I have been using ChatChat to build a canonical record of how I work, and the relationship between the end product and the thinking that got me there. Part of this process is to go back through the versions: Idea A, Idea B, Draft01, Draft 2, Draft 5.6 (Use this one)... You get the picture. Looking back at the work, the ideas that I present, get promoted internally, and grow past the original brief haven’t come from Option A or B, but seem to have started in Option C. I don’t think that’s an accident.
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We have a strange obsession with the number two. Yes or no. Stay or go. Premium or mass. Brand or performance. Human or AI. Work from home or return to the office. Long-form or short-form. Growth or profitability.
A or B.
There’s something wonderfully comforting about a binary decision. It takes a messy, complicated world and reduces it to something manageable. Two doors. Pick one. The problem is the world rarely comes with only two doors. We put them there. Then we spend an extraordinary amount of time debating which one to walk through.
Without particularly intending to, over the years I have come to find that neither A nor B is very satisfying. Option C is where the interesting stuff lives.
Option A is easy
Whenever I break down a problem, Option A appears almost immediately.
Option A is the obvious answer. It’s what the category normally does. It’s what experience tells you should work. It’s what the client is probably expecting — the answer you could reasonably arrive at after reading the brief, looking at the competition, and applying the accumulated wisdom of people who’ve solved similar problems before.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with Option A. In fact, it’s often quite good. Competent people are exceptionally good at producing Option A. Ask a competent strategist how to launch a premium product and there’s an Option A. Ask a competent creative team how to make a Christmas campaign, and there’s an Option A. Ask a competent consultant how to restructure an organization and, somewhere behind the PowerPoint, there’s definitely an Option A.
Best practice is essentially a gigantic international library of Option As.
And sometimes Option A is exactly what you should do. I just don’t particularly want to stop there.
Then comes Option B
Option B is usually more fun. If A says go left, B asks what happens if we go right. If A says make it premium, B says make it accessible. If A says automate the process, B says make it deliberately human.
This feels creative, because we’ve broken the pattern. We’ve challenged convention. We’ve become contrarian.
Here lies the problem: Option B is still being controlled by Option A. It exists in opposition to it. A says black, B says white. A says zig, B proudly announces it intends to zag. We congratulate ourselves for thinking differently while remaining trapped inside exactly the same frame.
Contrarian thinking can be useful, and I use it constantly. But contrarianism isn’t freedom. It’s rebellion. And rebels still need something to rebel against.
Which is why I keep going. Option C begins with a different question. Not “what is the opposite of A?” but “what else could be true?”
It’s a surprisingly liberating question, because by the time I reach C, I’ve already paid my intellectual debts. I’ve considered the obvious answer — that’s A. I’ve challenged it — that’s B. Nobody can accuse me, and more importantly, I can’t accuse myself of ignoring convention or failing to interrogate it. Both jobs are done.
Now the real fun begins. Option C doesn’t have to agree with A. It doesn’t have to disagree with A. It doesn’t even have to exist on the same axis. It can wander off. A answers the question. B challenges the answer. C challenges the question. That’s where I do my best work.
Say somebody asks: should we spend more on brand or performance marketing? Option A might say performance — we can measure it, optimize it, demonstrate return. Option B might say brand — stop feeding the short-term machine, build future demand. You could spend the next three months arguing about the right split between the two.
Or Option C might ask why we structured the problem around media investment at all. Maybe the real opportunity is product experience. Or distribution. Or packaging. Or customer service. Or community. Or something sitting inside one of the other Ps that nobody bothered putting into the original question.
Suddenly we’re not negotiating a point between A and B. We’ve changed the map.
This happens constantly in business, because binaries are seductive. Efficiency or creativity. Global or local. Specialist or generalist. Every binary creates an invisible line, and once the line exists, we instinctively go looking for our position on it. Option C asks whether the line deserves to exist at all.
The bias of simplification
We need simplification. You couldn’t operate in the world if every decision required contemplating every variable. So we compress, categorize, create opposites, and eventually the simplification becomes so familiar we mistake it for reality.
This is particularly dangerous in strategy, because the framing of the problem quietly determines the universe of acceptable solutions. If the question is “should we do A or B,” then A and B have already won. Everything outside that frame disappeared before the meeting even began.
Option C is a small act of resistance against that. It forces another possibility into existence, not necessarily because C will be right, but because the existence of C reminds us that A and B were never the entire universe. They were merely the first two things we happened to name.
Sometimes, though, there is no Option C. Option C is not a universal escape hatch. Some decisions really do have two doors, and one of them may be the right one. When that is the case, you do not need a reframing exercise. You need to just commit and move on.
There is also a point at which searching for another possibility becomes avoidance. A person can keep “challenging the frame” because making an actual decision would expose them to consequence.
I don’t present three options
There’s another reason I like working this way, and it has nothing to do with handing clients three ideas. I almost never do that. I’ve never really understood the ritual. Here are three strategic directions. Here are three creative territories. One is crap, and we all know it. One is lukewarm, but safe. One is there because we love triptychs. Pick your favorite.
If you’ve hired me to think about the problem, part of what you’re paying for is judgment. My judgment, my understanding of what good looks like. I’m not being paid to manufacture a menu and hand the difficult decision back to you. That’s my job, not yours.
So A, B, and C are not deliverables. They’re scaffolding. The client may never see A. They may never see B, and probably shouldn’t, because after exploring all three, I should have an opinion. That’s what goes on the table. Not three answers. The one I believe in. The one I can defend. The one I am most proud of.
Third time‘s the charm
A carries expectation. B carries opposition. C carries neither. By the time I reach it, I’ve stopped trying to be correct and stopped trying to be contrary. I’m exploring, and exploration is different from problem-solving. You start connecting things that aren’t supposed to connect. You steal an idea from another industry. You change the unit of measurement. You redefine the audience. You turn the constraint into the product. You realize the communications problem is actually a distribution problem. You stop trying to write a better answer to the brief and start wondering whether there’s a better brief.
That’s where strategy starts becoming creative, and creativity starts becoming strategic.
There’s a word for this stage: play. It’s the first point in the process where I’m genuinely playing. A has responsibility attached — what should we do? B has performance attached — how do I prove I’m thinking differently? C has neither. The homework’s finished. Now I can screw around.
That might sound like a strange thing to celebrate in serious strategic work, but I think we badly underestimate the value of intellectual play. Play lets ideas collide without immediately demanding they justify themselves. It permits detours, stupidity, the sentence “this might be completely ridiculous, but—.” Some of the best ideas I’ve encountered begin with something close to that sentence. Not because ridiculous ideas are inherently valuable, but because genuinely new ideas often look ridiculous from inside the assumptions they’re about to replace.
AI makes this even more important
We’re entering an era where producing Option A is becoming incredibly cheap. AI is extraordinarily good at plausible. Give it the category, the objective, the audience and enough context, and it generates competent, sensible, defensible answers almost instantly — Option A at industrial scale. Ask it to be provocative, and it’ll happily generate Option B too. It knows how to zag.
Which makes finding C considerably more valuable. Not because AI can’t help find it. But because someone still has to recognize when the frame itself is the problem. Someone has to ask the question that wasn’t in the prompt: wait, why are these the choices?
That may be one of the more important creative and strategic skills of this era. Not producing more answers. Escaping the architecture of the obvious ones.
So try Option C
Next time you’re facing a difficult decision, give A its due. What’s the sensible answer? Write it down. Then find B — challenge it, reverse it, break its assumptions, see what happens if you do precisely the thing you’re not supposed to do. Write that down too.
Then forget about both of them for a moment and ask: what else could be true? Not what’s between A and B. Not which one is better. Not how you might combine them. What becomes possible if neither defines the boundaries of the problem?
That’s Option C.
You may discover A was right all along. At least you chose it rather than inherited it. But every once in a while you’ll find something else. Something that wasn’t sitting neatly between the two available choices. Something slightly strange, difficult to categorize, nobody asked for.
In my experience, that’s very often the work that gets promoted.
A answers the question. B challenges the answer. C asks whether we were asking the right question in the first place.
