What if You're Solving the Wrong Problem?

Why I’m sharing this:

Over the years, I’ve sat in plenty of leadership meetings trying to make the right call on something that was critical to the company’s growth—with mounds of data in front of me, but unsure of what was really driving the problem we had to solve. I was convinced that more and better metrics would easily lead me to the right answer. Now I realize we were asking the wrong questions.

This isn’t about theory. It’s about what I’ve seen go wrong—and what finally started to make sense when I took a step back and looked in a different place.  This wasn’t out of curiosity, but necessity.

We’ve been optimizing for symptoms—because the root cause has been invisible.

For years, I made leadership decisions based on what most executives have access to: KPIs, engagement scores, surveys, performance reviews, turnover data. It felt data-driven. In control. But I couldn’t get past the feeling that we were constantly reacting to the outcome, not the root cause.

Why did one team adapt to change while another resisted?

Why did performance slide after a leadership change—even when the strategy looked sound on paper?

Frustrated, I came to a hard truth:

Everything in an organization—performance, culture, engagement, retention—traces back to behavior. Not intent. Not personality. Behavior.

But most organizations still aren’t measuring behavior in a meaningful, objective way.

They’re managing the business without seeing what’s actually driving it.

Here’s what changed for me: once I saw behavior as the root system, the noise started to make sense.

Patterns that looked random—sudden attrition, slow adoption, team friction—were actually explainable and predictable. But only if you knew what to look for.  I went from making decisions on “nice-to-have” data to “need-to-have” actionable, objective data. Things were never the same through this lens.

So I’ll ask you this:

If you could see the behavioral root system underneath your team’s outcomes, what decisions would you stop making in the dark?  Think on that!  We will uncover more in the next article.