Stop Solving the Same Problem

What looks like a series of separate challenges may be a single pattern asking to be seen.

You’ve handled this before. Not this exact situation — but something close enough that you can feel it. The question is whether you’ve been treating each arrival as a new problem, or as the same pattern returning in a different coat.

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For years, the people around me seemed heavy.

My orchestras, my teaching staff, my project teams — they showed up, did the work, and went home. But there was a weight to their presence. Not crisis, not conflict. Just a persistent, low-level burden I couldn’t quite name. I noticed the symptoms easily enough: the musician who came in disheveled, the team member who was consistently a beat behind. I’d give a little grace here and there, adjust expectations when someone seemed to be having a rough day. I thought I was paying attention.

I wasn’t.

During an executive training day in Nashville, my mentor described something that stopped me mid-sentence. He was talking about a team he’d led years earlier — the weight, the quiet resignation, the joyless execution. It sounded so familiar I nearly interrupted him. Then he said: “You’ll recognize it as soon as I say it.”

He was right. The pattern wasn’t with them. It was me — my intensity, my narrow focus, my unspoken expectation that everyone would simply match my pace and feel the same urgency I felt. I had been seeing tasks and decisions. I had not been seeing people.

That recognition didn’t require a system overhaul. It required honesty about what I’d been missing. Recognizing the pattern was the work. The rest followed.

The most disorienting leadership moments are rarely new — they are familiar ones we haven’t yet recognized as familiar. When we learn to treat recurring situations as patterns rather than coincidences, we gain something more useful than solutions: we gain clarity about where to look.

Recognizing Recurring Observations

The first move is the simplest — and the most resisted. It is just noticing what keeps showing up.

Not diagnosing. Not fixing. Not building a plan. Just slowing down long enough to ask: Have I been here before? Organizational researcher Karl Weick describes this as sensemaking — the ongoing, retrospective work of constructing meaning from ambiguous cues.¹ His insight is quietly subversive: we do not understand situations and then respond to them. We act, and then we make sense of what we’ve done. Pattern recognition is sensemaking made intentional.

There are probably two or three recurring dynamics in your week right now. The meeting that consistently ends without resolution. The person who reliably withdraws under pressure. The project that always seems to stall at the same point. You have likely attributed each of these to circumstance: a difficult agenda, a bad day, a funding delay. But what if they aren’t separate problems? What if they are the same signal, arriving in different clothes each time?

Name what keeps showing up — plainly, without immediately reaching for a solution. That naming is itself the first act of leadership clarity.

Recognizing Recurring Responses

Once you have named what keeps showing up, the next recognition is harder: how do you tend to respond when it does?

Not how you think you respond. Not how you intend to respond. How you actually, habitually, almost automatically respond — before awareness catches up with behavior. Craig Groeschel writes that every repeated behavior is driven by an underlying belief, often invisible to us until we name it.² The person who reliably withdraws when you get frustrated doesn’t just have a personality quirk. The meeting that never resolves may have something to do with how you enter the room.

Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright found in their research with thousands of leaders that the language people use about their work reveals the actual culture they’re living in — not the one they intend to model.³ Recurring patterns of language are not personality quirks. They are diagnostic data. When you hear the same frustrations expressed the same way each week, you are not hearing complaints. You are hearing information.

Jerry Colonna asks leaders the question that makes this personal: “How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?”⁴ It is not a comfortable question. But it is a clarifying one. Recognizing your recurring response doesn’t assign blame. It assigns agency.

Recognizing the Wisdom Patterns Carry

This is the turn that changes everything.

Patterns, once named, are not enemies to defeat. They are information to receive. And the leaders who pause long enough to interpret what keeps returning — before moving to fix it — tend to make more durable decisions than those who treat each incident as if it arrived without a history.⁵

There is wisdom in the observation itself. There is wisdom in recognizing how you tend to respond. Together, they produce a quality of clarity that no new strategy can manufacture — because it comes not from adding something, but from finally seeing something that was already there.

What I learned from my mentor in Nashville was not a new management technique. It was a recognition I had been resisting for years. My teams were heavy because I had not been present to them as people. The pattern had been trying to teach me that for a long time. Once I saw it, the correction was not complicated. Patterns are generous that way — they wait.

This week, the invitation is not to solve anything. It is simply to notice. You don’t have to answer it fully in one sitting. You just have to stop arguing with what keeps returning long enough to ask what it might be offering.

That kind of attention — patient, honest, undefended — is some of the most important work you will ever do as a leader.

What is one recurring situation in your leadership right now that you have been treating as a series of separate problems — and what might change if you received it as a single pattern instead?

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Endnotes