Learning to walk through walls

I have a running joke that one of the most useful things I do when coaching or consulting is to say to people “Yes, that does sound like a problem. Have you tried solving it?”

Part of why this is a joke is that actually most of the useful work happens prior to the point - the hard part is actually articulating what is going wrong well enough that it seems like a soluble problem - but there is genuinely something useful about this, because often it feels people are looking for permission.

Without the external prompt, solving their problem is not something they noticed that they were allowed to do.

  1. ​A Burglar's Guide to the City​