Great coaches and consultants use evidence-based and systems thinking

I saw a doctor recently about a dull pain running from my hip to ankle. I ended up thinking about an issue I see often in both in coaching and consulting.

I told the doctor the pain only came if I lay on my left side. He looked at my online chart and stated, “You have arthritis.” Yes, I said, but minimal, and the pain is in my muscles. “It’s arthritis” he said. Hmm, yet the pain is in my muscles, I noted, asking if there could be another cause. “It’s arthritis!” he said bluntly. “In the muscles?” I asked. “It’s arthritis!” he snapped.

Frustrated, I left. The doctor had made a classic error in thinking, albeit subconsciously—that of ‘I’ve seen this set of symptoms before, and it was X then this must be X’. He wasn’t interested in exploring any further because he’d made his diagnosis, based on a very brief description of my pain. Many years ago, now, the concept of evidence-based medicine took hold to combat such thinking.

The idea is to look beyond first thoughts and ask what evidence supports the diagnosis. Far too many times, incorrect diagnoses have led to ineffective, sometime harmful, treatment. My pain could have resulted from arthritis, yes, but unlikely given the minimal amount I have. Only looking for more evidence can lead to understanding.

The concept eventually took hold in the business world, as evidence-based management. “What evidence is there to support our diagnosis of the issue we’re facing and the solutions we are considering?” In management, just as in medicine, it’s all too easy to assume that the same group of “symptoms” as seen earlier means the same underlying issue as last time.

How does this show up in coaching? And consulting? I’ve certainly experienced coaches who diagnose my need or problem before I’ve even finished discussing it. There are coaches who make everything fit their preferred interventions, models, tools, etc. And then clients end up frustrated because they don’t get what they really need. One coach I used decided quickly that my marketing “problem” was me not understanding how to use all the social media tools. I think she made that diagnosis based on my age as much as anything, as though those of us of a certain vintage can’t use multiple social media tools. Even though I explained I wanted to focus on just 2 or 3, she still insisted I needed to use many more. What she totally missed was that my block was in my positioning statement. Had I followed her guidance, I would have been blasting ineffective messaging all over the social media landscape and getting frustrated that I wasn’t getting coverage.

In my corporate life, I experienced too many consultants who worked on the same basis—the client’s need is always one that our models and interventions can address. A colleague of mine used to work for one of the big management consulting companies and got into trouble, eventually fired, for trying to understand the clients’ actual needs. She was told bluntly that she needed to sell the company’s proprietary interventions.

Just like doctors, coaches and consultants need to take the time to understand each client’s unique needs, environment, factors contributing to the need, and so on. Just pushing standard tools and interventions on to the client, the same ones used for every client, just doesn’t generate the results and outcomes the clients deserve. Coaches and consultants need to use evidence-based thinking to deeply understand the client’s need before making action recommendations.

Which leads to my second topic of systems thinking. The coach that misdiagnosed my problem as a lack of social media understanding not only misdiagnosed because she didn’t take time to explore what was really happening, she also assumed there was a root cause of the problem. There rarely is. This idea of a single root cause is known as reductionist thinking (or cause-and-effect thinking). Reduce the problem to a single cause, fix that, and boom, done! Not so fast.

Reductionist thinking leads to the problems-in perpetuity-syndrome. You fix the root problem, and then it reappears a short while later. Or you fix one problem, and then another one comes up. Fix that, and right away, the next problem appears. Why is this?

The answer lies in systems thinking. Systems thinking means recognizing the system within which a need, issue, or opportunity is appearing and the multiple and dynamic factors that are at play. An organization, by definition, a complex adaptive system (CAS). There are myriad factors at play, inside and outside the organization, and in constantly changing configurations. That makes it complex. An organization is adaptive because it constantly adjusts to what’s happening in the environment. Lockdown anyone? How have leaders seen profit and loss change during the COVID pandemic? Some have experienced rising profits, such as those providing online goods and services, while others have been hit extremely hard, such as restaurants.

When coaches and consultants default to reductionist thinking, once again they underserve their clients. By the time the coach or consultant has identified the believed root problem, the problem has changed because the various factors involved have changed. And that’s before anyone has even figured out the solution, let alone implemented it. One organization for which I was HR Director years ago had a major issue with data integrity in its Human Resources Information System. Over more than a decade, people kept fixing the so-called root cause of the issue. And six months later the data was out of whack again. I was so lucky that the consultant I brought in a few months after I started used systems thinking approaches and could discover why earlier solutions hadn’t worked—the historical data was corrupted when it was first entered. So yes, in a way there was a root problem in this case—corrupt data, yet it was at the system level. Previous efforts focused in fixing particular factors based on the assumption that it was that factor, and that factor alone each time that was causing the corruption. No matter how many factors got fixed, it solved nothing because the data itself was corrupt and the software just kept multiplying the errors.

My erstwhile coach not only didn’t use evidence-based thinking to diagnose my marketing issue; she didn’t use systems thinking either. That meant she couldn’t see the relationship between various marketing factors and elements, and that they work as a system—shake one, they all shake. When people yank one element in a system, hear a big crash somewhere else, and wonder what it was without considering that their yank caused the crash, that means they are not using systems thinking, not recognizing the interrelatedness of the many elements in the system. My coach could not see that just fixing the social media issue wasn’t going to help me achieve my goals—I needed to work at the whole marketing system level.

I recently got a great reminder of this in a three-day conference I recently took, run by David Newman of Do It Marketing, in which he presented his Expert Profit Formula. (Note: I was not asked to promote David in any way—I am just impressed.) Although he calls it a formula, it’s actually a fully integrated marketing system comprising several interrelated and interdependent elements. If any of the elements in my or someone else’s marketing strategy is weak, the system is weak. David made that truly clear and took us through each element, the various factors within each element, and the actions we can take to make each element strong. It was totally refreshing after seeing so many coaches focus on reductionist thinking. It gave me, and other attendees, the opportunity to look at our marketing strategy from a systems perspective and analyze what each of us needed to do in all elements of the system to get the best results and outcomes from our marketing efforts.

Good coaches and consultant use both evidence-based and systems thinking to help clients achieve more than incremental improvement. The two forms of thinking, in combination, are the lifeblood of transformational change.