The question before the question

When a client first describes the problem to me, I try not to trust the description. Not because I think they are wrong (they are rarely wrong about the surface of it), but because the problem as first described is almost always the second question. The first question is underneath it, and nobody has asked it yet, including them.

This is not a trick. It is a property of organisations under pressure. By the time something has been named as a problem, the naming has already done work: it has made the problem tractable, legible, and (crucially) small enough that the current leadership can imagine solving it without changing themselves. That is the version that arrives in the brief.

An example, disguised.

A leadership team tells me they have a communication problem. The executive and the board are misaligned. Could we run some workshops to get everyone on the same page. I have heard this brief, in one form or another, a hundred times. I no longer hear communication. I hear: we have avoided a decision, and the avoidance has started to show up as friction, and if we call it friction we can fix it without making the decision.

So in discovery I do not ask about communication. I ask what the decision is that has not been made. Sometimes the room goes quiet. Sometimes someone says a version of it straightaway and is visibly relieved. Either way, we are now on the right question, and everything that happens after is better for it.

The problem as first described is almost always the second question. The first question is underneath it, and the work is to find it without being the person who names it.

What we listen for.

A few things, none of them reliable on their own. The words people use when they are tired, rather than when they are performing. What the quiet people say when the loud people stop. What a person contradicts themselves about. Contradictions are where the real question lives. The sentence that begins "of course, we all know that…" Because of course we all know it is usually a flag for something nobody has said out loud.

I also listen for what is missing. If no one mentions the founder, in a founder-led organisation, the founder is the question. If no one mentions money, in an organisation that is running out of it, money is the question. If the board is not mentioned by the executive, or the executive not mentioned by the board, the relationship between them is the question. Absence is loud, if you are listening for it.

Why not just tell them.

Because the real question is not useful as a diagnosis delivered by me. It is only useful if the people who will have to live with it can find it themselves, which (gently held) they almost always can. My job is to make the room safe enough for the question to surface, and then to protect it long enough for the group to look at it without flinching.

If I deliver the diagnosis, I take the answer with me when I leave. If they find it, they keep it.

A practical note.

We budget more time for discovery than most clients expect, and less for the build than they expect. This is deliberate. The best engagements I have ever done, measured by what happened a year later, were the ones where we spent the first quarter on the question and the rest of the year on the answer. The worst were the ones where we moved to the answer in the first month, because the brief was confident and the clock was ticking.

The brief is never the question. The brief is where the question has been hiding.

Paul Steele