When Fixing Isn’t Enough

The leaders who solve more wisely aren’t faster — they’re willing to look past what’s visible.

Fix the symptom and you buy time. Name the cause and you change something. Most leaders know this — and still reach for the fix first.

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Over the years, a handful of concerts I’ve produced have stayed with me — not because they went well, but because they didn’t. A UK charity concert in a village church. A choral performance in Florida. A community orchestra series in England. Each one received real effort: thoughtful outreach, targeted advertising, a programme worth hearing. Every visible box was checked.

And yet the seats didn’t fill.

The natural response was to adjust what could be seen — the poster, the timing, the venue, the social media schedule. Each shortfall led to another round of surface-level changes, and each round produced roughly the same result.

Then a simple question cut through all of it: What are you actually promising them?

Something more than the repertoire, the theme, or the reception. Something that would make someone standing outside that door decide to give up an evening and walk in. The answer wasn’t in any of the materials. It wasn’t in the marketing plan. It was buried underneath all the visible effort — a missing promise that no amount of adjustment to the surface would ever uncover.

The first concert that sold out was the one that finally had an answer to that question.

Most of the problems that refuse to stay solved aren’t really problems at the surface level — they’re symptoms of something quieter underneath. Leaders solve more wisely when they stop treating symptoms as causes.

Symptoms Repeat, Cause Unnamed

There’s a particular satisfaction in fixing something. But then there’s a particular frustration in fixing something and watching it return. You tighten the process. You adjust the approach. You have the conversation. And then — weeks or months later — there it is again, wearing a slightly different coat but carrying the same weight.

What’s happening in those moments isn’t a failure of effort. It’s a failure of diagnosis. The symptom gets treated, but the cause never gets named. And unnamed causes don’t disappear; they wait.

David Cutler, writing about the gap between excellent craft and empty concert halls, observed that the audience’s perspective is of paramount importance — often more so than the performer’s own.¹ The same logic applies to leadership problems. The problem you’re experiencing often has an origin point that isn’t visible from where you’re standing when you’re in fixing mode. The cause stays unnamed because you’re solving for the symptom — and symptoms are always easier to reach.

The first shift begins not with a new solution, but with a new question: What’s actually driving this? Asking it once is a start. Asking it before you act is a discipline.

Symptoms Reveal, If You Look

When a problem keeps returning, the instinct is to be frustrated with it. Understandably so. But frustration tends to narrow attention, and narrow attention misses things.

There’s another posture available — one that requires a small but significant reorientation. Instead of treating a recurring symptom as an obstacle to overcome, you can treat it as information to read. Organizational psychologist Karl Weick described the work of making sense of a difficult situation as requiring a particular kind of interpretive effort — work that precedes action and that most busy leaders skip.²

What is this symptom pointing toward? What’s true about the way this team communicates, or the way this project is structured, or the way this relationship operates, that keeps producing this outcome? Those questions feel slower than reaching for a fix. But they lead somewhere the fix never does.

Jerry Colonna invites leaders to slow down enough to notice — not just what is happening, but how it feels to be in it.³ That quality of attention isn’t soft. It’s the precondition for accurate diagnosis. And accurate diagnosis is where lasting resolution begins.

Symptoms Reported, Change Starts

This is where the architecture of a recurring problem begins to shift. When you’ve named the real cause — not the presenting symptom, but the quieter thing beneath it — you arrive at a genuinely different starting point. The question changes. The decision changes. And the resolution, when it comes, tends to hold.

Jon Acuff describes overthinking as what happens when what you think gets in the way of what you want.⁴ The inverse is equally true: when your thinking goes deep enough to name the real cause, it becomes a clarifying force rather than a spinning one. You stop circling the surface and start working from the ground up.

The leaders who develop this capacity aren’t more decisive in some conventional sense. They’re more willing to sit with a symptom long enough to hear what it’s saying. They’ve learned that the problem presenting itself is rarely the whole problem — and that the most durable solutions tend to start below what’s visible.

Cutler’s observation that great execution alone rarely brings people to the concert hall is a reminder that excellence at the visible level cannot compensate for a gap at the invisible one.⁵ The audience — or the team, or the situation — is responding to something deeper. And so is your leadership, every time the same problem returns.

Take one recurring problem you’re facing — something that keeps returning despite your best efforts — and resist the pull toward fixing. Ask instead: what’s true? What is this symptom carrying that the fixing has been drowning out?

That question doesn’t resolve in a sitting. But it moves you off the surface. And that, it turns out, is exactly where the real work begins.

There’s a kind of Joyful Excellence that comes not from solving harder but from seeing more clearly. It’s less exhausting and more honest. And it produces the kind of change that doesn’t require you to fix the same thing twice.

What is one problem in your work that keeps returning — and what might it be telling you that you haven’t stopped long enough to hear?

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