Sometimes the most consequential problems don’t announce themselves. They show up disguised as routine questions.
I was in a room once where a pricing conversation had everyone’s attention. A contract model was being renegotiated and the new structure came back more expensive than the existing one. The instinct in the room was immediate: bring the number down. That is a reasonable instinct. Except the existing model had years of hidden costs quietly folded into it. The new structure was pricing something the old one was absorbing invisibly. You cannot compare them directly.
But the bigger question nobody was asking was why the customer wanted to renegotiate at all if they were already getting a good deal.
The answer had nothing to do with money. Something had shifted in the relationship. Trust had quietly eroded. The customer was trying to regain control of a narrative that had started to look bad on their side. The new contract structure was not about cost. It was about credibility.
The room was solving a pricing problem. The real problem was running on a completely different layer.
Then there was a different conversation. A routine check on a delay. Someone explaining what went wrong. The short version: a chain of people had each done their job correctly against the wrong starting point. By the time the error surfaced, a fix was already underway. Fast, competent, impressive. But in the focus on fixing, one thing had been missed. The people who needed to know, didn’t.
One question changed the temperature of that conversation: who knows about this?
The answer revealed the real problem. The fix was on track. The exposure wasn’t. Someone senior was one phone call away from hearing about a problem they had never been told existed. That is a different kind of risk, and it had nothing to do with the technical layer everyone was working on.
Both situations had something in common. The problem everyone was solving was not the real problem. The real problem was running on a layer nobody was looking at. In the first story it was trust and perception. In the second it was escalation and exposure. Nobody was incompetent. Nobody was malicious. They were solving what they could see.
Edward de Bono saw the same pattern and built a framework around it. Six thinking hats, structured, deliberate, designed to pull you out of your default perspective. It works. But a framework asks you to stop and think. A layer does not wait. It is already moving while you are in the room. You do not get to call a timeout and put on a hat. You either see it or you don’t.
The hats teach you to look. Experience teaches you to see.
I don’t have a checklist for this. I am not sure one exists. But there is one question worth asking quietly, before any move, in any room.
What am I not seeing right now?
Leave a Reply