"Fixed it."

The easiest solution is rarely the right one.

Jul 26, 2026

I was in full flop sweat as I waited outside the conference room. Inside, the senior leadership team awaited my update.

For a project that I hadn’t even started.

I don’t think I can fully convey my panic in that moment. Sweat trickled down my back. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t take a full breath. My head was fuzzy from the night before, when I had barely slept in anticipation of this very moment.

A few weeks earlier, this same leadership team had confronted poor numbers in the annual employee survey – particularly in the “leadership communication” category.

They immediately determined that the department managers needed communication training – and tasked me with developing it.

But I hadn’t.

Because try as I might, I couldn’t find any evidence that the managers were the problem.

“Leadership communication” was a pretty broad survey category. We could be talking about pretty much anything:

Lack of transparency from leadership
Employees giving feedback that disappears into a void
Different leaders giving conflicting direction

So I didn’t have a slide deck or a detailed training strategy to share with them that day.

All I had was a question:

Why do we think the managers are the problem?

There was an uncomfortable silence, during which time I may have peed a little. I had just walked in and told a bunch of executives that I couldn’t deliver what they’d asked for. I briefly wondered if Starbucks was hiring.

But then my boss actually laughed.

She realized they’d done what harried leadership teams often do – saw a problem, latched onto a plausible explanation, and moved to solve it without testing the assumption.

They repurposed the time they’d allotted for my presentation to do what they should have done from the outset: put together a cross-functional team to investigate what was really happening.

I wish I could say that was an isolated incident, but it wasn’t.

Training was the catch-all solution to just about every organizational ill – usually before anyone had fully examined the issue.

Executive presence training for a team whose flawed proposal had been rejected by – you guessed it – executives
Communication training for a team whose processes were so outdated they were constantly barraged with complaints
Accountability training for a department whose VP had thrown them under the bus for a misguided business decision

I learned to be a lot more disciplined when I received these kinds of requests from leaders.

I also learned to gently question whether they’d identified the wrong problem to solve or failed to investigate the cause of the real one.

It doesn’t just happen in the training world.

When a problem arises, people naturally reach for the most visible cause so they can quickly move from uncertainty to action.

Then they can declare it handled without uncovering any deeper, decidedly more inconvenient realities.

All the time and money in the world won’t help you if you’re solving the wrong problem or targeting the wrong cause.

Asking more questions in some cases shifted the work from me to someone else.

Which is always nice.

More importantly, it meant the work I did take on focused on the real issue – and wasn’t a knee-jerk response from someone who hadn’t validated the diagnosis.

Think of a problem you’re trying to solve right now. Who decided what was causing it? What evidence supports that conclusion?

I went into that leadership meeting fully expecting a smackdown. I came out with a rule I used for the rest of my career: question the diagnosis before deciding on a treatment.

Could have done with a lot less sweat, though.