The desire question that most advisors never ask

Most advisory engagements begin in a recognisable place. The advisor arrives, sits across from the leadership team, and asks what the problem is. The leadership team describes the problem. The advisor begins constructing the solution. The engagement proceeds with admirable efficiency to a destination nobody ever paused to confirm was the right one.

The omission is not in the diagnosis. It is in the question that ought to come before it. What do you actually want this business to become? Not what is broken. Not what the market is demanding of you. What does the version of this organisation you would be proud to have built look like, and how does its existence feel as a daily experience of leading it?

Almost no advisor asks this question. Partly because it is uncomfortable, partly because the answers tend to be slow in coming, and partly because the methodology the advisor has brought to the engagement does not have a column for it. The methodology has columns for problems and solutions. Desire does not fit cleanly into either.

The cost of skipping the question is that the engagement ends up solving the wrong problem with admirable efficiency. The strategy is sound, the systems are well-built, the deck is impeccable. Six months later the organisation is exactly where it was, except slightly more sophisticated about its discomfort.

Every engagement that carries The Andy Life name begins with the desire question. Sometimes it takes weeks to reach an answer that is genuinely useful. The work that follows is built on whatever that answer turns out to be. Anything else is the wrong work, no matter how well it is executed.