A strategy workshop concludes with confident, genuine agreement around the table that a proposed initiative makes sense, expressed in the fluent, high-level language of the strategic framework used to structure the discussion. Asked individually and specifically to walk through exactly how the first proposed action causally leads to the intended outcome, several participants who nodded in confident agreement struggle to produce a coherent, detailed explanation — a gap well documented in cognitive research as the illusion of explanatory depth, and one that strategy workshops built around fluent, high-level language are specifically prone to producing.
What the underlying research actually found
Studies asking people to rate how well they understand the mechanism behind everyday complex objects — a zipper, a toilet, a bicycle — before and after actually attempting to explain the mechanism in detail consistently find that confidence drops substantially once the attempt to explain reveals genuine gaps, even for objects people interact with confidently and successfully every day. The core finding is that fluent familiarity with something, including confidently using and discussing it, is not the same as possessing a genuine, detailed causal understanding of how it actually works.
Why strategy discussions are specifically exposed to this same gap
Business strategy frameworks provide fluent, high-level language — market positioning, competitive advantage, synergies — that participants can use confidently and comfortably in discussion without that fluency requiring, or necessarily reflecting, a genuinely worked-out, mechanism-level understanding of exactly how a proposed strategic action is supposed to causally produce the intended business outcome, step by step. A group can reach genuine, sincere consensus using this fluent shared language while each individual participant, and the group collectively, actually holds a considerably shallower understanding of the specific causal mechanism than the confident agreement in the room would suggest.
Why this specifically becomes costly at the implementation stage
A strategy that seemed clear and well-agreed at the high level of framework language frequently reveals genuine gaps and disagreements once implementation requires specifying exactly what happens at each concrete step — gaps that would have been considerably cheaper to surface during the workshop itself, before resources were committed, than after implementation has already begun and specific, conflicting assumptions about the underlying mechanism start to surface under real operational pressure.
What actually surfaces this gap before it becomes expensive
Deliberately asking participants, individually and in writing before further group discussion, to explain a proposed strategy's causal mechanism in specific, concrete detail — not just to restate their agreement with its high-level conclusion — directly tests for the illusion of explanatory depth in exactly the way the underlying cognitive research does, surfacing genuine gaps and disagreements in understanding before the group's fluent, shared vocabulary papers over them in a way that feels like real consensus.
What this means for running a rigorous strategy workshop
- Ask participants to explain a proposed strategy's mechanism step by step, individually and specifically, not just whether they agree with its high-level framing
- Treat confident, fluent agreement using shared framework language as weaker evidence of genuine understanding than a detailed, individually produced causal explanation
- Surface implementation-level specifics during the workshop itself, deliberately, rather than assuming high-level agreement will translate cleanly into implementation
- Be specifically alert to workshops that conclude quickly and with unusually smooth, unanimous agreement, since that pattern is consistent with the illusion of explanatory depth operating undetected
The illusion of explanatory depth is a reminder that fluent, comfortable discussion of a strategy and genuine, detailed understanding of its actual mechanism are two different things — and a workshop that only tests for the first can produce confident consensus around a plan that quietly falls apart the moment someone asks how, specifically, it's supposed to work.