcing, and then look deliberately, and with some discomfort, for the evidence that does not fit it.

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 about this? If the answer is "nothing", that is something to investigate. If you can name what would change your mind, the next question is whether that evidence exists, and whether you have been avoiding it.

Where this practice fails

A framework like this has its own failure modes. An article praising Complicating the Narrative without applying Pillar Four to itself would not be doing what it preaches.

One failure mode is when complicating becomes a defence. If every conversation turns into a request for more nuance, more context and more perspectives before anything can be decided, complexity has become an excuse not to act. If we keep widening the frame when we need to make a call, we may simply be avoiding the decision.

Another is false equivalence. Not every story has two legitimate sides. Abuse, exploitation, harassment and clear ethical failures do not need their narratives complicated. They need to be brought to the surface. Someone who responds to "my manager is undermining me" with "well, what's their side?" as a reflex may have confused complexity with neutrality. Real harm can come from this confusion, particularly when the instinct to remain neutral takes precedence over what is happening.

The third failure mode is subtler: complicating can become a kind of intellectual distance. The four pillars are not meant to make us cooler, more detached observers. They are meant to help us see more accurately. That may require getting closer to what is actually happening, not further away from it.

What I'm taking from this

Useful work is often slower and less quotable. It sometimes requires staying with what is complex until the person can describe what is happening in a way they recognise as their own, rather than accepting a story handed to them by someone else.

Solutions Journalism calls this complicating the narrative. I would call it something closer to listening properly: staying with the questions for long enough to hear more of the story before deciding what it means.

If you work with people who do not see the world the way you do, the four pillars give you something concrete to practise. Over time, this can become a habit of attention rather than simply another technique.

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.