For the past few weeks, I’ve been sick. Not the kind of sick where you take a day off, drink some tea, and move on. The kind where every day seems to bring a new test, a new concern, and another conversation you never wanted to have.
Last week, I had a CT scan. The results were not what I hoped for. In fact, they led to yet another specialist appointment and now a consultation with a surgeon later this month.
The irony is that the surgery being discussed is one I swore I would never go through again. Years ago, after the first experience, I remember saying, “I would rather be dead than do that a second time.”
And yet here I am.
What struck me over the past few days is how closely this mirrors what I see inside manufacturing companies.
Most business problems begin as symptoms. A missed shipment. A customer complaint. A dip in margins. A sales slowdown. A quality issue. An employee turnover problem.
At first, the symptom seems manageable. You take some pain relievers. You work around it. You tell yourself it will get better next quarter. You reassure yourself that you’ve always done things this way and things have worked out before. Sometimes they do. But sometimes the symptom is signaling something much deeper.
The CT scan doesn’t create the problem. It simply reveals what was already there. The same is true in business.
When I conduct a growth strategy engagement, sales assessment, Voice-of-Customer interviews, competitive market research, or a SWOT analysis, I often find that the issue leadership believes they have is not the issue they actually have.
The declining revenue isn’t really a sales problem. The sales problem isn’t really a marketing problem. The marketing problem isn’t really a lead generation problem.
Often, all of those symptoms point to something deeper: a misalignment between strategy, sales, marketing, operations, customer expectations, and market realities.
Nobody enjoys discovering that the problem is larger than expected. Nobody gets excited when the diagnosis requires a difficult intervention. But avoiding the diagnosis doesn’t improve the outcome.
In manufacturing, I’ve seen companies delay CRM implementation because it feels disruptive. I’ve seen leaders postpone customer research because they’re afraid of what they might hear. I’ve seen organizations resist updating their sales process because the old one worked for twenty years. Until it didn’t.
The uncomfortable truth is that growth often requires confronting the very thing you hoped you would never have to deal with again.
But when the data tells you something is wrong, the goal isn’t to wish for a different diagnosis. The goal is to understand the reality in front of you and make the best decision possible.
As I prepare for my surgical consultation, that’s the lesson I’m sitting with. In medicine and in business, the sooner you understand the real problem, the sooner you can begin working toward a solution.