The Diagnosis

How it runs

Five questions, in that order

The order is not a formality. Each answer narrows the next question, and skipping one produces a diagnosis that sounds right and treats the wrong thing. On the right is a real sentence somebody arrived with, taken apart.

“I struggle to use business phrases.”

1. What?

   Dimension

   Which of the five is involved. Where the capability sits.

   Message. The words themselves.

2. Where?

   Application

   Which room it shows up in. The same person is often fine in one and lost in another.

   Client meetings.

3. When?

   Context

   Under what conditions. Seniority in the room, time pressure, noise, tiredness, what is at stake.

   Particularly when the senior client is in the room.

4. Why?

   The gap

   Which of four things is actually in the way. This is the part almost nobody thinks to ask.

   They know the phrases. Under pressure they do not reach them.

5. What changes?

   The prescription

   One named thing to work, in an order, at a dose, with a way to tell when it is done.

   Retrieval under pressure, not vocabulary.

Read the right hand column on its own and it is a different sentence from the one they came in with. That is the whole of it. They arrived believing they had a vocabulary problem. They have a retrieval problem, in one room, under one condition, and vocabulary drills would have kept them busy for months without touching it.

The why

Four ways the same thing breaks

Two people fail identically in the same room for entirely different reasons, and the same advice will help one and set the other back. So the fourth question has four possible answers, and which one it is decides everything that follows.

You cannot practise your way out of not knowing, and you cannot read your way out of a habit.

The honest part

Sometimes the answer is the room

Context is a filter before it is a finding. Somebody says they communicate perfectly well until the room is noisy. The temptation, and it is a strong one, is to reach for a capability. Presence, perhaps, or projection.

The better question is asked first: if the condition changed, would the problem go? Put that person in a quiet room, and if they are immediately fine, there was never a capability gap to find. There was a noisy room.

A diagnosis that manufactures a weakness out of a constraint is worse than no diagnosis. It sells work nobody needed.

So one of three things is true, and the session says which. The condition can be changed, in which case change it. It cannot be changed and has to be worked inside, which is a real and different piece of work. Or the condition was never the cause, and now that has been ruled out properly rather than assumed.

The output

What you leave with

A result here is three parts and reads as a sentence. Delivery, at pause, as a habit. Precise enough to prescribe against, which a dimension on its own is not.

With it: the room and the condition it shows up in, so you can see it happening rather than take my word for it. One named thing to work on. The order it gets worked in, the dose, and how you will know it is done. How that correction is then run is the five steps, and it is the same sequence for everybody.

What you do not leave with is a list. One thing is named. That is the point of spending ninety minutes finding it.

Before this

Nothing here starts cold

A Diagnosis follows a first conversation, because ninety minutes of close attention is worth arranging properly and both of us should know it is the right use of them. Before that, the Assessment is where most people begin: it reports what your own answers point at, which is genuinely useful and is not a diagnosis, because three of the five dimensions cannot be observed from the inside at all.

What it involves and what is asked of you is explained in full, live, before anything is agreed.