For years, I thought my work was about resolving disagreements.
The circumstances varied widely. Sometimes it was a business partnership beginning to unravel. Sometimes it was a family struggling through the care of an aging parent or an inheritance. Sometimes it was a leadership team that had stopped trusting one another.
The disagreements were real. But something about those conversations kept bothering me.
The people sitting across from me were almost always intelligent, thoughtful, and capable. Yet they were often seeing the same situation very differently than they had only weeks or months earlier.
That puzzled me.
At first, I assumed they were simply under stress. But over time, I realized that stress alone didn't explain what I was observing. People weren't just becoming more emotional. They were becoming more certain.
The longer I did this work, the more my attention shifted. I became less interested in the disagreements themselves and more interested in what those disagreements were doing to the people involved.
Looking back, I don't think the disagreement itself was usually creating the greatest difficulty. More often, it was exposing something that had already begun to change.
Trust had been damaged. Expectations had diverged. Fear had entered the picture. Loss had occurred, or appeared imminent. Something important no longer felt safe, secure, or predictable.
Those were the real sources of pressure.
As the pressure increased, people began seeing the situation differently.
One of the things that puzzled me most was how little the underlying facts sometimes changed, even as people's decisions changed dramatically.
A delayed phone call became evidence of betrayal.
A brief email became proof of disrespect.
A disagreement about strategy became a referendum on trust.
The events themselves often hadn't changed.
The meaning people assigned to those events had.
Gradually, I came to understand that people weren't simply responding to what had happened. They were responding to what they believed had happened.
Without realizing it, they had stopped responding to what they knew and had begun responding to what they believed. It took me years to recognize that I wasn't observing isolated situations. I was observing the same pattern appearing in different settings. Eventually, I came to think of that pattern as “The Spiral.”
And The Spiral begins quietly. A conversation is replayed on the drive home. An email is drafted and redrafted. Silence begins to acquire meaning. Assumptions quietly replace questions. Before long, the situation begins to look simpler than it really is. What once appeared to contain many possible paths now seems to offer only two:
Do nothing.
Or escalate.
Around that same time, another thought usually appears.
Something must be done.
Waiting begins to feel irresponsible. Reflection begins to feel passive and action begins to feel like the only reasonable response.
I've never found that reaction surprising—the difficulty is that urgency and clarity are not the same thing. One is a feeling. The other is a condition. And one can easily masquerade as the other.
Over the years, I've become less interested in helping people decide what to do. I've become much more interested in helping them see clearly enough to decide well. Most people already know the choices in front of them. What they struggle to see are the assumptions, interpretations, and pressures that have quietly begun shaping those choices.
That's why another set of eyes can be so valuable. Not because someone else has better answers. But because someone standing outside the situation is often able to see what has become difficult for those living through it to recognize.
Looking back, I no longer think my work has primarily been about resolving disagreements. I've come to believe it's about helping people recover the clarity to make decisions they can trust.
And that clarity rarely begins with better answers; it begins with a better question: Am I seeing this situation as accurately as I think I am?
I've found that the moment people become genuinely curious about that question, something begins to change:
Certainty softens.
Perspective widens.
Options reappear.
And better decisions often follow.
If you're facing a situation where the stakes are high and the path forward isn't clear, let's have a confidential conversation.
Andrew Akers is the Founder of Resolve Advisory, where he advises business owners, executives, investors, and families through high-stakes situations involving conflict, uncertainty, and important decisions. Learn more at www.resolve-advisory.com.