Very Good at the Wrong Question
Best Buy's new CEO skipped headquarters on his first day. He drove sixty miles north of Minneapolis to a store in St. Cloud, Minnesota, put on a blue shirt, and worked the floor.
It was September 2012, and the company was widely expected to die. Circuit City had run the same playbook and lost. It liquidated in 2009, all 567 stores dark inside a few months, the second-largest electronics chain in the country gone. Borders followed in 2011, the last of its bookstores shuttered by that September. Two big-box chains gone in three years. Best Buy looked like the next one to fall.
The stock was trading near a ten-year low. The founder was assembling a bid to take it private. Wall Street had written the obituary, and the analysts agreed on the cause of death. The stores. Too many, too expensive, too easy to walk into and then buy the same television from Amazon on your phone before you reached the parking lot. Stores were the problem. The only argument was how many to close, and how fast.
Hubert Joly worked the floor for three days. Over lunch he asked the store's general manager to sketch the layout on a napkin. A fifth of it went to physical media, already dying. Mobile phones, the one category booming, held just four percent of the space. At the back of a sixteen-billion-dollar small-appliance market he found a single blender. One.
The analysts saw a cost to cut. Joly, on the floor, saw a building full of decisions no one had revisited in a decade.
You may be sitting in a version of that room right now. The strategy keeps coming down to the same two options — two answers, two sets of data, and a meeting that ends where it began. You have read the deadlock as a strategy problem, and you are building the private case for whichever option you trust more. Hold that thought. It is the same room.
The analysts were not careless. They were some of the most capable people in retail, and they had run the numbers the same way for years. The stores cost money. Online was cheaper. Amazon had no floors to heat or staff to pay, and every quarter the comparison got worse. Inside that arithmetic, closing stores was not a position. It was what the data said.
This is what a settled binary looks like from the inside. Two options, weighed against each other for so long that the argument becomes the whole field of vision. The Best Buy version was existential. Most versions are smaller. Build the feature or buy the company. Premium or volume. Sunset the product or double down. Centralize or hand it to the regions. The hardest versions are about people. Cut the team or hold steady. Five days in the office or fully remote. The shape repeats at every altitude, and the danger is never that one of the options is wrong. The danger is that these may not be the right questions at all, and an organization can get very good at answering questions it stopped examining years ago.
That frame did not come from a meeting. It came from an inherited definition of how the industry wins, built in an earlier era and absorbed long before anyone in the room took their seat. Big-box retail ran what The Imagination Age calls a Default Script: scale the footprint, drive foot traffic, win on selection and price. The people who rose inside that world rose because they executed the script well. The metrics rewarded it. The promotions confirmed it. By the time the ground shifted, the script had stopped looking like a strategy and started looking like the shape of reality.
A script that strong does more than guide decisions. It decides what the team is able to perceive. The options that fit the script are visible and arguable. The option that sits outside it does not register as a worse idea. It does not register at all. If you have walked out of a strategy session with every option on the board reasonable and not one of them new, you have felt this from the inside.
Why the Room Can't See It
Why couldn't a room of experts see in two years what Joly saw on the floor in three days?
The answer is more physical than it sounds. In a 2005 study in Biological Psychiatry, the neuroscientist Gregory Berns gave volunteers a perception task. They looked at pairs of three-dimensional shapes and judged whether the two were the same object rotated or genuinely different. The task had a right answer. Before each person decided, they saw how others had answered, and sometimes those others were wrong. People often abandoned the correct answer and went along with the group. The revealing part was where the going-along showed up in the brain. When the wrong answer came from other people, activity changed in the network that does the seeing, the visual and spatial regions running the task, and not in the regions that handle deliberate choice. When the same wrong answer came from a computer, that shift was weaker. The researchers drew the unsettling conclusion. Social pressure was not overriding people's judgment after they took in the shapes. It appeared to reach back into perception itself, shaping what they saw before judgment began. Conformity, on this reading, was not caving on a belief. It was closer to seeing what the group saw.
Four years later, Vasily Klucharev, writing in Neuron, found the enforcement mechanism. When a person disagreed with the group, the brain produced the same error signal it fires when you simply get something wrong, and at the same moment pulled back the small reward that comes with belonging. Disagreement registered as a mistake and a loss at once. Berns had found the third piece earlier. Hold your ground against the group, and the amygdala, the brain's threat alarm, fires harder, treating independence as a kind of danger.
Put those together and a team's agreement stops looking like weakness. The brain pulls what you see toward the group. It treats disagreement as an error. It withdraws the reward of belonging the moment you break ranks, and sounds a threat alarm on anyone who stands alone. Four systems, pulling the same direction, none of it reaching awareness. Convergence is not what a team does when it loses its nerve. It is what the brain does on its own.
That was the Best Buy boardroom. A roomful of retail experts looking at the same stores, able to see only what the room had already decided was there. It was also your last leadership meeting, in every head at the table, yours included.
Where the Imagination Went
Here is what was happening to that team. Imagination runs in three modes — the framework at the center of my book — each doing a different job. Generative asks what could be. Navigational asks how we get there. Protective asks what could go wrong. A binary only ever exercises two of them. Choosing between options that already exist is Navigational and Protective work, planning the route and bracing for the risk. The mode that pictures a third option, the one not on the table, is Generative, and it is the first to shut down when the pressure rises. The endless either/or in your meeting is not a sign that your people have stopped imagining. It is the signature of a team running on two of its three modes.
The imagination never left the room. Same engine, different direction. A transition puts the team under threat. A merger, a collapsing market, a new leader with a mandate to fix things. The brain reads all of it as danger and runs Protective. A team's collective imagination goes to work guarding the existing frame instead of breaking it. It builds the case for each option. It anticipates every risk. It defends the script better than it ever defended a new idea. Because consensus has already rewritten what everyone sees, the guarding feels like nothing more than facing facts.
He Had to Leave the Building
This is why Joly's first move was the floor.
He was not gathering folksy anecdotes. He was doing the one thing he could not do from inside the company's own consensus. He took in information the room had not already filtered. He later said the things he learned standing in that store were things he could never have seen poring over spreadsheets or sitting in meeting rooms with other executives at headquarters. The napkin, the dying media wall, the lonely blender, the phones booming in four percent of the space, none of it was visible from inside the room, because the room could only see the stores the script had defined. Joly needed new inputs to bring the Generative mode back online. Then he had to do the harder thing, and point it at what could this be while every analyst and every instinct screamed what could go wrong.
What he saw was that the stores were never the liability. They were the asset Amazon could not build. He turned them into mini-warehouses, shipping online orders from shelves that already sat near every customer. He rented floor space to Samsung and Apple and Microsoft, who paid to staff their own showrooms inside his. He matched Amazon's prices in the aisles, so the showrooming that was supposedly killing him became the reason to buy on the spot. None of this split the difference between cut and keep. It redrew the question. A company that had lost more than a billion dollars turned a profit, and kept turning one. The asset was hiding inside the thing they had agreed to kill.
Everything that blinded that team is running in yours. The pull toward what the group sees, the alarm on whoever breaks from it, the script deciding what counts as a real option before anyone speaks. Seniority does not lift you out of it. The longer you have succeeded inside the consensus, the harder it holds you, because you helped build it.
This is why the third option stays invisible. It is not missing. It is sitting in plain view of someone who is not in your meeting, in the exact way a booming phone market was invisible to a roomful of experts until one of them stood in the store. Generative imagination does not switch back on by trying harder in the same chairs. It comes back when new information reaches the room from outside the consensus that filters it.
That part is yours to start. You do not have to run the company to do it. You have to be the one who brings in the voice the room has never had to answer to, the one who treats the two options on the table as a question worth reopening. Someone has to carry in what the room cannot see on its own.
Joly put on the blue shirt.