Anyone who has experienced recurrent problems with a car the garage has been unable to fix, or read in the press about miscarriages of justice over recent years, may not share Miles and Huberman’s confidence in the ability of car mechanics and detectives to reach the ‘right’ conclusion! Putting that to one side, however, their analogy is a useful one. It shows that a variety of strategies is needed to fully understand and explain a problem: the challenge is to find the right combination of strategies and then bring together the findings, weighing up their cumulative evidence.