When a product or team hits a wall, the instinct is to generate more options — brainstorm harder, bring in more voices, widen the search. But the 14th-century scholar Ibn Rushd (Averroes) made a case that still holds: clarity comes not from accumulating possibilities but from sharpening the criteria that let you eliminate them. This connects surprisingly well to what organizational theorist Karl Popper called 'falsificationism' — the idea that a good theory isn't one you can prove, but one you can clearly disprove. Applied to decisions, this flips the mental model: instead of asking 'what could work?', ask 'what would have to be true for this to fail?' A leader who can articulate precise failure conditions for a direction is actually thinking more clearly than one who can name ten reasons it might succeed. Today, pick one initiative you're currently backing — and try to write down, in a single sentence, the exact condition under which you'd abandon it.

In the last 48 hours, have you made a decision by adding more reasons to support it — or by seriously trying to identify what would prove it wrong?

Drawing from Islamic Scholastic Philosophy / Philosophy of Science — Ibn Rushd / Averroes (Decisive Treatise, c. 1180 CE) and Karl Popper (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934)