Yes, no, and the ratio.

The fastest cognitive diagnostic I know — and what Daniel Kahneman almost noticed.

By John Furey·Founder, MindTime

Here is an experiment you can run, free, in any meeting you are about to be in.

Listen for two specific moves. The first is the move toward yes — let’s do it, I love that, we should pursue this, I’m in. The second is the move toward no — I’m not sure, what about, have we considered, the last time we tried. Count them roughly. You do not need a tally sheet. A rough sense of the ratio after ten minutes is enough.

Now, before the meeting ends, ask yourself one question. Is this the ratio I want for the work we are doing right now?

Most leaders, the first time they do this, are surprised. Not by the number — they can usually guess the number in advance — but by how easy it is to hear once they are listening for it. The yeses and nos were always there. They had become invisible the way a clock becomes invisible: present, ignored, doing structural work nobody was attending to.

The Yes/No ratio is the fastest cognitive diagnostic I know for a leadership team. It takes ten minutes. It requires no instrument. It tells you something true.

What you are actually counting.

A move toward yes is anything that adds momentum toward action. I’d back that. We should fund it. Let’s get this on the agenda. Yes, and what if we also…

A move toward no is anything that adds friction. Have we tested this? The last cohort told us. I want to see the evidence. Are we sure the timeline holds?

A few things look like one of these but are something else, and they should not go in the count.

That’s interesting is not a yes. It is a holding move while the speaker decides what they actually think.

What do you think is not a no. It is a deflection — sometimes thoughtful, sometimes self-protective, but not the same as a substantive challenge.

I agree with what was just said is a yes if it adds momentum, but it is filler if it just acknowledges the previous speaker without committing the speaker themselves to anything. Most agreements in most meetings are filler. You will hear this once you are counting.

The signal you want is the directional move — forward toward action, or back toward validation. Everything else is the noise around it.

What the count reveals.

A team’s ratio, sustained over weeks, is not a personality. It is a structural condition.

A team that runs at seven yeses to one no — and many of the foundation teams I have worked with do — is not an aligned team. It is a team that has lost the use of half its instrument. The no-leaning voices in the room have learned that their contributions cost more than they return, and they have stopped offering them. The team is not arguing because the argument is no longer a permitted move. What looks like consensus is the agreement of one orientation talking to itself.

A team that runs at one yes to seven nos — less common, but I have seen it in foundations that came out of academic or research traditions — has the inverse problem. Possibility cannot get a hearing. Every forward move becomes a question, every question becomes a request for more evidence, and the strategy never quite ships. The team is very thoughtful and very slow.

The healthy team has a working ratio that moves with the work. In early divergence, when the team is generating possibility, the ratio tilts toward yes — properly so. In late convergence, when the team is committing real resources to a decision that will be hard to reverse, the ratio tilts toward no — properly so. The pathology is not the ratio. The pathology is when the ratio gets stuck at one tilt regardless of what the work needs, and the stuckness becomes invisible to the people inside it.

This is what makes the count useful. You are not looking for the right number. You are looking for whether the number is responsive — whether your team is using both halves of its mind, and switching between them when the work asks for it.

Where Kahneman gets you, and where he stops.

If you have read Thinking, Fast and Slow — and most senior leaders have, at least in summary — you will recognise something familiar in what I have just described.

Kahneman’s contribution was to make a generation of leaders aware that the mind operates in two modes. System 1 is fast, intuitive, pattern-matching, evolutionarily ancient. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and effortful, the part that catches System 1’s mistakes when it is paying attention. Most cognitive errors, Kahneman argued, come from System 1 running unchecked while System 2 is asleep at the wheel.

This is right, and it has changed how a lot of people think about decisions. It is also, I have come to believe, working with one half of a larger picture.

Kahneman’s two systems describe how a mind processes — how fast, with how much effort, with how much access to deliberation. They do not describe where the mind is pointed. And in a team, the second question is at least as important as the first.

The yes-leaning move is not faster than the no-leaning move. Either can be quick or slow, intuitive or deliberate. A senior leader can produce a snap no that draws on twenty years of pattern recognition; the same leader can produce a slow, careful yes after weighing every consideration. The speed is not the diagnostic. What the move is pointing at is.

The yes-leaning move points forward. It reaches toward the not-yet, the possibility, the partnership that has not yet been struck, the programme that has not yet been designed. It is the temporal orientation that scans the future for what could be true.

The no-leaning move points backward. It reaches toward the already-happened, the previous attempt, the evidence we already have, the precedent. It is the temporal orientation that scans the past for what is true.

Kahneman gave us fast and slow. The picture underneath is forward and back.

When you count a team’s yeses and nos, you are watching, in real time, where the centre of gravity of that team’s attention is located in time. The ratio is the team’s temporal posture made audible.

I will write more about this temporal architecture in the coming weeks. For now I will say only this: once you have started counting yeses and nos, you have started, without quite meaning to, watching the second picture appear.

What to do tomorrow morning.

If you take only one thing from this article, take this. The Yes/No ratio is something you can listen for. You can listen for it in the next meeting you walk into. It does not require a workshop, a consultant, or a permission slip.

If you find your team is yes-tilted — and most mission-driven teams are — try one thing. Before any decision that will be hard to reverse, ask the room a specific question: what would the no-leaning voice in this room say if we made room for it? The phrasing matters. Does anyone disagree almost always returns nothing, because dissent is socially costly. What would the no-leaning voice say asks the room to populate the missing half of its own instrument, and that is a different request.

If you find your team is no-tilted, ask the inverse. What would the yes-leaning voice in this room say if we gave it air? The same logic applies in reverse. You are not asking for cheerleading. You are asking the suppressed orientation to come into the conversation.

If you find your ratio is roughly balanced and moves with the work — congratulations. You are running a rare team. You will still want to know how you are doing it, because the conditions that produce it are fragile and worth protecting.

What this leaves us with.

Counting the yeses and nos in your meetings is the easy half of what I want to teach you in this series. It is the half that requires no framework, no language, no instrument beyond a leader’s own attention.

The harder half — the one I will write about next week — is what happens when you start to notice that the conversations in your strategy meeting and the conversations in your operations meeting are not just about different things. They are happening at different altitudes. The same five people, in the same room, are operating in two completely different cognitive modes, and the gap between them explains more about how decisions actually get made in your organisation than any organisational chart will.

That dynamic is harder to see than yes and no. It is also more consequential.

For now: count. Tomorrow morning. Ten minutes. See what the ratio tells you.