Right, Wrong, and the River Between Us
For moments when “us and them” feels like truth
The river had always been there, steady and predictable, until the night it wasn’t. It rose overnight and took the bridge with it, leaving the village divided. By morning, people stood on opposite banks, staring at the water that moved too fast to cross. One village had become two overnight, split by roaring waters and everything they’d never settled before it rose.
The bridge had been old. Everyone knew that. For years, the elders warned it needed repairs, but there was never enough money, never the right time, always something more urgent. Now those same conversations became weapons.
“We told you this would happen,” one side shouted
“You are the ones who didn’t take it seriously,” they yelled back.
The truth was messier than either version, but messy truths don’t satisfy the body’s demand for a target when flooded with anger. Accusations flew easily, and blame moved faster than the current. It didn’t need to be accurate, it just needed somewhere to land.
“You people never fix anything.”
“You people expect everything to be fixed for you.”
Some argued more forcefully, their voices sharpening with each exchange, somehow confusing volume with effectiveness.
Others went quiet. They stopped showing up, pulled back,
and conserved what little energy remained.
Getting louder or going numb. Both felt like the only actions. The real divide was no longer the water but the belief forming on each side that:
Those people over there are not like us.
And once that belief took hold, every word across the river sounded like a threat.
Meanwhile, real problems mounted.
An elderly man on the north bank couldn’t get his medicine from the south bank. A woman missed her sister’s funeral because the road to the south bank was gone.Children whined when they couldn’t play with their friends. No one could tell them why. Only that it was “their” fault.
Addressing these problems felt like surrender, like admitting the other side mattered.
Surrender was the one thing nobody could afford right now, when being right was the only solid ground left.
In the middle of all this lived a woman who stood on her side of the river and felt it all, the fury, the righteousness, the exhaustion that follows both. She also had her reasons to be angry, good reasons, the kind that felt worthy and clean. She was just as tired, just as done.
But her anger came with a warning in the pit of her stomach, a feeling that fed on never being satisfied. Anger that didn’t want resolution. It wanted company, wanted to be proven right, wanted the other side to finally, visibly, suffer. The kind of feeling that burns bridges of her own making, drives decisions made in fury that solve nothing. The kind that put words in her mouth that she couldn’t take back. She had lived long enough to know that this binary way of categorizing complexity into right and wrong, good and bad, however satisfying it felt, was a lie.
She’d seen this cycle before.
Rage was a slow teacher.
It insisted on breaking things to make its point.
The only real question was how much damage it would take this time.
So she took a breath. Sometimes breathing works, sometimes anger just inhales with you. This time, it worked.
She let the wave of anger move through her without letting it move her. The way she’d learned to let grief pass. The way she’d learned that feelings could be true without their urgency being trustworthy. The way she had learned that beneath the noise, we all are usually reaching for the same things: to be accepted, respected, understood, valued. It’s how we go about it that divides us
And when she opened her eyes, she noticed the old bridge had left its bones behind. Stones, scattered and half-buried, smooth from decades of use. Without thinking too hard about it, she picked one up and carried it to the edge of the river, setting it down in the shallows where the current lost some of its arrogance.. The simple act interrupted the spiral of her thoughts. Something in her body settled while everyone else was armoring up for reasons that made perfect sense to them.
When questioned by those sharpening arrows, she did not explain herself. If she had, they might have argued about that too. Their stance made sense. So did hers.
She did not give speeches about healing or offer words that had lost their meaning. She focused on the one task in front of her: marking a place where crossing might one day be possible again.
She returned the next day with another stone.
And the next day, another.
Some days her back ached. Some days, the anger returned, and she wanted to throw the stones rather than place them. Some days the whole thing felt absurd. One woman and a handful of rocks against a river and two sides that decided, somewhere along the way, that being understood mattered less than being right.
She focused on the small, real thing within reach.
Each day, she picked up another piece of the bridge and carried it to the water.
It was a way to be angry and still move in the direction of something.
It gave her somewhere to put her hands. A way to move through the wreckage without becoming someone she would later have to forgive.
The stones went down one at a time. The two sides stayed on their sides. But in the shallows, where the water ran quietest, a new path was beginning.
Bringing the Reframe to Your Team
Right now most teams are feeling like change is hard, AI is coming, and they’re already behind. The gap between where they are and where they’re supposed to be feels insurmountable.
My job is to show you that’s a frame problem. Not a team problem.
The 9-Minute Reframe is a 90-minute experience that turns a room full of people playing it safe into a team that thinks boldly together. Part training, part immersive workshop using real challenges your team is actually sitting with. By the end, your team not only feels energized and aligned, they have a tool they can use anytime they want to move faster than the moment.
Sometimes I stay on and coach the whole team for a few months after, like at Shutterstock. Sometimes I just do the training and they use a moderator’s guide to do their own reframes after, like Google. And sometimes I work one-on-one with senior leaders as a reframe ninja in their corner like HSBC. I ask questions that shift perspectives, and the aha moments that come create real leaps and powerful momentum forward.