What would have to be true?

The move sounds small and changes everything. Instead of advocates defending positions, the room maps conditions: what would have to be true about customers, competitors, capabilities and economics for option A to be the best choice? For option B? Then identify the pivotal conditions you are least confident in, and test those, and only those. Nobody has to be wrong in the meeting; the world gets to decide.

Why it works

Three mechanisms. It depersonalises the debate: you argue about conditions, not opinions, so seniority stops deciding strategy. It converts strategy into testable assumptions, which is the only form in which a strategy can be improved by evidence. And it surfaces the crux: the one condition that, if false, kills the option, Rumelt’s pivotal challenge found by Martin's route. The condition you are least confident in and cannot cheaply test is where the strategy is genuinely at risk, and most rooms never find it because advocacy hides it.

The epistemology underneath

The method embodies Strategy as Logic Not Analysis: in the part of the world that the Aristotle Distinction calls "can be otherwise", you cannot prove a strategy in advance, however much analysis you commission. You can only reason to the most plausible bet and monitor its load-bearing assumptions. WWHTBT is that monitoring made explicit. The canonical application is the Olay case study: would women pay $18.99 at mass retail? A testable condition, tested, before the company bet the brand.

How this connects to OKRs

This is the reasoning our methodology runs at goal altitude. It is the logic inside OKRs as bets and Key Result narratives: every quarterly bet carries named assumptions, and confidence levels grade them weekly as evidence arrives. When a team cannot say what would have to be true for their OKR to be achievable, they have not planned a quarter, they have scheduled a hope.