Why the Apparent Problem is Rarely the Actual Problem

At some point in the last year, something clicked.

I had been building what felt like several separate things at once: an advisory practice, a teaching role, a framework, and a book. They had different names, different audiences, and different deliverables, and I kept trying to organize them as separate workstreams that happened to overlap.

Then one day I stopped trying to separate them and looked at what they had in common.

The through-line was so obvious once I saw it that I could not believe it had taken me this long.

Almost everything I do starts with the same move: figure out what the apparent problem is obscuring, get underneath the version everyone already knows how to describe, and give the thing underneath enough language that we can actually do something with it.

I do it in a classroom. I do it in a boardroom. I do it in advisory work. Near Enemies is really just a more systematic version of the same instinct.

The setting changes. The move does not.

The Stated Problem Is Usually Real

That is what I mean when I say the apparent problem is rarely the actual problem.

I do not mean the stated problem is fake or irrelevant. Usually it is very real. It is just often incomplete.

A leader who says they need to communicate better may actually be struggling with conflict. An organization that says it has an alignment problem may be operating inside a story about itself that nobody has tested against reality in a long time. An executive who says they need to make a decision may already know what the decision is and just not want to deal with what comes next.

Those are not semantic differences. They are different problems, and they lead to different work.

You can spend a tremendous amount of time trying to solve the first version and still wonder why nothing is really moving.

I have seen that happen a lot.

What Sits Underneath

Over the past several months, I have written about different versions of this pattern: strength becoming armor, loyalty becoming silence, reflection becoming rumination, accountability becoming self-blame, and competence becoming indispensability.

When I first started building Near Enemies, I thought the underlying mechanism was mostly about strengths crossing a line. Something good gets overused until it starts producing an outcome you did not intend.

That still happens. But I have gotten more interested in a slightly different question: not just whether a strength has been turned up too high, but whether it has been given a job that does not belong to it.

Empathy is a strength, but empathy does not get to decide what boundary you set. Competence is a strength, but being able to solve a problem does not automatically make it yours. Loyalty is a strength, but loyalty should not make a decision that really belongs to judgment.

Sometimes the issue is not the volume. It is what has been allowed to decide what.

I find myself asking that question constantly now, including in my own life.

What I Actually Do Through Residy

This is also why I have always had a hard time explaining exactly what I do through Residy.

It is not quite strategy. It is not traditional coaching. It is not consulting in the conventional sense either.

I have landed on diagnostic advisory, at least for now.

Usually someone comes to me with a problem they can already describe. My job is to keep asking questions until we are reasonably sure that is actually the problem.

What assumption are we treating like a fact? What are we solving for? What is driving this decision that probably should not be? Whose problem is this, actually? What has become so familiar that nobody is looking at it anymore?

Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable. Sometimes it is almost annoyingly simple.

But once we can name the actual thing, the work gets much easier.

Near Enemies grew out of doing that over and over again and realizing I kept seeing versions of the same pattern. The book is where I am trying to make the fuller argument. These articles have been a place to work some of it out in public. Residy is where I get to see whether any of it is useful when real people have real problems.

Work in Progress

The funny thing about spending this much time naming patterns is that knowing the names does not make you immune to them.

I can see a problem and immediately start figuring out how to solve it before stopping to ask whether it is mine. I can absolutely call rumination reflection because, technically, I am thinking very hard. And I can take accountability well past the point of what I am actually accountable for.

Apparently understanding the framework and consistently living it are two different skill sets.

Work in progress.

Somewhere along the way, though, I accidentally figured out what my teaching, advisory work, framework, and book had in common.

So maybe the question is the same one I increasingly start with:

What is the apparent problem, and what might it be obscuring?