When logic isn't enough

Corin Lines-Stary has been in enough rooms where strong arguments died to know that the argument is rarely the point. 

She's the founder of an AI consultancy and a leadership coach, and when we sat down for this Full Picture Leadership conversation, she pulled me into two moments from one BCG project that I've been returning to ever since.

Here's the first.

The invisible layer

It was 2020. Corin was leading a small UX team on a digital transformation project at BCG. They were mapping customer journeys across multiple workstreams, and she knew Miro was the right tool. It would let designers work in parallel and move faster.

She made the case clearly, logically, and more than once.

The senior partner said no.

Corin tried different angles. She reworked the pitch, built support from others, set up one-on-one conversations. Nothing worked.

"You can be the most logical voice in the room and have the right opinion," she told me. "But if you're not trusted, if you don't have history with the person making the decision, it can fall through the cracks."

That's the part that stuck with me because I see it every week. Someone makes the strongest case, and the room doesn't move. They go home blaming themselves and their presentation.

It usually isn't them.

At BCG, teams constantly reshuffle, which makes the trust gap harder to close. Much of your time goes to getting aligned with new partners instead of building the kind of history that makes a "yes" easier. Corin had spent weeks trying to out-argue that gap, and she admits now she waited too long before asking for help.

I've watched the leaders I work with do the same thing. The reflex is to try one more angle, then one more, before we consider that trying harder might not be what's needed.

A mentor once described this to me as a relay race. You run your leg as hard as you can, and then you pass the baton. The more senior you are, the higher the stakes of waiting too long to pass it.

When Corin finally did, a colleague brought in Lauren, a designer who had worked with the same senior partner before.

Lauren got on the call and walked him through three projects he'd been part of where the team had used a tool like Miro. Then she named the concern he hadn't said out loud: with hundreds of people live in the same tool, work could move, get lost, get overwritten. She laid out how they'd lock drafts, limit editing rights to six people at a time, and protect the work.

The partner said yes.

The argument was the same. What shifted was who was carrying it, and whether he trusted them with his concern.

"Some of the influence in these moments," Corin said, "comes from trust and experience, not logic."

Last month, a client told me, "I had the strongest analysis in the room and nobody moved." I asked about her relationship with the decision-maker. Long pause. "New."

Right now, teams are moving faster than ever. Decisions happen quickly, and many of us are building trust through screens instead of across a table. This dynamic is only getting harder.

What Corin almost missed

For two years, Corin thought her team was being disingenuous.

On that same BCG project, she was running customer workshops where the team guided ideas into the room. They shaped the conversation and expanded what the client could see.

At first, it didn't sit right with her. She wondered if they were planting ideas, and it felt too close to smoke and mirrors.

Later, she reframed it. What looked like planting was actually scaffolding, a way to show clients the art of the possible.

"It's not disingenuous," she said. "It's experienced guidance."

Sometimes people can't see the full range of options in front of them, and part of the job is to widen that view.

I've run into this tension, too. There are moments when I wonder if I'm over-extending and guiding too much. But staying fully neutral has its own cost. When I can see further than the room and say nothing, not even as a suggestion, I'm holding back something that might have mattered.

What this means for you

If you've ever made a strong case and felt like no one was hearing it, the instinct is to rework the pitch.

Sometimes that isn't where the gap is.

The question worth sitting with is whether there's a relationship that would move the dial faster than a better pitch would, and whether you've waited too long to bring that person in.

At the end of our conversation, Corin shared something small.

Each night, she and her kids say goodnight to the people in their lives. Friends, family, even animals. Then she asks, "Did we forget anyone?"

There's always another name.

The people who pause long enough to ask, "Did I forget anyone?" tend to find what they were missing.

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This an edition of the Full Picture Leadership series, where I talk with experienced leaders about the hidden dynamics behind high-stakes moments, so you can recognize them faster in your own work. You can connect with Corin Lines-Stary and me on LinkedIn.

If someone you know is making a strong case that nobody's hearing, send this their way.