My wife Liz and I disagreed about our daughter Olivia's future. She had one view. I had another. Both positions were reasonable — grounded in genuine care, backed by logic, and completely incompatible with each other.
This is the particular frustration of a high-stakes disagreement: when both parties are right, conventional argument doesn't work. You can't reason your way to a winner. You can only entrench.
We were stuck in Option A versus Option B — and both of us knew, without saying it, that the only honest outcome of that framework was a stalemate where someone wins and someone resents the result.
Step One: Reestablish Common Ground
Before you can find a creative solution, you have to reconnect with what you're actually both trying to achieve. In our case, that was easy to say and harder to feel in the moment: we both loved Olivia, we both wanted what was best for her, and we both wanted to make this decision together rather than in opposition to each other.
That shift — from adversaries with incompatible positions to collaborators with a shared goal — changes the nature of the conversation entirely. You're no longer trying to win. You're trying to find something.
Most conflict, underneath the surface, is about care. Two people who didn't care about the outcome wouldn't be arguing about it. When you can access the care underneath the conflict, the energy of the conversation changes.
Step Two: Find Option C
There is always an Option C. If you can't find it, you're simply not looking hard enough.
Option C isn't a compromise — a halfway point between two positions that leaves both parties vaguely dissatisfied. It's something genuinely different. A third path that neither person had conceived before the conversation opened up.
Finding it requires setting aside the original positions long enough to ask a different question: not "which of us is right?" but "what haven't we considered yet?"
In our case, we found it. I won't go into the details — it belongs to Olivia more than to this essay — but it surprised both of us. Neither of us had arrived at it alone.
The Business Application
This principle applies with particular force in negotiation. Negotiations most often stall on price — a single variable where movement in one direction means loss in the other. But price is rarely the only lever.
Payment terms. Delivery schedules. Exclusivity arrangements. Customer introductions. Referral agreements. Scope adjustments. Each of these represents a way to create value without the zero-sum mathematics of pure price negotiation.
The negotiators who find Option C consistently are those who stay curious when others are digging in. They ask more questions than they make statements. They treat impasse as information — a signal that the current frame needs expanding, not that the conversation is over.
There is always an Option C. Your only job is to look for it.