Transcript
There’s a carnival song from Cologne, my hometown, by a band called Kasalla. The title translates roughly to “The Neighborhood That’s Missing.” The idea is beautiful: tear down the old city, and together we build the neighborhood we’ve always wanted. The greatest place on earth. We live exactly how we please. Love, imagination, and dynamite — come join in.
Tens of thousands of people sing this every year, arm in arm, beer in hand. And they mean it.
Here’s my question for today: why does that neighborhood never get built?
Not just the one in the song. Any of them. The new company system that replaces the broken legacy mess. The bold climate policy everyone claims to support. The political fresh start that voters keep demanding. The utopia always gets the applause. The construction site stays empty.
The answer, I think, reveals something uncomfortable about how consensus actually works. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it — in politics, in business, in your own projects.
So let’s dig in.
Vague ideas buy cheap consensus
Here’s the mechanism in one sentence: the vaguer an idea is, the more people believe they agree with it.
“Let’s tear it all down and start fresh” is not a plan. It’s a projection screen. Every person who cheers for it is cheering for their own private version of it. The developer imagines clean architecture. The manager imagines fewer meetings. The customer imagines lower prices. They’re all applauding the same sentence and none of them are applauding the same thing.
That’s why the enthusiasm at the beginning is real — and completely worthless. The consensus was never tested. It was never even a consensus. It was a coincidence of projections.
And the collapse comes on schedule, at the exact same moment: the moment someone asks, “Okay — so what do we do first, and who pays for it?”
Suddenly the room gets smaller. Opinions diverge. You discover that what you thought was common ground was actually a set of partial overlaps. The grand vision shrinks to a compromise, the compromise shrinks to small adjustments, and the small adjustments get implemented “step by step” — which is corporate language for “so slowly that nobody has to admit the vision is dead.”
Compare the final result to the original demand, and the distance is embarrassing.
A story from my own past
Let me make this concrete, because I lived it.
Years ago, I worked as a specialist on a corporate project that was going in circles. The mission was genuinely important: find and fix errors across multiple systems — errors that were costing the company millions.
But the project wasn’t moving. So I proposed the green field: keep what already works, rebuild the rest from scratch. Stop patching a structure that resists patching.
And here’s the interesting part: people liked it. Not just colleagues — stakeholders supported the idea. For a moment, it looked like the fresh start had momentum.
Then, gradually, the appetite shifted. Let’s not rebuild — let’s adjust. Small changes only. Step by step. And the project bought itself a few more years of going in circles.
Now, for a long time, I told this story as a story about consensus decay. Everyone loves the bold idea until it gets concrete. That’s true, and it’s part of what happened.
But there was a second layer I only understood later. The project leader had made the project his personal baby. He didn’t want it to end — because ending it meant handing it over. Think about what that means: the project going in circles wasn’t a failure of the project. It was the success condition for the person running it.
That’s a classic principal-agent problem. The company wanted the result. The agent wanted the project. And every fresh-start proposal was a threat, because a fresh start devalues the insider knowledge of the people who administer the old mess.
So here’s the first iconoclast takeaway: when a bold idea dies, don’t just ask “did we disagree?” Ask “who profits from the circling?” Vague consensus collapses on its own — but sometimes it gets a push from someone whose paycheck depends on the problem staying unsolved.
And to be fair to the other side of this: I’m not claiming my green-field approach was guaranteed to work. Big-bang rewrites fail all the time, and they often fail through the very same mechanism — because even “keep what works” sounds consensual until three departments fight about what “works” means. The point is not that fresh starts are right. The point is that the enthusiasm for them tells you nothing.
Climate politics: applause is free, the price tag isn’t
Now scale this up to politics.
Ask people if they support climate action, and the approval numbers are impressive. “It’s the right thing to do.” It’s the safest sentence in modern politics.
Then attach a price tag. Your car. Your heating system. Your parking spot. Watch the numbers fall.
I see people drive one kilometer to the store and then spend thirty minutes hunting for a parking space. They could have walked there and back in that time — twice. These are, statistically speaking, the same people who agree that “we need more climate protection.”
And on the other end of the spectrum, you get demands like: all combustion engines gone within two years, gas stations included. Ask how that gets replaced, on what timeline, at what cost, paid by whom — and the answer is a shrug wrapped in a slogan: “Well, climate protection costs money.”
That’s not a plan either. That’s the same projection screen, painted green.
The pattern is identical to my project: agreement to the abstract goal is nearly free, so it’s abundant. Agreement to a concrete cost is expensive, so it’s scarce. And any movement that confuses the first for the second is setting itself up for the exact disillusionment it will later blame on “the people not understanding.”
Vagueness as a business model
Which brings me to political parties — and here I want to push past the usual complaint.
Yes, parties tell voters what they supposedly want to hear. In a competitive electoral system, that’s almost tautological. Complaining about it is like complaining that companies advertise.
The sharper observation is this: for an opposition party, vagueness isn’t a weakness. It’s the product.
A party that never governs never has to concretize. “We’ll do it better” only becomes falsifiable in office. Until then, the projection screen stays intact, and every dissatisfied voter can project their own personal “better” onto it. That’s why protest movements are structurally advantaged in opposition and reliably disenchanted in government — across the political spectrum, left and right, everywhere. The voters bought an unconcretized promise. And the seller has every incentive to delay the concretization as long as possible.
Meanwhile, the governing party faces the opposite problem: everything it does is concrete, therefore everything it does disappoints someone’s projection. When votes drift away, you’ll hear that voters “didn’t understand the policy” — which may occasionally even be true, but as a communication strategy it’s an admission of failure. And the debates about banning inconvenient parties? I’ll just note that two readings exist simultaneously: a legitimate constitutional instrument with deliberately high hurdles, and a tool to remove competition. The fact that courts decide this — and not the competitors themselves — is the only thing keeping those two readings apart.
But here’s the deeper problem, and it’s a market-design problem: in business, vagueness gets punished fast. No paying customer, no company — the feedback loop takes months. Politics runs on four-year cycles, diffuse responsibility, and no clean attribution of cause and effect. The feedback loop is so slow and so noisy that the vague promise consistently outcompetes the concrete one.
Call it Gresham’s Law of promises: cheap, vague promises drive out expensive, concrete ones.
The startup version — and the marketing wisdom
The business world has its own dialect of this disease.
Startups that try to serve everyone, because a bigger target market sounds like a bigger opportunity. They end up serving no one, because they can’t be excellent for anyone. The marketing world compressed this into one line: whoever tries to reach everyone ends up reaching no one.
So the standard advice is “find your niche.” Correct — but incomplete. Because a niche can also be too small. Concretize too far, and there’s no customer left inside. Stay too vague, and every customer thinks you might be for them and none of them buys.
So the real skill isn’t “be specific.” It’s a balancing act: concretize early enough to test whether your consensus is real, but only as far as still leaves you enough supporters to matter. And honestly, it’s less a static point than a sequence — recruit broad, then concretize step by step, and deliberately lose people along the way. Losing supporters through concretization isn’t failure. It’s the vague consensus finally being converted into a real one.
“Both” — the smallest possible case study
Let me end with the smallest version of this pattern I know, because it fits in a single word.
I’ve asked people many times: what matters more to you — reach, or deep conversations? Followers and likes, or a handful of exchanges that actually change something?
Almost everyone agrees that deep conversations are important. Obviously. It’s the “climate protection is right and important” of personal branding.
But when I force the choice — reach or depth — the answer I keep getting is: “Both.”
Both. They won’t even commit in a hypothetical. And that one word is the entire episode in miniature. “Both” is the refusal of the trade-off — and the refusal of the trade-off is the vagueness. Whoever says “both” hasn’t prioritized, and whoever hasn’t prioritized hasn’t decided. A strategy that excludes nothing is not a strategy. Strategy is what you say no to.
And I have a suspicion about why reach wins in practice while everyone pledges allegiance to depth: reach is measurable. Depth isn’t. Followers are a number you can show, compare, report. A deep conversation leaves no counter behind. So people optimize what can be counted and profess what sounds good — the same free-applause, real-cost gap we’ve seen all episode. And the moment the metric becomes the goal, it stops measuring what you actually wanted. Goodhart’s Law, working exactly as advertised.
But let me apply the knife to my own side too, because that’s the job here. “Depth over reach” can become its own comfortable vagueness. It also gets easy applause — as long as you don’t concretize: depth with whom, about what, toward which outcome, at what cost? Someone with zero reach eventually holds their deep conversations only with themselves.
So the honest answer isn’t “depth beats reach.” It’s: as much reach as necessary to find the right few — and not one click more. That’s a sentence you can actually be held to. Which is exactly why nobody wants to say it.
The neighborhood needs a building authority
One last thing about that carnival song.
Even if the new neighborhood got built — exactly as dreamed — the story wouldn’t end in harmony. Sooner or later, someone disagrees with something. Power struggles emerge. Structures form. And the community that wanted to abolish rules discovers it needs someone to set them. Sociologists have a name for this: the iron law of oligarchy. Every movement that sets out to abolish hierarchy grows its own — because coordination doesn’t scale without it.
The song, honestly, ends at exactly the right moment: right before the new neighborhood needs a building authority.
Dynamite is the easy part. It always was.
So here’s what I’d ask you to do this week. The next time an idea makes you want to cheer — in a meeting, in a manifesto, in a feed — pause and ask one question: what does this concretely mean, what does it cost, and who pays?
If the answer survives that question, cheer twice as loud.
If it doesn’t — you just saved yourself a few years of going in circles.
Thanks for listening. This was Iconoclast Insights.
