Familiar problems

A funny thing happened after I sent this email a few days ago.

A longtime client wrote back, laughing, half-convinced I'd written it about them.

I hadn't.

But it felt that way to them, because it sounded exactly like a conversation we'd had before.

That's the part worth noticing.

Most of the time, our challenges don't feel generic. They feel personal. Unique. A little embarrassing. Like maybe everyone else has this figured out except us.

But step back far enough, and you start to see the pattern:

Different organizations.
Different people.
Same underlying struggles.

Unclear definitions.
Reports that feel off.
Metrics that don't quite match reality.

When someone recognizes themselves in a story that wasn't written about them, that's usually a sign of something important:

The problem isn't you.
It's just the stage of the progress you're in.

Progress doesn't come from solving a one-off mystery. It comes from realizing that other people have been here before, that there’s a pattern worth noticing -- and that there is a next step forward.

That's why these emails resonate, when they do. Not because they're clever, but because they're familiar.

And familiar problems are solvable ones.

-A.