Three practitioners, three decades, and one recurring discovery: the problem an organisation names is rarely the problem it actually has.
What could motivate three senior practitioners to become first-time entrepreneurs in 2026? And after seeing the same patterns repeat across organisations and sectors for 25 years, why would they still have the appetite to do something about it?
It’s rarely the same context, or the right problem
Across the three stories we published over the last few weeks, an organisation named its problem, and each time it was the wrong one.
- Stefaan’s software team was told it lacked discipline. It was running a delivery model that piled all the risk at the very end.
- Paulina’s support team was treated as the problem, when the process around it had been built to fail.
- Bertrand’s health-insurance federation was sure IT was the issue, when the federation had never fully agreed what it aimed at in the first place.
Three sectors, three decades apart and, as so often, the complaint described the symptom, while the cause sat in the system of work.
But the lesson is the same
Each story manifested the four lenses even if we hadn’t named them yet at the time:
- Flow and Experience tend to shout the loudest in most challenges. They are where a strained system is most visible, the symptoms anyone notices, and the easiest to mistake for the problem.
- Value and Quality are typically quieter or harder to address, but ignoring them leads to short-lived successes.
Irrespective of how the problem presents itself, we learned to go beyond the symptoms and trust that people can be successful when given the right context, tools and support.
Three learnings
- You cannot redesign what you have not understood: every turnaround we have lived started with taking the time to explore and discover, mapping how the work really moved, sitting with the teams and the clients, letting the honest version of the problem come out.
- Change has to be built with people, not on them: the fixes that held were the ones the team built itself; the ones that died arrived as someone else’s framework. The best changes are the ones nobody can claim, the ones the group carries.
- Change has to be sustained, or it quietly unravels: it is not a project with a fixed end. It cannot stick if it isn’t steered and facilitated day to day, and cannot survive unless it leads to a better ability to evolve and adapt as the context changes.
So why do this again?
After 25 years each, we have watched capable leaders, teams and people lose to the same structural traps, over and over. You would think that would wear the optimism out of you.
When we reconnected in 2025, the thing that stayed with us across both our shared and distinct careers was the moments things clicked, and seeing people deliver their best once put in the right context: two management teams realising in one room they wanted the same thing; a support team finally allowed to thrive; a delivery cycle going from quarterly to daily without anyone burning out.
As direct actors in creating those moments again and again, we know they don’t happen by accident, and they are entirely repeatable. Every organisation is facing structural tensions it keeps trying to address.
That is why we started INCEPTI: to enable more organisations and leaders to go to the roots of their growth, scaling or adaptation challenges, and find the structural, resilient and lasting mechanisms to address them.
Our joint learnings and perspectives directly led to the four lenses as a practical diagnostic tool, and to our three-step services arc, Discovery, Leadership Bootcamp and Change Delivery, as the journey to create lasting change.
If any of this sounds familiar, get in touch to talk through what’s really driving your organisation’s tensions.