Before You Invest in Another Leadership Workshop, Check Your Diagnosis

“The problem is communication.”

It's a reasonable place to begin. Important information isn't getting shared. Decisions get revisited. People leave meetings with different ideas about what they're supposed to do next.

But before you buy another workshop, it's worth getting specific about what you mean by communication and what leads you to believe it is the problem.

Are people unclear about the decision? Do they understand it and disagree? Is ownership unresolved? Are there concerns that nobody has raised directly? Those possibilities could call for different responses. You won't know which deserves attention by starting with the solution you already had in mind.

Experience gives leaders useful pattern recognition. We know the organization. We've seen versions of the problem before. Our instincts can tell us where to look.

The discipline is knowing how much certainty to attach to those instincts. There's a meaningful difference between “The problem is X” and “My current hypothesis is X. What would I need to know before I act on it?”

That distinction becomes especially useful when conditions have changed. Your organization has grown. A funding source has shifted. New leaders have joined. What worked before may no longer explain what is happening now.

When the old playbook stops working, your assumptions become more expensive.

Before choosing an intervention, take one problem you're under pressure to solve and make three columns:

• What do we know?

• What are we assuming?

• What do we still need to learn?

Keep the first column grounded in observations. “Three agreed deadlines passed without an update” gives you something to investigate. “Nobody cares” is an interpretation of what happened. It may feel persuasive, but it doesn't tell you why the deadlines were missed or what would help.

Then examine the intervention you're considering. What evidence suggests it addresses the pattern you've observed? What would you expect to see change if your diagnosis is right? What information might lead you to choose a different approach?

The more you're preparing to invest in a solution, the more important it becomes to understand the problem you're actually trying to solve.

That doesn't mean investigating indefinitely. The purpose is to identify the next responsible step with enough clarity to act, while being honest about what the available evidence can and cannot establish.

Life Editor's Curious Leadership Scan™ uses interviews, observations, and data to uncover communication patterns, alignment gaps, and other sources of leadership friction across an organization. It is designed to help leaders understand what's happening before choosing where to focus their attention and resources.

You can explore the Curious Leadership Scan™. Start with the problem you need to understand and the evidence you would need to choose what happens next.