FUEL
Stake
The reason somebody would want to move at all. Not your reason. His reason. And those aren’t the same.
It is usually already there. You don’t make it, you find it.
01
When something doesn’t work, we add something.
A plan that doesn’t land gets a second presentation. A hesitant client gets more figures. A team that isn’t moving gets another session.
Almost nobody looks at what is missing.
02
Everyone knows how to make a fire.
Fuel, oxygen and heat. If one is missing, there is no fire. Everyone learns this at primary school and nobody has ever struggled with it.
Decisions are no different. A decision doesn’t come from information, but from three conditions being present at once.
OXYGEN
Trust
Why won’t a fire burn without oxygen? Because it gets no room. It suffocates. Exactly the same happens with people.
You can’t ask for it. You can only design it.
HEAT
Urgency
Why does a campfire sometimes refuse to catch for hours? Because the temperature is too low. Simply nothing happens.
Not the same as pressure. More on that shortly.
Stake isn’t need
That difference sounds small. It is the difference between a sales conversation and a real one.
Need
Something somebody wants to have. Look for that and you end up at products.
"He needs solar panels."
Stake
Something that is at stake for him. Look for that and you end up at his life.
"He wants this business to still be his in five years."
With the first you can sell something. With the second you can help somebody.
03
And still nothing happens.
The stake is there. The trust is there. The urgency is there. And still nothing moves.
There isn’t a fourth condition missing. What is missing is a first movement. That is the spark.
Not the biggest step. Not the most expensive step. Not the hardest step. Fire starts small — always. Start big and you blow it out.
The first step is the first meeting.
That is the spark. Nothing more than that.
Most salespeople send a proposal as step one. That isn’t a spark.
Why proposals sit there
A proposal isn’t a first step. It is a go/no-go moment.
And if one of the three is missing, the answer is always no-go.
That is why proposals don’t get signed. Not because the amount is too high or the offer is poor, but because that step isn’t on the table yet. The other person isn’t ready to decide.
And if you then apply pressure, the other end goes quiet. That isn’t unwillingness. That is somebody who can’t say yes.
What most people do
Step 1. The proposal.
One conversation, one proposal, one moment where everything has to land. All three conditions have to be right at once, without anybody having checked them.
Then: silence. And then another phone call.
What the Fire Path does
Step 1. Look. What is actually happening here? What does this business do?
Step 2. The baseline. Mapping what is there and what is missing.
Those are separate meetings. You never do everything in one conversation — you design a process with steps.
You have to gather all the elements before you can make fire. Strike a match over an empty hearth and all you are holding is a burning match.
04
You don’t ask for trust. You design it.
A tidy website, a neat proposal, a certificate on the wall. All of it helps a little. But it isn’t where trust comes from.
Trust comes when four questions have been answered. Usually unconsciously, and always in this order.
Designing starts with yourself, incidentally. Here are the three rules I used to do it — respect, commitment and honesty, and why they aren’t tricks.
Above all, remember this
Designing trust is an act, not a promise.
A promise is uncertainty: you never know whether it will work. An act is certainty, because it has already happened.
Most conversations stall on question four. Somebody believes you, he just doesn’t believe himself. More evidence for question one helps not at all.
Something that isn’t about work
When my son was small, he used to call out from his room in the evenings.
Everyone knows this. And everyone gets the same advice.
"Don’t go in. He has to learn to sleep."
I heard something else.
Others heard: he doesn’t want to sleep.
I thought: he is calling me.
And if my son learns that his father doesn’t come when he calls — what is he actually learning?
Maybe he learns to sleep.
But maybe he also learns that it is better not to ask the people you love for help.
They never respond anyway.
That is not something I ever wanted to teach him.
So I went. Not so he would get his way, but because there was one thing he always had to be able to count on.
Not usually. Not when convenient. Always.
If you really need me,
I come.
That is the only thing a child needs to know in order to dare to call out. And it is exactly what a person needs in order to dare to say yes.
A gift is given once.
An investment you make again and again.
Every time I walked to my son’s room, I made a small investment. He only saw the interest years later.
This isn’t about fatherhood. Or perhaps it is — and then also about leadership, about running a business, and about love. Because the design rule is exactly the same in all four.
Design flaw #3
We teach people how to project trustworthiness.
Far more important is learning to behave so that trust becomes unavoidable.
Don’t do what projects trust. Do what builds it.
05
Agreement is not action.
"Next year." "After the holidays." "When things calm down." "Let’s wait and see."
Those people weren’t against it. They were convinced. They simply had no reason at all to start today.
"You’re right" is not a decision.
06
It isn’t who he is.
The man with four faces
Look at this man. You know him.
At homeHe decides everything. Where they go on holiday, what gets eaten, which car they buy.
At the bankThe same man sits with his hands in his lap, nodding at everything the account manager says.
At his accountantSharp, critical, businesslike. He keeps asking until he understands.
At the tax inspectorSuddenly very careful. Every word counts and he knows it.
Four conversations. One person.
Ask him tomorrow who he is, and he’ll say without hesitating that he is a doer. Someone who makes decisions. That is also true.
Just not at the bank.
Why not at the bank?
Because there he needs something he has no control over. He doesn’t decide whether he gets the loan. Somebody else does.
So he adapts before he even sits down. He will have to accept somebody else’s decision, and that changes his behaviour.
He could go dominant
Demand that the bank grant the loan. Bang the table, threaten to go elsewhere.
It doesn’t happen.
He could be assertive
Ask the right questions, supply the figures neatly, hold the conversation patiently.
He still isn’t the one deciding.
That is how a situation changes somebody’s behaviour. Not his character — his position. And it happens in every conversation, including yours.
Why this decides everything
The decision your client makes depends on the situation he is judging it from.
Not on who he is.
That is why I don’t believe in mindset. Not because people can’t change, but because at the table, who somebody is gets you nowhere. What helps is the position he is in right now.
And there is one more thing, perhaps the most confronting part of this book. You are in a position too. At the bank you might be submissive. With your own team, dominant. With your partner, assertive. Or exactly the other way round.
Submissive
"What could go wrong here?"
This one is misread most often, because a submissive position often talks a lot. Not because the person likes talking, but because he is looking for safety.
Every new sentence is an attempt to find one more piece of certainty. One more confirmation. One more detail.
needsAn overview
Assertive
"How do I make this a good decision?"
He is after information, balance, and an outcome everybody can work with. He asks questions because he wants to know, not to cover himself.
This is the ideal counterpart. And exactly the position almost every negotiation training assumes. That is the problem: those methods are written for the people it was already going well with.
needsInformation and room
Dominant
"What does this get me?"
If the answer isn’t entirely positive, he checks out. This is the man who interrupts you within thirty seconds. Get to the point, what does it cost?
I used to think he was rude. Now I know he is testing. He wants to know whether you are telling him the whole story. The moment he notices you left something out, the conversation is over — and he will never tell you why.
needsThe downside first
Something else for a moment
Be honest. When did you last sit like that?
At the garage
When you didn’t dare ask why that repair had to cost so much.
At the solicitor
While you nodded at a sentence you hadn’t understood.
At the doctor
When you said "yes, clear" and realised outside that you didn’t know.
You didn’t become a different person at that moment.
You were just in a different position.
And what did you need? Not more explanation. Somebody who said: this is what I would do, and this is why.
How I found out
I was pouring water on somebody who was drowning.
I remember hundreds of conversations from my years in finance. Some clients laid out their entire life on the table. Their marriage, their children, their worries, their business. I listened for an hour, and after that hour I knew exactly what the problem was.
The client still didn’t.
I heard somebody talking a lot, concluded he was short of information, and gave him information. They weren’t asking me for a financial product. They were asking me for something to hold on to.
Calm doesn’t come from yet more information. Calm comes when somebody feels: I don’t need to know everything to make a good decision.
Same fuel, three fires
Take a stake that genuinely exists. For an assertive position that is enough to move on. For a submissive position it isn’t, because he weighs the stake against the risk, and the risk weighs heavier. For a dominant position it isn’t either, because he is wondering what you haven’t told him yet.
That explains something I didn’t understand for years. Why does the same conversation work one time and not the next? I always thought I had been better that day. Or worse.
That wasn’t it. I was having the same conversation with somebody standing somewhere else.
Design law #8
The same message lands differently in a different decision position.
Miss that and you think the message is the problem.
Since then I ask myself one question before I sit down. Is this person after safety, balance or advantage right now? Usually I know within two minutes. And if I still don’t know after twenty, that is an answer too — it probably means I did too much of the talking.
Since I started asking that question, conversations end differently. Not because my arguments are better, but because I put them in the right place.
07
The design flaw.
A design flaw appears when a system is built on an assumption about people that isn’t true.
Nobody is doing anything wrong. Everybody is doing exactly what the design asks. The fault isn’t in the execution, it is in the drawing.
A design flaw that fails completely gets found. One that half works stays for a hundred years.
Three questions that reveal them
Question 1
What assumption about people sits underneath this?
Question 2
Who ever checked it?
Question 3
What are we measuring — and does it explain anything?
08
The Fire Path.
Eight steps. The order is the point, not the list. No doctor starts with the treatment: first the complaint, then examination, then the diagnosis, and only then treatment.
Most conversations start at step three.
Step 2 · the baseline
Not because we measure anything. Because we assume nothing yet.
We literally turn the light on. Nothing more.
A surgeon doesn’t start operating the moment somebody walks into the consulting room either. That is why we call the first meeting a baseline: free advice to know where you stand, and nothing else.
Nothing is offered and nothing is signed. What does happen is that questions get asked. A lot of questions. And that somebody listens — really listens, not waiting for their own turn to speak.
That makes the baseline not a sales instrument but the smallest possible first step. A small step carries little risk, and risk is exactly what hesitation runs aground on. Ask for a big first step and you are really asking for all the trust at once. Almost nobody has that.
