The Groin Strain Fallacy

A facilitation error about development, effort, and the middle

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED that come late January, a particular mood sets in. And not just the slow countdown to payday.

The big resets have quietly failed. Not in any dramatic way. Nothing has collapsed. But the sense that this term, this return, this new structure was going to fix things has ebbed away.

The sessions aren’t disasters.
They’re not magical either.
They’re just… fine.

And for many facilitators, this is the moment when an ache sets in. Not because the work is going badly, but because it no longer feels like development. The strain that was meant to signal progress has faded into soreness, or into caution. We pull back. We lower ambition. We tell ourselves we’re regrouping.

What we’re often responding to here is not failure, but a mistaken expectation about what development is supposed to feel like.

I want to call this error The Groin Strain Fallacy.

Two kinds of session we remember

I think most of us tend to carry two kinds of workshop very clearly in memory.

The first are the catastrophes.
The session that went off the rails. The activity that generated tumbleweed, hostility, or refusal. The discussion that turned sharp and never recovered. These moments burn themselves in. The causes are often obvious in hindsight. I misjudged the group. I ignored a warning sign. I rushed a transition. We tell ourselves, with some confidence, I won’t do that again.

The second are the magical sessions.
The ones where everything aligned. Where a reluctant participant suddenly spoke. Where the group created something none of us could have predicted. Where time slipped and people left changed. These sessions glow in memory, but they are strangely unhelpful. Too many invisible factors were in play. Try to recreate them and they evaporate.

Between these two poles sits the overwhelming majority of our work.

• Stuff that mostly worked.

• Times when some things landed and others didn’t.

• Sessions where the energy dipped and recovered.

• Days where nothing went wrong, but nothing quite lifted either.

And these are the bits we rarely look at properly.

The error in thinking

The Groin Strain Fallacy is the assumption that development lives in bridging the extremes.

That disasters are where we learn what not to do and great successes are where we prove what we are capable of. The ordinary sessions in between are largely uninformative. They are what happens while we are planning better things.

Hans Rosling describes what he calls the gap instinct: our tendency to divide the world into opposing categories and imagine a wide gulf between them. Rich and poor. Developed and undeveloped. Success and failure.¹

The problem with the gap instinct is not just that it misrepresents reality. It produces helplessness. When we see only extremes, movement feels impossible. Progress appears to require a leap.

Facilitators often reproduce the same distortion in how we think about our own practice.

The cost of ignoring the middle

If development is assumed to live at the extremes, the middle of practice quietly drops out of view.

We finish the session. It was fine. There’s nothing to hold onto, no clear lesson, so it fades. Next week, another session. Also fine. Also fading.

Each one asks something slightly different, so we improvise, and move on.

What remains are the extremes.

Clear failures become warning signs. Rare successes become templates. Development shrinks to steering away from the former and reaching for the latter.

Risk narrows, because avoiding failure becomes more important than extending capacity. Ambition becomes episodic - occasional leaps rather than sustained preparation. Ordinary, competent sessions are quietly discounted because they didn’t feel like progress.

Most damagingly, learning becomes reactive. We attend to what went wrong there or right then, rather than to what is repeatedly being asked of our practice as a whole.

The irony is that the middle is where we spend most of our time.

Where learning actually comes from

The ordinary session teaches differently. Not the blunt lesson of disaster, not the unreproducible magic of everything aligning. Something quieter.

The moments that matter are small and unremarkable.

• The question you answered instead of opening.

• The transition you rushed.

• The activity that worked better than expected.

• The participant whose attention drifted, then returned.

None of these announce themselves. None feel like development at the time. But they recur. They can be noticed. They can be adjusted.

This is where generalisable knowledge forms - not in the post-mortem of a crisis, but in the slight adjustments available to us most weeks, if we knew where to look.

From one-offs to practice

Rosling’s corrective to the gap instinct is not to search for better examples, but to change where we look. To attend to the majority.

For facilitators, the majority is not a type of session. It is the conditions under which we work most of the time. The repeated negotiations with energy, attention, timing. The decisions that don’t announce themselves as decisions.

When reflection stays at the level of one-off events, each situation appears irreducibly unique. Learning has nowhere to settle, hence the attraction of the extremes.

Conceptualising practice changes this - not by simplifying the work, but by giving learning a stable place to accumulate that isn’t tied to the specifics of a single session.

Seen this way, most facilitation can be understood through a small number of recurring demands. Not techniques, not styles, but capacities exercised in almost every session.

Managing group dynamics and expectations
How authority, boundaries, and uncertainty are held so participants know what kind of engagement is being invited.

Making decisions in real time
How plans meet reality—adapting to circumstances as they arise, and helping groups move toward decision and completion when they’re ready.

Working beyond the surface
How curiosity is sustained beyond first responses, habitual positions, or performative answers.

Creating conditions for creativity
How play, permission, and productive uncertainty are held so others can generate freely rather than cautiously.

These concepts are deliberately broad. Their purpose is not to explain any single session, but to make visible what your practice is doing most of the time.

What this looks like in practice

Imagine two sessions a week apart.

In one, a discussion stalls because participants keep offering safe, predictable answers. You respond by adding another stimulus, hoping to shake something loose. No bites.

In the other, a practical task runs long. Energy drops. You push on anyway, reluctant to interrupt something that might be about to work. It doesn’t.

On the surface, these are different problems. One looks like a lack of depth. The other looks like a timing issue.

But viewed at the level of practice, they point to the same underlying question: how are decisions being made about when to intervene, and on what basis? This is the capacity I’ve called making decisions in real time - and now it has a name, it can be watched for.

Not solved. Watched for. Across next week’s session and the one after that. The question stops being “what went wrong there” and becomes “what is this demand asking of me, repeatedly?”

That’s what stops it fading. Not a fix, but a thread to follow.

This is the shift the Groin Strain Fallacy obscures.

Always an error?

No.

There are times when reflecting on extremes is useful. A genuine disaster may require careful examination. A great success may remind us what is possible.

The problem arises when extremes become the primary reference point for development.

Most of our work is neither heroic nor catastrophic. It is ordinary, contingent, responsive, and slightly unfinished.

Which is to say: it is exactly where learning lives.

Related work
In April, I’m running a small weekend of in-person practitioner workshops in Liverpool that work directly with the kinds of questions this piece raises - particularly how learning accumulates in the middle of practice rather than at the extremes.

Details here:
https://www.brendonburns.org/liverpool-workshops-april-2026/

To cite this article:

Burns, B (2026) The Groin Strain Fallacy. The Philosophical Theatre Facilitator: www.philosophicaltheatrefacilitator.substack.com

© Brendon Burns 2026

Sources:

Rosling, H., Rosling, O. and Rosling Rönnlund, A., 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books.

1. Hans Rosling’s work is about far more than workshops. Trained as an epidemiologist, he spent much of his career studying global health and development, particularly patterns of poverty, education, and population change. A central part of his contribution was showing how development thinking had become trapped in what he called a dramatic instinct: a preference for extremes, crises, and decline that obscures the slower, less visible progress most people actually experience. Factfulness is a clear and accessible account of this work, and well worth reading (as you can tell I’m a big fan).