This is a real example pulled from my experience as a local elected official in North Texas.
The majority of your neighbors want a new library. The majority of city council members privately support the idea. And yet it doesn’t happen.
Why?
Because the council members aren’t voting on a library. They’re voting against a future attack ad.
Several have their eyes on higher office. They know a small, coordinated opposition will frame any “yes” vote as fiscal recklessness—never mind that the community would fund it, never mind that most residents want it. So the council won’t even put it on the ballot. The voters never get to decide.
This is the invisible architecture of failure. The stated problem (Should we build a library?) sits on top of forces no one names: a minority that can impose reputational cost, candidates’ career calculations, and risk management presented as principle. And once that dynamic becomes “what everyone knows,” it starts to govern the room.
Steven Pinker’s book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, gave me language for what I’ve watched happen across 30 years in council chambers and boardrooms. He calls it common knowledge—the condition that makes coordination possible, and the condition that allows a small group to trap decision-makers by controlling what “everyone believes.”
Pinker references a famous anecdote that serves as an expression of the problem of infinite regress: the earth rests on the back of a giant turtle. When asked what the turtle stands on, the answer is: “It’s turtles all the way down.”
Most leadership failures happen because we obsess over the top turtle: the item on the agenda, the development project, the budget line, the corporate pivot.
But the top turtle doesn’t float.
It’s supported by a stack of unseen turtles that leaders avoid because they’re political, indirect, and costly to name out loud.
The base and the activist trap
Vocal bases are fluent in common knowledge. They don’t need to persuade a majority. They need to create perceived inevitability.
They do it by making their view the view everyone expects everyone else to hold. Once that expectation hardens, leaders stop managing the underlying decision and start managing exposure.
Even when broad majorities quietly favor a sensible path, leaders often defer to the most coordinated faction—because the penalty for crossing it is clear, immediate, and personal.
Uncovering the real constraint
To make progress, stop managing the top turtle. Audit the stack.
From experience, I look for three layers that typically dictate outcomes:
The historical turtle: What happened ten or twenty years ago that makes people distrust this category of move today?
The incentive turtle: Who loses status, leverage, relevance, or identity if the problem actually gets solved?
The coordination turtle: Is the opposition truly broad, or simply coordinated enough to look inevitable?
The bottom line
Real leadership is the willingness to name the turtles.
When you bring the unseen into the light, the common-knowledge trap weakens. You discover the “ground” wasn’t solid. It was a stack of incentives and expectations waiting for someone to build a better foundation.
Don’t simply look at the podium. Look at the stack.
If you’re stuck on a decision that should be easy but isn’t, send me the one-paragraph situation. I’ll identify the turtle you’re actually standing on.