PRESSURE PATTERN #12

First Transition

Ten races, one wrong explanation, and the answer that came from a contrast.

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I threw up in transition one of ten consecutive triathlons.

Transition one is the changeover from swim to bike. Out of the water, run to your spot, wetsuit off, helmet and shoes on, go. Two minutes, maybe three, and for ten races that was where my body quit. Then I got on the bike, rode, ran, and finished.

I had an explanation before I had finished toweling off the first time. I was not fit enough, which was my primary fear. It also came with an instruction I already knew how to follow.

Pressure: The wrong explanation survives because it gives you something to do.

So after that race was done, I got to work and trained. More swimming, more miles, harder weeks. Each race I arrived fitter than the last, and each race I threw up in transition one.

Ten times.

What kept that explanation alive was not stubbornness and it was not a shortage of information. It was that “not fit enough” is a problem with a familiar response attached. I knew how to train. I could start that afternoon. Finding out what was actually happening would have meant stopping, and stopping does not feel like progress when there is another race on the calendar.

Teams do this. A recurring failure picks up an explanation early, usually in the first cycle or two, and the explanation that sticks is the one with work attached. We need more people. The team is too junior. We started too late. Each of those points at something the team already knows how to do, and each can absorb unlimited effort without being tested.

The diagnosis was wrong, and it had one advantage over the right one: I already knew how to act on it.

Pattern: Once you have named a problem, new evidence gets filed instead of tested.

Here is what I did not notice for a long time.

It was only transition one. On the bike I felt better, and I kept feeling better as the race went on. By the run I was fine. Every race, the same shape.

That shape argues against my own explanation, and not subtly. An endurance problem gets worse over a race, not better. I had that data ten times, from inside my own body, and it did not register. I had already decided what kind of problem this was, so the evidence got sorted into the category instead of being used to question it.

After race two, my wife Mandy said I might be getting nauseous from the open water swim, and that I might want to try dramamine.

She had watched two races. She did not have the training log, the split times, or the felt experience of the swim. She got it right eight races before I did, because she was looking at the symptom while I was looking at myself.

Medicine has a name for what I was doing. Premature closure is the habit of stopping the search once an answer fits. Mark Graber and colleagues examined one hundred cases where hospital doctors had reached the wrong diagnosis, and found that stopping too early was the single most common thinking error, with errors of thinking involved in about three quarters of the cases. These were experienced physicians working problems they had trained for years to solve. Expertise did not protect them. It may have exposed them, because a deep pattern library produces a confident first answer fast.

Their work is about doctors and patients. Applying it to a leader working out why their own team keeps failing the same way is my extension. But the mechanism does not appear to require a white coat.

Shift: One changed variable teaches you more than another round of effort.

Race eleven, I took dramamine.

Out of the water, run to my spot, wetsuit off, and nothing happened. I felt good. I got on the bike feeling good, which I had not done once in ten races, and standing there in transition it landed. Turns out it was simply motion sickness induced by swimming in choppy open water, just like Mandy predicted.

I did not reason my way to the answer. I tried something different, felt the difference, and then I understood what the previous ten had been.

That changes what you do next. When a team has been grinding on the same failure for a while, the instinct is to analyze harder: another retrospective, another root cause session, another week of looking at the same data through the same frame. But the frame is the problem, and analysis inside a wrong frame mostly produces better arguments for the frame. Changing one variable for one cycle does something analysis cannot. It produces a contrast, and a contrast is visible in a way an argument is not.

Three things to try.

Look at the shape, not the count. Describe the failure precisely: when it happens, when it does not, what happens after. Then ask whether your explanation predicts that shape. Mine predicted worse-over-time. Reality was better-over-time. That mismatch was available after the first race.

Ask what you were already told. Go to the person closest to the problem but outside it and ask: what have you told me about this that I did not act on? Then take notes instead of defending. It is the cheapest test you have.

Change one cheap thing for one cycle. Not a project. A variable. Pick the cheapest untested explanation and run one cycle with it changed. Decide in advance what a difference would look like so you cannot explain it away afterward.

Ten races of effort taught me less than one race with one thing changed. The fitness was real and I would train those years again. But clarity did not come from working harder. It came from changing something cheap and paying attention to the difference.

Most teams stuck on a recurring problem are closer to seeing it than they think. One changed variable and one honest question, and both are available this week.

This pattern is part of the library of leadership content at Resonant Vector published by Mark Benson to help leaders and teams thrive under pressure.