A mental model I keep coming back to is Gray Thinking. It’s the ability to resist the urge to judge something as purely black or white too quickly. Instead, you stay in the gray longer. You hold multiple possibilities open, gather more information, and look for the nuance that binary thinking usually misses.
Most things in life are not so cleanly black or white. Yet our minds and many of our workplaces prefer the simplicity of either/or. When I catch myself forcing a problem into a strict binary frame, it’s usually a warning sign that I’ve taken a cognitive shortcut. It simply feels easier and less overwhelming to say “it’s either A or B.” That’s an illusion of simplicity. The binary view may not be wrong, but in my experience it almost always means something important is still missing.
I had to apply this mental model while helping a client choose how to set up user access for a new enterprise AI tool. At first it looked like a clean choice between two standard options. Each option unlocked certain capabilities and closed off others. It felt mutually exclusive: pick one and accept the trade-offs of the other.
In reality the best path was a hybrid approach that combined elements of both. Getting there wasn’t simple. It required research, a clear understanding of what the client actually needed, and careful mapping of how the different pieces would work together. But Gray Thinking proved right again. The solution that looked impossible when viewed as black or white became obvious once we allowed ourselves to sit in the gray.
Next time you feel the pull of a clean either/or decision, pause and look for the gray area. That’s often where the real solution lives.