It's well documented that around 67% of well-formulated strategies fail. Most of the analysis pins that on execution - the plan was fine, the delivery wasn't.
I'd like to suggest a less comfortable possibility. What if a good number of those strategies were solving the wrong problem in the first place?
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg's research is uncomfortable reading on exactly this point: 85% of respondents agreed their organisations were bad at diagnosing problems, and 87% agreed that this flaw carried a significant cost. Read that twice. Most organisations know they're poor at diagnosis, and know it's expensive, and carry on regardless.
What a diagnostic sprint is
A diagnostic sprint is a structured, time-boxed process for working out what's actually wrong. Rather than a problem-solving effort that drags across weeks or months, it compresses the work into an intensive session lasting a few days - and it brings deliberately diverse people into the room, because the person outside the discipline is usually the one who asks the question nobody inside it thought to ask.
It fits naturally with an active strategy approach: plan for the short term, stay flexible on the long term, and revisit as the market moves.
What it looks like when it works
A B2B client came to us convinced they had a lead generation problem. Conversions were down, so the instinct - a completely reasonable one - was to spend more on advertising and drive more traffic.
The sprint found something else. The business had expanded, and in doing so the sales process had fragmented. Good quality leads were arriving and then not being nurtured through to anything.
That matters enormously, because it inverts the answer. Investing in lead conversion would eventually be the right thing to do - but only after the sales process was fixed. Do it first and you'd have spent more money to push more leads into a process that was already losing them. You'd have made the problem worse, expensively, while feeling productive.
That's Wedell-Wedellsborg's finding in one story.
Spending more to drive traffic into a broken sales process doesn't fix the problem. It makes it worse, expensively, while feeling productive.
Two techniques you can use yourself
You don't need us in the room to start. Two of the most useful tools are also two of the oldest.
The Five Whys. Deceptively simple: ask why, then ask why of the answer, and keep going. It works because most teams stop at the second why, which is roughly where the symptom lives and the cause doesn't. It takes discipline to keep going when the answers start getting uncomfortable - which, incidentally, is the sign you're getting close.
The fishbone diagram. Kaoru Ishikawa's cause-and-effect diagram, originally built for manufacturing quality control. Its value is that it forces you to consider multiple categories of cause rather than seizing on the first plausible one - which is precisely the failure mode of a busy leadership team.
Why the compression matters
The time-box isn't a gimmick. It does two things.
It accelerates the answer, so you can act while the problem still looks like the one you diagnosed. And it forces collaboration, because with only days available, you can't take turns sending documents to each other. Everyone has to be in the room, which is the only condition under which the awkward question actually gets asked.
At Distinction, the diagnostic sprint sits in the Diagnose stage of our diagnose, define, deliver approach - an approach we've used with hundreds of clients over twenty-odd years, largely because the alternative is watching people build the wrong thing very competently.
The question
Think of the biggest initiative currently on your roadmap. Who diagnosed the problem it's meant to solve, and how? If the honest answer is "someone senior asserted it in a meeting and nobody wanted to argue" - that's not a strategy. That's a hunch with a budget attached.
Worth a conversation? Book a short discovery call with the team at Distinction - no pitch, just an honest look at whether you're solving the right problem.
