Every day I look at an old Honest Tea bottle cap sitting on the ledge of my whiteboard.
It reads: "An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions." —Robert A. Humphrey.
It reminds me how often organizations become attached to solutions before they've fully defined the problem.
I didn't always think this way.
"You weren't competing against the other training companies."
"Really?" (Because the arduous RFP process certainly felt like it!)
That conversation completely changed how I think about our business. For years, I assumed our competition was training companies offering similar services. They weren't.
It isn't. Our real competition is something much more dangerous: Premature solution selection.
He continued. "When a leader wants better results in the next 90 days, the options seem obvious: hire a consultant, launch a training program, reorganize the team, or benchmark against the competition."
None of them are bad ideas. But you never assumed. You sold us on determining whether any of them was the right answer at all.
Since that conversation, I've realized we see the same pattern across industries with remarkable consistency:
Sometimes the challenge is onboarding. Sometimes it's AI adoption. Sometimes it's sales execution, manager effectiveness, or cross-functional collaboration.
What are our best people doing differently in this role, in this context, in this organization, and how can we scale it?
When performance falters, organizations typically pursue one of four paths:
🐾Path #1: Training: A workshop on "closing." A coaching program. A speedy trust initiative. A leadership development series.
🐾Path #2: Structural Change: A reorganization. Additional headcount. New territories. New reporting structures.
🐾Path #3: External Benchmarking: Industry research. Market studies. Competitive analysis. Best practices.
🐾Path #4: Wait and Hope (my favorite): Keep doing what you're doing, and hope managers solve it.
None of these are inherently wrong. The problem is that most are chosen before leaders fully understand what is driving the performance gap in the first place.
Every organization already contains its own best practices. ⭐
Somewhere inside the business are people consistently producing exceptional results under the exact same conditions as everyone else.
The difference isn't the environment. It's how they perform within it.
The biggest lesson for me wasn't about positioning. It was about leadership.
The best leaders I've worked with share one habit - they resist the urge to solve the problem too quickly. Instead, they invest time upfront to understand what's actually happening before deciding what to do about it.
And sometimes...(most times?) it isn't the intervention anyone expected.
So, before you: launch another workshop, redesign onboarding, reorganize the team, or hire more people...ask this question:
Because if the answer is no... you're not choosing the best solution.
You're choosing the first one.