Marvel Entertainment was emerging from bankruptcy in the late 1990’s and had settled into a low-risk survival strategy because it was starved for cash. By licensing its characters to big studios—Spider-Man to Sony, X-Men to 20th Century Fox, The Hulk to Universal—Marvel could collect a tiny profit and suspend its chances for anything better or worse. Marvel earned less than 5% of box-office returns, while the studios kept the billions these characters generated.
The safe path felt like the only path, but drift dressed as strategy can be deceiving.
When the relatively unknown industry insider David Maisel arrived in 2003 to make the case that Marvel should finance and produce its own films, the easier road already had its defenders. The board was on the verge of licensing away yet more characters, and Maisel had to block deals that would have sent Captain America to Warner Bros and Thor to Sony—the very pieces he needed to build a connected universe.
Whether they realized it or not, Marvel and Maisel were in the midst of a binary thinking design process, with two divergent paths to consider. One was their current trajectory, living off the crumbs from licensing its characters. The other was to leverage the only thing it did have, its characters, in order to build something astonishing.
Binary thinking gives the mind what it craves in uncertain moments: simplicity and a sense of control. By reducing complex realities into clean categories—left or right, risky or safe, us or them—it minimizes the mental effort required to interpret the situation. Ambiguity fades, judgment feels easier, and the world can feel more manageable.
What finally forced a decision was a financing structure that made the tradeoff undeniable. In 2005, Marvel secured a seven-year, $525 million non-recourse credit facility from Merrill Lynch, with the theatrical film rights to 10 characters pledged as collateral: Captain America, Nick Fury, and the Avengers among them. If successful, Marvel would own its future. If it failed, the bank would take the rights to every one of those properties. There was no hedge left—no way to license and keep. There was no comfortable middle.
Iron Man grossed over $500 million in 2008; Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion the next year.
Not So Marvelous
I once spent the better part of a year working with a president and his executive leadership team on scenario planning for two divergent paths. The organization was well established and well resourced, but had been in slow decline for 25 years. It was deficit spending year after year because leadership couldn’t make the tough calls about who they were and where they were headed. Although the annual budget deficit was relatively minor, the board wanted to turn toward growth and expansion. The question was straightforward: What do we want to accomplish, and what will we start or stop to get there?
In an effort to stimulate thinking and fast-track the inevitable, helpful conflict, I designed two extremes. Both would result in the same growth and expansion, but they took radically different paths to get there.
One option went all-in on narrowing the focus to three areas of growth, tying all revenue streams to those three areas, and eliminating services that had been added over time but could no longer be justified. The cost of this path would require reducing the headcount by nearly half and eliminating the ability to work remotely, a perk the organization had recently established. It would be painful, but bold.
The other option went all-in on services and support. Rather than make risky bets on what might work (even though these bets paid off in the past) this path doubled down on what is currently working, with the idea that delivering exceptional value would spur more growth over time. The cost of this path would require reducing most of the new development areas and reducing headcount by 15%. It would be much less painful and much more conservative.
Both options achieved balanced budgets and growth. The extremes were excruciating for the executive team and the board because they forced conversations around binary options. Some in the room let out audible gasps at what was being proposed, while others winked and winced, depending on the path they preferred or opposed. Why choose one or the other when it was easier to pick and choose from both paths and come up with a middle way?
Compromise is what got them here. And because of this continual decline, every five to 10 years, they’d been forced to reconcile what feels good to the majority with what would be worth pursuing for the future.
For some organizations, it’s possible to go for years without clear conviction and to sit comfortably in the middle. This ends up looking like planning cycles where a little bit of the focus is on growth, and a little bit of focus is on stability, to preserve as much of the status quo as possible. The result is drift, not balance.
Binary thinking interrupts drift. It removes the illusion that everything can be preserved. The extremes force clarity. They reveal the true cost of each path. They expose what leaders are willing and unwilling to sacrifice. They surface which values are real.
The Antagonist appears in the tension between the options because it entices leaders to straddle the extremes, to find a way that feels less severe and safer.
If you want to confront the future, you sometimes have to exaggerate the choices until the tradeoffs become undeniable. Don’t let comfort confound conviction.
Put This Antagonist to Work
In my work with principals and their teams to overcome the pull of the comfortable middle, especially where drift has been mistaken for balance, three things come to mind for defeating this Antagonist.
Design the extremes. For example, don’t ask “what should we do?” Ask “what would all-in on growth cost us, and what would all-in on stability cost us?” The tradeoffs only become undeniable when you refuse to let people blend them.
Name what you’re willing to put on the line in order to succeed. The middle survives because its costs stay abstract. Ask: What are we betting when we choose this path, and what specifically do we lose if we’re wrong? If no one can answer, you’re just deferring.
Watch what happens to the person who disrupts the drift. Whatever your stated appetite for conviction, and what happens to the person who forced the hard choice, is the signal everyone else reads. If the person who interrupted the drift is celebrated, you have an organization that can commit. If they’re sidelined, you’ve taught everyone else that opposing viewpoints are unnecessary.
The danger of binary thinking is that people mistake the exercise for the answer. The value of binary thinking is that it reveals the real potential.
The Antagonist is the comfortable middle that prevents the right conflict from ever surfacing.
The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?
Does this Content Resonate?
Every organization has an Antagonist. Most leaders can’t name theirs.
After serving as a founder, facilitator, CEO, and chief of staff over the past 30 years, I know it’s not due to a lack of intelligence. It’s due to a lack of visibility.
So I built a short assessment to help you find it. In eight questions and less than five minutes, you’ll get a sense of where the friction in your organization is coming from. After that, if you like, we can jump on a free 30-minute call to discuss more.
Didnt know about the Marvel dilemma, that was a heck of a bet!