There comes a point in a recurring problem where adding another expert can increase the organisation’s confidence while reducing its understanding.
For a CEO facing a problem that has survived several attempted fixes, bringing in expertise is entirely rational.
The internal team has tried. Perhaps consultants have already tried. Costs continue accumulating. The board wants answers. Management patience is disappearing.
So another specialist is engaged.
Then another.
Each brings experience, methodologies, benchmarks, data and recommendations.
Yet something strange can happen.
Instead of the problem becoming clearer, the organisation accumulates more explanations for why it exists.
This is the consulting paradox: more expertise does not necessarily produce more clarity. Sometimes it simply produces more interpretations.
And that can become a particularly expensive form of 空回り, karamawari: enormous effort without corresponding forward progress.
Expertise usually arrives with a lens
Experts are valuable partly because they recognise patterns.
A technology specialist sees architecture, integration and capability problems.
A strategy adviser sees portfolio choices, positioning and resource allocation.
An organisational specialist sees structure, incentives and culture.
A risk adviser sees controls, governance and exposure.
A process specialist sees workflows, handoffs and inefficiencies.
None of them is necessarily wrong.
That is precisely the problem.
A recurring organisational problem can contain evidence supporting several different explanations simultaneously.
The danger begins when the lens used to investigate the problem quietly becomes the definition of the problem itself.
If you begin by assuming you have a technology problem, technology evidence becomes unusually important.
Soon, technology becomes the solution.
The organisation accumulates solutions faster than understanding
This helps explain why some persistent problems acquire extraordinary histories.
A customer problem produces a service improvement programme.
It returns, so processes are redesigned.
It returns again, so technology is replaced.
Another recurrence triggers restructuring.
Then new KPIs.
Then leadership changes.
Then another transformation.
Every intervention may be defensible.
Some may even produce measurable improvement.
But the recurring problem survives.
By now the organisation has spent millions and accumulated thousands of pages of analysis, yet may actually be further away from asking the simplest question:
What has every attempted solution left unchanged?
That question is powerful because recurrence is evidence.
If five different interventions changed five different things and the problem survived all five, something important probably survived with it.
GE offers a useful warning
General Electric provides an interesting illustration of the broader problem.
During the difficult later years of its transformation, GE faced extraordinary complexity across its portfolio, financial position, operating model and strategic direction.
There was no shortage of sophisticated analysis available to leadership.
But enormous complexity creates an unusual problem: there are many plausible ways to describe what is wrong.
Portfolio problem?
Capital allocation problem?
Operating performance problem?
Leadership problem?
Structural problem?
Financial problem?
Strategic problem?
Several can be true simultaneously.
The lesson is not that GE failed because it used advisers, nor that consultants lacked expertise. That would be far too simplistic.
The more useful lesson is that expertise cannot compensate for an inadequately framed problem.
Before asking experts for solutions, leadership needs confidence that it understands what actually requires solving.
Analysis can become a substitute for diagnosis
This distinction matters.
Analysis asks:
What is happening?
How large is it?
Where is performance deteriorating?
What are comparable organisations doing?
What options are available?
Diagnosis asks something harder:
Why does this keep happening here?
Those questions are related, but they are not interchangeable.
A leadership team can possess extraordinary amounts of analysis while remaining surprisingly uncertain about the conditions generating the problem.
This is where consulting can unintentionally become part of karamawari.
Another engagement creates activity.
Another framework creates structure.
Another presentation creates apparent clarity.
Another programme creates momentum.
The organisation feels as though it is moving because enormous amounts of work are occurring.
But activity and traction are not the same thing.
The problem may sit beneath everyone's expertise
Persistent problems often survive because their causes cross organisational boundaries.
A margin problem might originate partly in Sales incentives, Operations capacity, pricing authority, customer promises and investment decisions.
No individual function owns that combination.
No individual specialist necessarily sees the entire chain.
This is why recurring problems often need to be traced backwards.
Impacts → Decisions → Behaviours → Assumptions → Conditions.
The visible impact might be declining margin.
But perhaps repeated commercial decisions are producing it.
Those decisions may reflect behaviours that everyone considers normal.
Those behaviours may arise from assumptions nobody thinks to question.
And those assumptions may be entirely rational given the organisation's incentives, governance, targets, history and unwritten rules.
Replacing the pricing system does not necessarily change those conditions.
Neither does restructuring Sales.
Nor appointing a new executive.
The organisation can therefore keep changing components while preserving the mechanism generating the outcome.
Use experts differently
The answer is not to stop using consultants.
Expertise is enormously valuable.
But leaders confronting recurrence should resist asking experts too quickly:
“What should we do?”
First ask:
What do we actually know?
What are we assuming?
Which explanations have already been tested?
What changed after previous interventions?
What did not change?
Why did the decisions producing this outcome make sense at the time?
What conditions made those decisions more likely?
Only then should specialist expertise be brought to bear on what the evidence reveals.
The objective is not to have fewer intelligent people examining the problem.
It is to prevent intelligence from creating sophisticated answers to the wrong question.
Because after the third or fourth failed intervention, another solution may be the last thing the organisation needs.
If every expert has given you a credible answer and the problem still keeps returning, what if your shortage isn't expertise at all, but clarity about the question everyone has been asked to solve?
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