Big idea #2: Problem solving integrity

Most leadership failures aren’t during execution. They begin much earlier, in how the problem is understood.

Over the years I’ve become increasingly interested in what Professor Ron Heifetz describes as balcony thinking or reality testing. In other words, resisting the urge to rush to action before you’ve properly understood what’s happening. I tend to think about it as problem solving integrity. The discipline to keep asking, with genuine curiosity, what’s really going on here?

It sounds obvious. It turns out to be difficult.

The challenge isn’t simply that we’re biased. We all know that. The more interesting problem is that we naturally interpret situations through the lens of our own experience. We don’t just solve problems. We quietly reshape them into forms we recognise.

A strategy leader tends to see strategic problems.

A finance leader sees financial discipline.

An HR leader sees culture.

An operations leader sees process.

None of those perspectives are wrong. They become problematic when they’re the only lens through which the situation is viewed.

Over time, our expertise becomes part of our identity. The approaches that have served us well become the approaches we trust. Our values become intertwined with that expertise, shaping not only how we solve problems, but what we believe the problem actually is. Without noticing, we start defining situations in ways that fit both the capabilities we’ve spent years developing and the outcomes we instinctively value. And that’s before organisational dynamics make things even harder.

By the time a senior leadership team begins discussing an issue, the boundaries of the conversation have often already been drawn. Certain data has been gathered. Certain stakeholders have been consulted. Certain perspectives have quietly been ruled out because they’re seen as unrealistic, emotional, or unhelpful. Too often these are the very perspectives most likely to expose what the rest of us cannot yet see.

The organisation believes it is investigating a problem. Often, it is simply reinforcing an existing worldview.

Diagnostic integrity is the leader’s capacity to see what is actually happening without bending the diagnosis to protect themselves, their team, or a preferred solution.

What this looks like in practice

There’s an irony to senior leadership. The more senior you become, the further you move from the very problems you’re expected to solve. Senior leaders are further from customers. Further from frontline work. More dependent on summaries, dashboards, and interpretations prepared by others.

Yet they’re expected to make the most consequential decisions.

It’s an uncomfortable reality. The people carrying the greatest accountability are often the people with the least direct contact with the issue itself. That doesn’t mean senior leaders shouldn’t make decisions. It does suggest they should hold their diagnosis a little more lightly.

I remember watching this play out during a significant organisational transformation. The outgoing CEO had made improving organisational performance through a more inclusive culture a central priority. Over several years, they brought more voices into consequential conversations and improved gender balance across the organisation, particularly in leadership and decision-making roles. This was not inclusion as a stand-alone initiative; it was a means to improve decisions, strengthen accountability, and unlock the organisation’s collective capability. Employee engagement rose, performance improved, and many people experienced the organisation as both healthier and more effective.

The incoming CEO looked at exactly the same organisation and reached a different conclusion. His diagnosis wasn’t that the organisation lacked inclusion. It was that it had lost its performance edge. Too much consensus. Too little accountability. In his mind, operational and technical excellence had become the missing ingredient.

Same organisation. Same people. Largely the same evidence. Entirely different diagnoses.

Neither perspective was irrational. Each reflected a different set of values about what mattered most. The more interesting question wasn’t which CEO was right. It was what the organisation might have discovered had it spent longer asking what was actually happening before deciding which philosophy should prevail.

Where had greater inclusion genuinely strengthened performance?

Where had it unintentionally slowed decision making?

Where had higher performance standards created better outcomes?

Where had they reduced the willingness to speak openly?

Those questions are slower. They’re also more useful.

What problem solving integrity looks like

Over time I’ve noticed that the strongest leaders rarely present their diagnosis as certainty. One CEO I worked with had a habit of beginning important discussions by saying: “This is how I’m currently seeing the situation, but here are the reasons I might be wrong.”

He’d then list them almost matter-of-factly.

I’m not close enough to customers.

I’ve spent too long in this industry.

I know I have a tendency to trust approaches that have worked for me before.

It wasn’t false humility. It simply gave everyone else permission to think.

Another CEO used a different question: “If we invited stakeholders who disagreed with every assumption we’ve made, what would they say?”

It immediately changed the quality of the discussion. The room stopped defending conclusions and started exploring possibilities.

A close friend of mine and Australia’s pre-eminent fund manager, Doug Tynan, has built an even more deliberate practice around this. He works regularly with a psychologist. Not because he needs support, but because he’s built a system that regularly tests the quality of his thinking.

Where is my ego creeping in?

Which of my assumptions feel like facts?

What story am I telling myself that the evidence doesn’t yet support?

In his world, small errors in judgement compound quickly. So does better judgement.

Why this matters

Most executives don’t struggle because they lack intelligence. Or experience. Or commitment. What they often lack is a reliable way of examining their own framing before it turns into action. That’s why I think this becomes less about better problem-solving tools and more about leadership disposition. The shift is subtle but important.

From believing your role is to solve the problem. To believing your role is first to understand the problem the system is actually facing.

Those aren’t the same thing. The second requires more patience. More curiosity. More willingness to hear perspectives that don’t sit comfortably alongside your own.

It also requires letting go of the idea that the best thinking should originate with you. More often, it’s distributed across the people closest to the work. Your role is to surface it, test it, make sense of it and, eventually, decide. The irony is that this can make a leader look slower.

The executive who widens the inquiry, tolerates ambiguity, and resists premature certainty will almost always appear less decisive than the leader confidently solving the wrong problem by Tuesday morning. But over time, the difference becomes obvious. One leader becomes known for making fast decisions. The other becomes known for making the right ones.

Executive coaching, at its best, supports exactly this work. Not by providing answers. Not by offering another opinion. But by creating one of the few environments where a senior leader can have their thinking examined honestly. Someone prepared to ask: “Are you sure that’s what’s going on here?”

And then stay with that question long enough for something to emerge.

Organisations often solve the wrong problem exceptionally well. The issue is rarely a lack of intent or execution. It is that they act decisively on the wrong diagnosis.