What looks like the problem is often only part of it.
Companies reach us with the diagnosis already made. A hiring plan. A reorganisation. A tooling decision that has been debated for two quarters. The work almost always starts by testing whether that diagnosis holds, because the expensive problems at this stage are structural, and structural problems present as something else.
An agency that came to us to plan a hiring round is the clearest version of this. The saturation was real. The cause was not headcount.
Most of what we are brought into falls into one of four.
They overlap more often than they arrive alone.
Founder dependency
Growth still depends on a handful of people. Decisions escalate, managers wait rather than decide, and hiring has not reduced the load.
Execution
Strategy, people and budget are all in place, and the priorities that matter still move at the wrong speed.
Transformation
A change everyone agrees on, with the ownership question still open.
Diagnosis is not a discovery call.
It is executive interviews, a look at how work actually moves rather than how the process document says it moves, and a read of where decisions stall. It produces a named constraint, the cost of leaving it in place, and a recommended intervention. You keep that whether or not the work continues.