I’ve been noticing a particular pattern for years, although I don’t think I fully appreciated how common it was until I started seeing it repeated across organizations that otherwise had very little in common.
The details would change from one organization to the next. Attendance might be declining. Revenue might be softer than expected. Audience growth might have stalled. Volunteers might be harder to recruit. In some cases, there was simply a general feeling that things weren’t working as well as they once had. The symptoms varied, but the response was remarkably consistent. People would immediately begin discussing solutions.
Marketing usually appeared early in the conversation.
Sometimes it was fundraising. Sometimes communications. Occasionally a rebrand. Every now and then the answer was assumed to be a new strategic plan. Whatever form it took, the conversation tended to move quickly toward action. What should we do? What should we change? What initiative should we launch? What resource should we invest in?
On the surface, this seems entirely reasonable. Organizations exist to solve problems. When a challenge appears, people naturally begin searching for solutions. The difficulty is that solutions and diagnoses are not the same thing, and I’ve become increasingly convinced that many organizations are considerably better at the first than the second.
This isn’t because people lack intelligence. In fact, some of the most confusing situations I’ve encountered have involved rooms full of thoughtful, experienced, highly capable people. Everyone was bringing useful perspectives to the discussion. Everyone genuinely wanted the organization to succeed. Yet as the conversation unfolded, it gradually became apparent that different people were responding to entirely different understandings of the situation.
One person believed visibility was the issue.
Another believed relevance was the issue.
Someone else was worried about capacity. Someone else was focused on community impact. Another person was concerned about revenue sustainability. Everyone was contributing ideas that made sense within the framework of the problem they believed they were solving.
The challenge, of course, was that nobody had stopped to confirm whether they were all discussing the same problem.
I’ve come to think of this as one of the most expensive habits organizations develop. Not expensive in a financial sense, although it can certainly become that. Expensive because it consumes time, attention, effort, and energy. Entire plans can be built around solving a problem that has never been clearly defined. Campaigns can be launched. Committees can be formed. Consultants can be hired. Months of work can be invested in addressing symptoms while the underlying issue remains comfortably untouched.
The strange part is that this often looks productive from the outside.
People are busy. Meetings are happening. Reports are being generated. Decisions are being made. There is a visible sense of movement, which creates the reassuring impression that progress is occurring. Yet activity can sometimes obscure confusion rather than resolve it. The organization feels busy because everyone is working. Whether everyone is working on the same problem is another question entirely.
I occasionally find myself thinking about a doctor attempting to diagnose an illness. Most of us would become uneasy if treatment began before anyone had agreed on what was wrong. We would probably want some confidence that the diagnosis matched the symptoms before medication started appearing. Yet organizations routinely do the equivalent. They move directly to treatment because treatment feels useful. Questions feel slower.
There is something deeply satisfying about action.
Questions, by comparison, can feel frustratingly inconclusive. They introduce uncertainty precisely when people are looking for confidence. They force us to consider the possibility that our first explanation may not be correct. They require patience at the exact moment when everyone would prefer momentum.
Perhaps that is why organizations often spend so little time examining assumptions. Assumptions are remarkably efficient. They allow conversations to move forward quickly. Everyone can begin discussing solutions without the inconvenience of spending too much time examining whether the diagnosis is accurate.
The difficulty is that assumptions have a habit of disguising themselves as facts.
An organization assumes it has a marketing problem because attendance is declining. That may be true. It may also have a programming problem, a positioning problem, a pricing problem, or a community relevance problem. A different organization assumes it has a fundraising challenge because donations have plateaued. Perhaps it does. Perhaps it has a relationship challenge, a communication challenge, or a clarity challenge. The symptom may be obvious. The cause is often less cooperative.
This is one reason I find myself paying close attention to the questions organizations ask. The first question often reveals more than the first answer.
An organization that immediately asks how to attract more people may be assuming that awareness is the issue. An organization asking how to increase revenue may be assuming that growth is the objective. Neither assumption is necessarily wrong. What interests me is how rarely they are examined before becoming the foundation for everything that follows.
Over time, I’ve developed a quiet affection for conversations that seem to slow progress down.
These are the discussions where someone asks an inconvenient question. How do we know this is the problem? What evidence supports that conclusion? What if we’re solving the wrong issue entirely? Such questions rarely create excitement. They can even feel mildly irritating when a group is eager to move forward. Yet they often prove more valuable than the confident answers that arrive too early.
There is a curious tendency in organizational life to reward decisiveness and undervalue diagnosis. We admire people who move quickly. We celebrate action. We talk about momentum. Much less attention is paid to the discipline of sitting with uncertainty long enough to understand what is actually happening.
That discipline matters because the wrong solution can be surprisingly effective at solving the wrong problem.
An organization may execute a marketing campaign brilliantly and still see little improvement because awareness was never the issue. It may conduct a flawless planning process and still feel frustrated because alignment, not planning, was the missing ingredient. Good work applied to the wrong challenge can produce deeply confusing results. Everyone works hard. Competent decisions are made. Progress remains elusive.
The organizations that impress me most are not necessarily the fastest to act.
They are often the ones that display a certain patience at the beginning. They resist the temptation to assume they already know the answer. They spend time examining evidence. They listen to different perspectives. They remain curious a little longer than feels comfortable.
From the outside, this can occasionally look inefficient. People are talking instead of acting. Questions are being asked instead of decisions being made. Yet the apparent delay frequently prevents far larger delays later. Clarity at the beginning has a way of reducing confusion further down the road.
I’ve started to suspect that many strategic challenges are not actually failures of execution.
They are failures of diagnosis.
The execution may be perfectly competent. The people involved may be exceptionally capable. The organization may possess all the necessary tools. What is missing is a shared understanding of the question being answered.
That sounds like a small distinction.
It isn’t.
When organizations understand the problem clearly, solutions become easier to evaluate. Priorities become easier to establish. Resources become easier to allocate. Decisions become easier to explain. The path forward is rarely effortless, but it is usually more coherent.
When organizations misunderstand the problem, everything becomes harder. Every solution competes with every other solution. Every idea appears equally plausible. Progress becomes difficult to measure because nobody is entirely certain what success is supposed to look like.
Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly interested in diagnosis rather than solutions.
Solutions are visible. They attract attention. They produce activity.
Diagnosis is quieter work.
It involves observation, curiosity, and the willingness to admit that the obvious explanation may not be the correct one. It rarely generates the same enthusiasm as launching something new. Yet it may be one of the most valuable things an organization can do.
After all, solving problems is not especially useful if they’re not the right ones.