01
PROBLEM
Turnover is high, but the overall rate is not telling you why people leave.
Holiday-linked resignation patterns can reveal an overlooked operating condition.
02
PROBLEM REGISTRY
Begin with the pattern you can already recognize.
A repeated failure, an unexplained exception or a result that no one owns can reveal more than the label first placed on the situation.
SIGNALS WORTH TRACING
From an observable symptom to the question underneath it.
The same symptom can arise from different mechanisms. The work begins by tracing the signal through behavior, incentives, rules and information flow.
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02
PROBLEM
Visible first impressions are outweighing job-relevant signals.
A role-specific hiring and performance-prediction question.
03
PROBLEM
The same operational problem keeps being solved again and again.
Troubleshooting knowledge and prior resolution context are not being retained.
04
PROBLEM
Operational handoffs lose the context that makes urgency visible.
A service-information and cross-functional handoff question.
05
PROBLEM
Growth is being treated as demand before the demand has been tested.
A strategic demand-diagnosis and expansion question.
06
PROBLEM
Your best people become more valuable — and then leave.
A retention, incentive and organizational-behavior question.
07
PROBLEM
HQ policies are coherent, but they do not produce the intended behavior in China.
A localization, governance and behavior-design question.
08
PROBLEM
Departments complete their KPIs, but nobody owns the end-to-end result.
A cross-functional ownership and operating-model question.
09
PROBLEM
Employee distrust has no credible route into testable policy design.
A trust, voice and operating-rule question.
10
PROBLEM
New hires struggle to join a team that works well without them.
A tacit-culture and onboarding-interface question.
11
PROBLEM
A matrix exists on paper, but shared resources still belong to individual business units.
A resource-governance and cross-business allocation question.
12
PROBLEM
One exception solved an immediate problem — and suddenly everyone wants the same exception.
A compensation-governance and precedent-management question.
13
PROBLEM
The business must close, but a collective dispute is not inevitable.
A restructuring, workforce-transition and employment-risk question.
14
PROBLEM
An executive exit has become a dispute over professional reputation.
An executive-exit, negotiation-recovery and employment-risk question.
BRING A LIVE SITUATION
You do not need to name the category before the conversation begins.
Bring the operating situation as it is. The first question is what signal deserves to be traced.