Six questions, forty minutes, before design
Most learning requests arrive pre-diagnosed, often in response to a perceived capability gap.
"We need a leadership programme for our new managers." "Our middle managers aren't holding people accountable." "We need psychological safety training." Each of these sounds like a brief. None of them is. They are conclusions. The person who reached them is rarely the person who will be blamed if the conclusion turns out to be wrong.
The uncomfortable part is that accepting the diagnosis is usually the commercially easier move. The client has already decided. Agreeing is fast, feels collaborative, and gets you to a proposal. But six months later the programme has good smile-sheet scores and nothing has changed. The conversation about why is a much worse conversation than the one you avoided at the start.
What follows is a six-stage diagnostic conversation. More usefully, it includes the point in each stage where the stated problem tends to diverge from the real one.
Stage 1: Establish what changed
The question: "When did this start being a problem? What was different before?"
Capability gaps rarely appear spontaneously. Something changed — a reorganisation, a new system, a growth spurt, a departure, a new metric. If nobody can name what changed, you are usually looking at a problem that has always existed. It has only recently become visible, which is a very different design brief.
Where it diverges: if the answer is "it started when we changed the incentive structure" or "since we restructured reporting lines," you are looking at a structural problem wearing a training costume. However, no amount of skill-building survives a system that rewards the opposite behaviour.
Stage 2: Separate can't from won't
The question: "Are there people in this same role doing this well? What is different about them?"
This is the single highest-yield question in the conversation and it takes ten seconds to ask.
If nobody in the population can do the thing, you likely have a genuine capability gap — the knowledge or skill is absent, and instruction is a plausible intervention. If some people do it well under the same conditions, with the same tools and the same manager, then the capability exists in the system. Consequently, the question becomes why it isn't spreading. The answer is almost never "the others need a workshop."
Where it diverges: the client says "some do it well" and then, unprompted, explains why those people are different — better team, easier region, longer tenure. Listen to that explanation carefully. Usually, it is the actual diagnosis, offered accidentally.
Stage 3: Apply the technical/adaptive test
The question: "If everyone in this group did exactly what you're asking, whose job gets harder?"
This is Ronald Heifetz's distinction and it is the most useful discriminator in the whole conversation. Technical problems have known solutions that can be applied by existing expertise or authority. However, adaptive challenges are different in kind. As Heifetz and Marty Linsky put it in Leadership on the Line (2002), there is "a whole host of problems that are not amenable to authoritative expertise or standard operating procedures. They cannot be solved by someone who provides answers from on high. We call these adaptive challenges because they require experiments, new discoveries, and adjustments from numerous places in the organization or community."
Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky put the consequence plainly in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (2009): "The most common cause of failure in leadership is produced by treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems."
That sentence describes a large share of corporate learning.
A technical problem can be trained. A manager who does not know how to structure a development conversation can be taught to structure one. An adaptive challenge cannot be trained, because the difficulty is not absence of skill — it is that applying the skill costs somebody something they are not yet willing to give up. This could be autonomy, status, a comfortable relationship, or a way of working that has served them for fifteen years.
Where it diverges: the honest answer to "whose job gets harder" is often the person commissioning the programme. When a senior leader wants their managers to push back more, and pushing back more means the senior leader gets challenged more, you have an adaptive challenge. A training request is the organisation's way of not having that conversation.
Stage 4: Look for the competing commitment
The question: "What would this person lose if they changed?"
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey's work on immunity to change — first set out for a general management audience in "The Real Reason People Won't Change" (Harvard Business Review, November 2001) and developed in Immunity to Change (2009) — makes an argument that is easy to state and hard to internalise: people who appear to be resisting change are frequently working very hard, and very competently, toward a different commitment they hold at the same time. In their words, someone may be "unwittingly caught in a competing commitment — a subconscious, hidden goal that conflicts with their stated commitments."
The manager who will not delegate may hold a sincere commitment to developing their team and a simultaneous commitment, invisible to them, to never being the person whose work was late. Those two commitments are in genuine conflict. From inside, the behaviour is not irrational. In fact, it is a rational solution to a problem you have not been told about. The person may not be able to describe it if you ask them directly, which is why the question above asks what they would lose rather than what they want.
Where it diverges: the behaviour you are being asked to fix is described as laziness, resistance, or "not getting it." Those words are a signal that nobody has asked what the behaviour is protecting.
Stage 5: Find the evidence that would change their mind
The question: "Six months from now, what would you see or hear that would tell you this worked?"
Ask this early, not at the end. It does three things at once: it tests whether the outcome is actually observable, it surfaces the metric that matters to the person holding the budget, and it exposes whether anyone has agreed on what success means.
The failure mode is a client who answers in terms of the intervention rather than the outcome — "we'd have run four cohorts," "attendance would be high." That is a plan, not a result.
Where it diverges: the client cannot name anything observable, or names something no available data could ever show. That is not a reason to walk away. However, it is a reason to design the measurement first and the modules second, because you have just learned that nobody has thought about evidence and somebody will ask for it later.
Stage 6: Name what training cannot fix
The question: "If we build this and the behaviour still doesn't change, what would the reason be?"
Most clients can answer this immediately and accurately. They will tell you about the manager who undermines it, the metric that contradicts it, the promotion that rewarded the opposite. That is because they know. However, they have simply not been asked, because most vendors do not want the answer on the record.
Putting it on the record is what separates a design from a proposal. If three of the four barriers to the behaviour are structural, a programme that addresses only the fourth is not a solution. It can still be a legitimate, useful part of one, provided the other three are named and owned by someone.
Where it diverges: the client names a barrier they cannot influence and then asks you to proceed anyway. That is a decision they are entitled to make. It is not a decision you should let them make silently.
What this changes about the design
Running these six stages produces something a needs analysis usually does not. It creates a defensible line between what the intervention is responsible for and what it is not.
That line is what makes measurement honest. If you have established that three of five drivers of a behaviour sit outside the programme, then a Level 3 behaviour measure is a measure of contribution, not of causation. You can say so in advance rather than defending it afterwards. Kirkpatrick's levels are frequently criticised for encouraging claims a programme cannot support. The model is not what produces the overclaim. In fact, skipping the diagnosis is.
The conversation takes about forty minutes. It routinely changes the shape of the engagement. Occasionally, it ends with a recommendation not to build a programme at all.
That recommendation is worth more to a client than a programme they did not need. In my experience of running programme design inside executive education, it is remembered considerably longer.
Sources
- Heifetz, R. & Linsky, M. (2002) Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading. Harvard Business School Press, ch. 1.
- Heifetz, R., Grashow, A. & Linsky, M. (2009) The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Harvard Business Review Press, ch. 2.
- Kegan, R. & Lahey, L. (2001) "The Real Reason People Won't Change." Harvard Business Review, November 2001, reprint R0110E.
- Kegan, R. & Lahey, L. (2009) Immunity to Change. Harvard Business Review Press.
