By: Eva Keller
Most leadership consultants get hired to fix a communication problem. Steve Nolan, CEO of Ariel Group, has built a career on a different premise: he believes that what companies call a communication problem is usually a symptom, and the real issue is sitting somewhere else in the organization entirely. “You can’t train your way out of a structural problem,” Steve says. It’s a line that cuts against the instinct of most training and consulting firms, which tend to treat the presenting complaint as the actual diagnosis.
The instinct is understandable. A client says morale is low or teams aren’t communicating, and the fastest path to a signed contract is to agree and start building a workshop. Steve has watched competitors do exactly that for years. But he argues that the symptom and the cause are frequently disconnected, and that the disconnect is where the real work lives. “They’re great at describing what hurts, but they’re not always great at pinpointing what’s causing the pain, because it might be across departments,” he says. “It might be up the ladder in a certain department where information stops flowing.”
That distinction, between what a client feels and what is actually happening, is the foundation of how Ariel Group approaches every engagement. Steve describes the company’s value as sitting in the gap between the presenting problem and the real one. He illustrates it with a medical analogy that has become central to how he talks about the work: “If you got a nosebleed, it could be an allergy, or it could be something much worse. If you get a nosebleed every day for a month, you really need to go get a diagnosis, because the nosebleed isn’t your problem; you’ve got a different problem.”
Steve illustrates this with a story about his daughter’s hospital stay. A doctor walked in with a list of everything the symptoms could indicate and methodically ruled each one out before landing on an answer. “That’s exactly what we do,” Steve says. “Smart training companies, smart consulting companies, that’s what they do. Here are all the possible things; let’s just knock out the ones that aren’t it, pressure-test everything, and make sure we’re dealing with the most likely scenario.” The alternative, treating the first plausible explanation as the diagnosis, is how companies end up spending on training that doesn’t address the actual problem.
The natural counterargument is that pattern-matching from the presenting symptom is faster and cheaper, and that most organizations don’t have the patience for a full diagnosis before they see action. Steve doesn’t dispute the pressure to move quickly. His point is that speed without diagnosis just moves the same unsolved problem into a new form, whether that’s a training program that doesn’t change behavior, a leader who reacts to last year’s numbers without context, or a sales team pouring more spend into new logos while existing accounts contract. The fix isn’t slower work. It’s asking a harder question before committing to an answer.
That’s ultimately Steve’s case for how leadership problems should be approached at every level, from the individual conversation to the enterprise dashboard: know the difference between what hurts and what’s causing it, or keep paying to treat the wrong thing.
