When Good Leaders See Different Problems

I once drove an hour and a half to an emergency board session convinced I knew exactly how it would end.

I learned something that day that I still use: before I decide someone is wrong, I want to know what problem others think we are trying to solve.

The organization was in serious financial trouble. Based on what I had heard, including the executive director’s assessment, I accepted bankruptcy as a foregone conclusion. I also decided the organization had outlived its purpose. The drive hardened that conclusion. I was going to vote to close it, and I expected to be headed home within an hour.

Early in the meeting, one board member spoke up.

“Can I say something?”

He believed we had allowed the organization to become fraternal when we should have been educating our members. We could offer valuable education and training, he said, and become the single source our members relied upon for their continuing education credits.

The moment he finished, I knew this was not going to be a one-hour meeting.

He had not made the financial trouble disappear. He had separated a failing operating model from a purpose that might still matter, something I had not considered.

The Room Was Carrying More Than the Numbers

The distinction sounds obvious today. I did not see it when I walked into that room. We had operated as a fraternal organization for so long that the drift had begun to look like the organization itself. His suggestion brought our original purpose back into the discussion.

Several directors remained convinced that we should shut it down. One new possibility did not end the argument. It gave us something else to argue about.

Hours into the discussion, we learned that some of the directors arguing to close the organization also served on the board of a competing organization. The rest of us didn’t know that when the meeting began. Serving on the other board did not make their position wrong. It did mean we had been weighing it without knowing part of the institutional context.

At some point I thought of the old movie 12 Angry Men. It felt as though a bunch of us had been locked in a jury room and told not to leave until we had an answer. We all came in with our minds partly made up. Mine was completely made up.

As the discussion continued, people began testing parts of their own positions instead of merely defending them. Some arguments weakened. Other directors began adding ideas to a direction they hadn’t supported at the start of the day. We did not agree quickly, but the discussion changed.

That required each of us to step beyond what our own experience had taught us long enough to listen and learn from the rest of the room.

I had arrived prepared to vote the organization out of existence. By the end of the day, I was arguing to keep it alive and rebuild it around education.

What Actually Changed That Day

We did not save the organization that day. We scheduled another meeting. The work continued, and within about a year the organization became education-focused and operated in the black.

When we left, nobody knew whether the education idea would work. Closing was still a reasonable choice. We had found another possibility, and now we had to see whether we could make it real.

The numbers did not improve during our meeting. What changed was the problem we believed we were there to solve. We began the day asking whether the existing organization could survive. Before we left, we were also asking whether a worthwhile purpose could be served differently.

The Context Stack

In Hold the Horizon™, I call one way of reading a room the Context Stack. It has four layers: individual, interpersonal, institutional, and historical. A consequential discussion carries more than the information printed on the agenda. A person’s experience, the relationships among the people present, the institutional roles they carry, and the organization’s history all affect what they notice and what they believe is at stake.

The balance sheet showed the financial trouble. It did not show that we had drifted from the reason the organization existed, that several directors also served on another board, or what I had talked myself into during the drive.

Until that one voice spoke, I took the negative financials as proof that the organization was doomed. I had never stopped to ask whether the operation was failing while the purpose was still useful.

Seeing the context did not make the financial threat less real or prove the new idea would work. It stopped me from treating my conclusion as the only sensible one.

What Else Could Be Shaping This Moment?

When a capable person sees the problem differently, I have learned to pause on one question: what else could be shaping this moment? Without that pause, a room full of reasonable people can vote on the wrong problem.

I spent ninety minutes deciding that the organization had no future. Another board member needed only a few minutes to show me a future I had not considered. He didn’t prove it would work. He made it possible for the board to find out.

The information reported in this document, financial and otherwise, should not be construed as either legal or investment advice, nor does it represent the views of ACUMA, its Board of Directors, its staff or its members. The author presents information current at the time of publication and is designed to educate ACUMA members and others interested in the credit union mortgage lending industry.