We ban ourselves from proposing a single fix for the first two hours.

TL;DR: The standard fix for a distorted answer is to separate the room, interviewing people away from the CEO so authority doesn't color what they say. My partner Ryan Deiss and I do the opposite: we put the whole executive team in one room, together, and control the distortion with a rule instead of with separation. For the first two hours, nobody, including us, is allowed to propose a single fix. What surfaces is usually the actual problem, not the story the group has already agreed to tell about it.

Most consultants interview a leadership team one at a time, and they do it away from the founder or CEO on purpose. The logic is sound. If the most powerful person in the room is sitting in on every conversation, everyone else's answers bend toward whatever that person seems to want to hear. Separate the interviews, and you remove the bend.

Ryan and I run it the opposite way. We get the entire executive team on one Zoom call, at the same time, including whoever the dominant personality is, which very often is the founder or the CEO. We don't separate anybody. We control the distortion with a rule instead of with distance.

It sounds riskier than it is. The instinct is that putting the loudest person in the room with everyone else guarantees you get their version of events back, amplified. That's true if the room is left to run on its own instincts. It stops being true the moment you take the one move that room would normally reach for, proposing a fix, off the table entirely.

The rule is simple to state and hard to hold to: for the first two hours, nobody is allowed to make a single recommendation or suggestion. Not us, not them. Ryan is the one who enforces it, and he's told me directly that it's hard for him specifically, because he likes to think out loud in real time. The rule doesn't care. Two hours of pure discovery, no fixes, full stop.

What we're actually doing in that window is asking every executive, one at a time, the same binary question: what should we keep doing, and what should we stop. I like to sharpen it further and ask people what they're doing that makes them think, why the heck are we doing that? Because most of what surfaces in a session like this isn't new information. It's stuff that's already been said, in hallways and side conversations, and just never said out loud to the whole room at once.

While that's happening, we're not just listening to the words. Ryan watches faces on the screen for the flinch, the small cringe when someone hears something they disagree with but won't say out loud. That's the moment worth naming, gently, in the room. Enter the danger a little. That reaction is usually where the real disagreement is hiding, and it never shows up if you interviewed that same person privately, because there'd be nothing on screen to react to.

Here's the part that took me a while to see clearly. Separating the room doesn't remove distortion. It just moves it somewhere you can't watch it happen. A private interview still has an audience of one, the consultant, and people still shape their answers for that audience. You've traded one distortion for another and lost the ability to see either.

Putting the room together and banning the fix does something different. It doesn't pretend the distortion isn't there. It watches for it, live, and treats the flinch as data instead of noise. One of us asks the questions. The other one watches the faces. That's the whole method, and it only works because nobody in the room, us included, is allowed to skip ahead to a solution before the actual disagreement has been named.

By the end of two hours, what's usually left isn't a dozen problems. It's one to three real constraints, the ones underneath everything else people brought up.

We also built a small habit into how we listen that turned out to matter more than it should. When someone says something worth holding onto, one of us plays it back before responding to it at all: here's what I heard you say, did I get that right, or did I mischaracterize it. It's a small thing. It also means the room spends its energy correcting our understanding instead of defending a position, which is a much easier argument to have, and a much more honest one.

We don't walk back into the room and hand over an answer either. When it's time to bring solutions, we use an old structure, one we didn't invent. Ryan will tell you flatly it goes back to somebody at IBM, decades ago: one problem, three possible solutions, one recommendation. The value isn't that the framework is ours. It's that it forces you to show your work. The three options usually come straight out of what the room already said, so when we land on the recommendation, nobody's wondering where it came from.

You don't need us in the room to run a version of this yourself. Pick the disagreement your team keeps having without resolving. Get everyone in one place at the same time, including yourself. Set a real rule: no proposing solutions until everyone's actually said what they think is wrong, not what they think is diplomatic. Watch faces, not just the agenda. Then, and only then, put three real options on the table before you name the one you'd pick.

What we charge for is the half-day itself, four hours, and we don't like trading dollars for hours, so we underwrite it against a serious minimum benefit to the business, not against our time. But the mechanism inside that half-day costs nothing to borrow. The discipline of withholding the fix isn't proprietary. Neither is watching the room instead of managing it.

Most founders think their constraint is intelligence, that if they just found the smartest possible answer, the problem would resolve. Usually the constraint is something less flattering: nobody's actually said the real thing out loud yet, in the same room, at the same time, without someone rushing to fix it before it's even been named. The answer is very often already sitting in the room. It's just never been asked for, together, under a rule that doesn't let anyone skip to the end.

— Roland

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