Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit

Brown uses the locked room mystery—a detective fiction subgenre where a crime appears unsolvable due to impossible circumstances—as a metaphor for understanding organizational failures. In these stories, detectives initially struggle because they make unfounded assumptions about time, space, causation, and reality. The resolution requires rejecting speculation and focusing on logical deduction from facts already present.

Brown applies this framework to post-mortem meetings where teams investigate what went wrong. Organizations often fail not because the facts are unavailable, but because team members operate from incomplete or distorted narratives. Each person sees only their own contribution, what they focused on, and sometimes what they wanted to see. Rather than allowing these fragmented stories to drive conclusions, effective post-mortem practice requires surfacing assumptions, identifying time gaps, and examining unreliable narration.

To illustrate this concept, Brown uses a practical example: A sales pitch fails, and blame initially falls on one team member. However, examining the actual sequence of events reveals a different story—the sales rep requested the deck 48 hours before the meeting (before receiving the numbers), the meeting was rescheduled multiple times, and remote work arrangements affected visibility. What appeared to be a straightforward failure stemmed from compounded timing issues and unspoken assumptions about deadlines.