DIAGNOSIS
When Expertise Meets Certainty
Organisations often claim to value expertise, while in practice, they frequently reward certainty. These are not the same thing. One of the most common patterns in business is surprisingly simple: a company encounters a problem. The first instinct is not always to understand it, but to find a solution that has already worked somewhere else – a framework, a methodology, a software platform. A ‘best practice’. The reasoning appears sound. If another organisation has already solved a similar problem, why reinvent the wheel?
The answer is that organisations rarely inherit someone else’s problem. They inherit someone else’s solution. Those are very different things.
Every organisation has its own history, incentives, people, culture, constraints and invisible dependencies. A solution that performs exceptionally well in one environment may fail completely in another, not because the solution is flawed, but because the context is different.
Why Questions Make People Uncomfortable
The more experience one gains, the more uncomfortable a simple truth becomes: It depends. That may be the least satisfying answer in business.
It is also often the most accurate. Competent professionals rarely begin with recommendations. They begin with questions.
What are we trying to achieve? What has already been attempted? What constraints exist? What is actually causing the problem?
These questions do not slow progress. They prevent expensive mistakes. Unfortunately, questions also create uncertainty. And uncertainty is uncomfortable. It delays decisions. It complicates presentations. It makes simple narratives impossible.
Borrowed certainty removes all of that. “We implemented industry best practice.” “We adopted the proven framework.” “This worked for Company X.” – Confidence arrives immediately. Responsibility quietly leaves the room.
If the initiative succeeds, everyone celebrates. If it fails, the explanation is already prepared.
The framework was proven. The software was an industry leader. Nobody made the wrong decision.
The circumstances simply turned out to be different. Ownership has been outsourced together with judgement.
Borrowed certainty is attractive because borrowed certainty is defensible. This pattern appears more often than we might like to admit. Imagine an organisation struggling with declining performance. An experienced operator suggests: “Before we change anything, let’s understand why the system behaves this way.” Another proposal arrives: “This model has already been implemented successfully in hundreds of organisations.” Which proposal feels easier to approve?
Not necessarily because it is better. Because it is safer. It carries external validation. It reduces political risk. It allows decisions to be defended before they have been tested. This is not an argument against external expertise. Nor is it an argument against best practice. Both can be enormously valuable.
When Best Practice Replaces Diagnosis
The problem begins when borrowed certainty replaces diagnosis rather than informing it. Best practice should be the beginning of a conversation, and not the end of one.
A company struggling with awareness adopted an advertising framework that had worked successfully in another market. The emphasis was placed almost entirely on media weight and campaign volume. The assumption was simple: if sufficient exposure had produced results elsewhere, repeating the formula would produce them again.
What the framework did not inherit was the context. The company’s social channels were virtually empty. Brand awareness was minimal. Community engagement barely existed. The campaign faithfully reproduced the mechanics of success while missing the conditions that had made success possible.
The framework performed exactly as designed. The environment did not.
Analysis cannot be replaced by assumed efficiency. Details matter. Assumptions are often lethal.
The Cost of Borrowed Confidence
The irony is that organisations often describe themselves as valuing competence. Yet competence rarely presents itself as certainty. Competence asks inconvenient questions. Competence introduces complexity. Competence refuses to promise outcomes before understanding the system.
Sales, on the other hand, often begins with confidence. Confidence is persuasive. Diagnosis is slower. One sells more easily than the other.
Every organisation contains functions that generate visible value and functions that enable it. During periods of financial pressure, enabling functions often appear easier to reduce because they are perceived as cost rather than capability. One organisation facing financial pressure decided to protect sales while repeatedly reducing operational capacity. The reasoning appeared logical. Sales generated revenue. Operations represented cost.
On paper, the decision was easy. Operationally, it dismantled the very system required to fulfil the promises being sold. Sales continued successfully. Until they succeeded… and there was nobody left capable of delivering the work. The organisation spent the following six months rebuilding capabilities it had deliberately removed.
There is another irony.
Experience itself is often treated inconsistently. Recruiters search for candidates with relevant industry knowledge. Companies seek agencies that understand their category. Boards ask whether someone has “done this before.” Until that experience becomes inconvenient.
Borrowed certainty has a mirror image: borrowed suspicion. Just as companies import frameworks without context, they sometimes reject relevant experience without context too. It is not a secret that quite often people seek solutions/managers/agencies with applicable experience, someone who may have worked at least inside the category and knows the market if not the brand. Well, once I was at a sales pitch meeting representing an agency, and the marketing director we were talking to delivered this speech: “So, I can see you are a very experienced agency with lots of interesting cases under your belt. But as you have mentioned, you worked with Brand X two years ago, and brand X is our direct competitor… I can’t give you the brief, because you’ve worked with our competitor. Goodbye.”
Companies often ask whether an agency understands their category. Sometimes they discover the answer is ‘yes’. And suddenly that experience becomes a liability rather than an advantage.
Context Travels Poorly
Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding surrounding best practice is hidden inside its name. Best practice is not a universal answer. It is a documented outcome achieved under a specific set of circumstances. Remove the circumstances, and only the procedure remains. Procedures travel well. Context does not. That is why diagnosis can never be replaced. It can only be postponed. Sooner or later, every imported certainty collides with local reality. The organisations that adapt continue learning. Those that continue defending the borrowed answer usually begin changing the organisation to fit the solution instead of changing the solution to fit the organisation. At that point, the original problem has become secondary. Protecting the certainty becomes the priority. And perhaps that is the real danger.
The most expensive mistakes in business rarely begin with ignorance, they begin with borrowed confidence.