We’ve seen it before. The scenarios are different, but what lies beneath them is always the same.
A crisis hits. A big customer leaves. A quarter gets missed. Key people quit. Something breaks.
Leaders spring into action. The first reaction is always the same. “We have to fix the problem!” And the fix focuses on the one thing in front of us. The customer is leaving, so we offer a steeper discount. Key people are quitting, so we change the comp plan. We missed the quarter, so we double the pipeline goal. We react instead of think.
The challenge is that none of this gets to the real problem. Our crisis playbook is built around band aids. We are wired to react, when the most important question is, “What is the real problem we are trying to solve?”
Without that question, every fix is a guess and every fix is temporary. We feel good because we have taken action. It looks like progress. And the band aids work, for a while.
Then the customer who was leaving tries to leave again. Or another customer leaves. Or our top sales people get disengaged and walk out. Or we struggle with the number again. And we run the same process over and over. The band aids worked before, so we apply more band aids.
We get good at this. We become proud of our ability to manage crises. We spend money, we shuffle people, we add new tools, we change metrics. We build playbooks for each kind of crisis. We mistake managing crises for leading the business.
Most of the time, we misread what is happening. We mistake the crisis for the problem. They are not the same. The crisis is not the problem. The crisis is the moment the problem becomes visible.
Sometimes the problem shows up like whack-a-mole. We solve it in one place. It pops up in another form somewhere else. We solve that one. It pops up again. We try different fixes. The problem keeps moving because we have never understood it. We are chasing the symptoms.
And problems persist for years, until they become so big that avoiding the problem means total failure or collapse.
Sometimes, companies are caught off guard by their own performance. They had a lucky win with a big account. That forms our ICP, but the wins don’t continue. Or there was a great market tailwind and good timing and the revenue came in. The company thinks their strategy was keenly honed and on target, where was really good fortune. Over time, the lucky win starts getting called a strategy. When the luck runs out, the company finds out it never had a real strategy. It had luck and a story about luck.
It gets harder. What we think is the underlying problem often is not. We miss the number, so we focus on sales execution. But the real problem may be strategy. We may be chasing markets we cannot win. If that is the case, no amount of execution work will fix it.
Or the real problem may be several problems at once. High performers leaving may be a strategy problem and a leadership problem and a comp problem, all at the same time. Change the comp plan, and the strategy problem and the leadership problem are still there. The people keep leaving. The crisis comes back.
The best question in a crisis is the one that exposes the problem, not the one that treats the symptom. Instead of asking, “What do we need to do to keep the customer,” asking, “Why are our customers leaving?” Or rather than, “How do we adjust our comp plans to keep our best people,” to “Why are our best people leaving?” Or rather than, “What are we doing to increase our outbound and double our pipeline,” to “Why do we continue to struggle to hit our goals?”
Figuring out the real problem is the real work of leadership. We have to move past the symptoms. We have to resist the urge to act and live with the question for a while. We have to drill in:
- Why is this happening? Keep asking why until the answers stop being surface answers.
- Do we see this pattern repeating over time? What is driving the pattern?
- Why do these problems come back after we thought we fixed them?
- What kind of problem is this? Strategy? Leadership? People? Process? Execution? Some combination?
- What signals did we miss? Why did it take a crisis for us to see this?
And the hardest one: if this one event had not happened, would we still believe the story we have been telling about our business?
This work cannot be done from a dashboard. It has to be done close to where the work is happening, where the problems are showing up, where the customers are. We cannot diagnose by remote control.
When we do this work, we usually find more than one problem. That is where most leaders get stuck. They try to fix everything at once. Focus gets diluted. Nothing gets fixed. The better path is to prioritize. Which problem, if we solve it, makes the others easier? Start there. Move to the next one. Sequence matters.
Band aids applied to a lesion will not cure cancer. Quick fixes to symptoms will not solve long term growth problems.
The first job of leadership in a crisis is not to act. It is to figure out what is actually wrong. Everything else depends on that.
Afterword: The AI generated discussion of this post is stunning! It actually caused me to re-title and edit the post. The way they re-framed the issues, clarifying them is fantastic. Please take the time to listen. Enjoy!
