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# Your Strategy Isn't a Nail. Put the Hammer Down.
- URL: https://signal-advisory.com.au/law-of-the-instrument/
- Published: 2026-09-10T23:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-28T12:21:10.000Z
- Description: Bring the same problem to five advisers and you get five diagnoses. The law of the instrument, why it gets more dangerous with seniority, and three habits to catch the hammer before it swings.
- Author: Ingrid Schnell
- Tags: Decision making, Strategy, Ethics, #Import 2026-09-28 21:23

Bring the same problem to five advisers and you'll get five diagnoses. The ERP vendor sees a system problem. The change consultancy sees a culture problem. The data team sees a data problem. The restructuring firm sees too many layers. And these days, just about everyone sees an AI problem.

None of them are lying. They're just holding a hammer.

The idea has a name: the law of the instrument. In 1964 the philosopher Abraham Kaplan put it this way: "Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." Two years later the psychologist Abraham Maslow gave us the version everyone quotes: "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

It sounds like a joke about consultants. It's actually a warning about every one of us, and it gets more dangerous the more senior you are.

Here's why. Leaders get promoted for being very good with a particular tool. The CFO who fixed the business with cost discipline. The CEO who grew by acquisition. The CIO who delivered the big platform on time. Success turns a tool into an identity, and then into a reflex. When the next problem shows up, the reflex answers before anyone has looked properly at what the problem is.

Organisations do it too. Once you've paid for a platform, every question becomes a question for the platform. Once you've built a transformation office, everything becomes a transformation program. Budgets, KPIs and org charts all quietly reward using the tool you already own.

I'll own my share. Architects are as guilty as anyone. Give us a whiteboard and suddenly everything needs a framework, a capability model and a target state. Sometimes what the problem really needs is two people who don't trust each other sitting down for a coffee.

The cost isn't just a wasted project. It's what the wrong diagnosis does to people. If you treat a trust problem as a process problem, you add controls, and the people who were already worried now feel watched. If you treat a capability gap as a performance issue, someone's career takes the hit for a system that set them up to fail. The tool you pick decides who gets blamed. That's why this is an ethical question, not just a methodology one.

So how do you catch the hammer before it swings? Three habits.

Diagnose before you prescribe. Get agreement on where you actually stand, the risks, the dependencies and the real constraints, before anyone mentions a solution. If the fix was named in the first ten minutes, be suspicious.

Ask who benefits from the diagnosis. When an adviser, vendor or internal team frames a problem, ask what they'd be selling if they were right. It isn't cynical. It's basic hygiene. And it applies to your own favourite answer too.

Keep more than one tool on the table. For any major decision, ask for at least two genuinely different framings, and what each one would have you build. Then decide what capability you actually need, and in what order, rather than defaulting to what's already in the shed.

A quick test for your next leadership meeting: look at the last three big problems you tackled. Did they all get roughly the same solution? If so, it's worth asking whether the problems were really that alike, or whether you were.

Two questions I'd love your take on:

- *What's the hammer in your organisation, the answer that gets reached for no matter what the question is?*
- *When did someone last change your mind by framing a problem in a way you hadn't considered?*

I help leadership teams get a clear, shared picture of where they stand before choosing a direction, so the tool fits the problem rather than the other way round.

#LawOfTheInstrument #DecisionMaking #Leadership #Strategy #SystemsThinking #EnterpriseArchitecture #BusinessEthics #Governance