STOP SOLVING PROBLEMS YOU HAVEN’T DIAGNOSED YET.
By Jann Parish, Founder, Alchemy Strategic Advisory
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HOW TO TREAT THE FIRST 30 DAYS AS A DIAGNOSTIC, NOT THE PLAN.
There is a version of the first thirty days that looks like orientation. You are handed an onboarding list and off you go to complete it. The meetings, the introductions and reports are delivered to you and you devour them like a good business leader.
That version is useful for optics, but how do you really get to the heart of the matter?
A truer version of the first thirty days moves differently, as a systematic process of reading signals that most organizations have tuned out. That familiarity among the existing team is a form of blindness. The people inside a struggling brand have usually adapted to its dysfunction like a slow leak, so gradually that the accommodation feels like the norm and the problem like white noise.
Your job in those first thirty days is to see what they can no longer see. But here’s where I stumbled in some of my onboardings: just because you have answers right away doesn’t mean you have the right answer.
RESISTING THE IMPULSE TO LEAD WITH CONCLUSIONS.
I joined Victoria’s Secret as CMO in the summer of 2017. Right at the outset of one of the greatest ideological shifts in how women were seen in the workplace and in the media. The male gaze as a marketing strategy was being called into question publicly, and I arrived with what felt like an obvious read on the moment.
I am a woman. I wear bras. I’ve done this kind of work successfully at Calvin Klein. I was sharpening the pencil in my head, ready to put it to paper.
What I was missing was that the new leader in the CEO seat was working through the same questions. And the founder believed deeply in the existing mission. My job at that moment was not to have the answer. It was to hear them, build the relationships, and then act. In that order.
Too bad that this was a case of if I only knew then what I know now.
That discipline — resisting the impulse to lead with your conclusions — is harder than it sounds when you’ve been hired precisely because of what you know. The executives who get the first thirty days right are the ones who stay curious longer than feels comfortable. Trust me, those first days are no time to try to be a hero.
WHAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY LOOKING FOR.
The first place you need to go is the bottom line, see and feel the numbers. Then understand what is actually moving the customer in that environment. Identify what no longer serves them. Test, learn, repeat.
These presenting symptoms do matter. But in my experience, the numbers rarely tell you the whole cause. They tell you the consequences.
The cause lives somewhere else entirely. Let’s unpack.
The Complacent Agreement
This first issue lives in places like the meeting where a deck is presented and everyone agrees too quickly. That silence is not alignment. It is either fear or exhaustion, and you need to know which one before you can do anything useful.
I learned that distinction the hard way. Early in one of my first lead roles, I walked into a room of twenty people and was met with twenty sets of unblinking eyes. Full out-of-body disassociation. The kind of silence that hurts your eyes and ears.
The DTC business had lost 50% of its year-over-year sales in a six-month period. The response had been to cut digital media to preserve cash and shift communication to full-file email sends. A strategy of contraction dressed up as discipline. That first day in the room when I asked the question, “do we think this is enough?”, the fingers pointed in every direction. The fit was wrong. Where was the color in the line? Did we have enough SKUs?
The general consensus was there’s too much to unpack so, nevermind, inertia wins. Cut marketing.
You cannot get honest answers in a room that has learned to perform busyness instead of doing the work. The first thirty days is not about taking silence as the answer or to get stymied by opinion. It is about creating enough trust that the room is willing to speak and to work with you.
“Develop trust first. Position the brand second. Do the diligence to really understand where your audience lives third. Then move. In that order, every time.”
The “We’ve Tried That” Helplessness
You’ll find the truth in how the brand is talked about internally. There is a specific register that organizations fall into when they have lost confidence in what they are selling. The language becomes retrospective and “heritage” gets bandied about. There is more energy in the room talking about what the brand was than anything else - the old, “we’ve tried that before”. When you hear that language, you are not dealing with a marketing problem. You are dealing with a belief problem.
There is a vital productive tension in the relationship between the creative function and the commercial function. Each pushes back on the other and the friction generates something better than either would produce alone. When that tension collapses the brand starts to drift.
More times than not, the issues live in the customer data that no one looks at anymore because, at some point, the numbers stopped saying what people wanted to hear, and the organization stopped asking.
THE MISTAKE MOST OPERATORS MAKE.
The temptation in the first thirty days is to move toward solutions. You have been brought in to fix something. The pressure to demonstrate value early is real and it is not entirely wrong.
Momentum matters, and a leader who disappears into observation for a month without signaling intent creates its own kind of anxiety.
But premature diagnosis is the most expensive mistake you can make in a turnaround.
The Victoria’s Secret lesson applies here too. I arrived with credentials, context, and a clear point of view. The specific texture of what that brand needed in that moment and what the organization could absorb, what leadership would support, what the customer was actually ready for could only be learned by listening. I needed to lead with questions and not preconceived notions.
I have seen the alternative play out consistently across many companies. The operator who arrives with a framework they have applied before, maps the new situation onto it, and starts executing before they have actually understood what is specific and particular about this brand, this team, this market position, and this moment.
Every troubled brand is in trouble in its own way. The through-line across struggling businesses is rarely the problem itself. It is the organization’s relationship to the problem. Whether they know it exists and if they named it accurately. Whether the people with the authority to fix it have the will to do so.
Your goal in the first 30 days is to simply arrive at the right questions. The rest will follow in due time.
WHAT GOOD DIAGNOSIS ACTUALLY PRODUCES.
When the first thirty days go well, you should be able to articulate three things clearly.
The presenting problem: what the business believes is wrong, in its own language.
The actual problem: what the data, the culture, and the market are telling you is wrong, which is frequently not the same thing.
The constraint: the specific organizational, financial, or leadership factor that has prevented the gap between those two things from being closed already.
The third diagnostic, the constraint, is arguably the most important and the most consistently overlooked. The gap between what a company thinks its problem is and reality does not persist by accident. Something is holding it in place. Find that, and you have found your real work.
I’ve been wrong about where that constraint lives, even when I was certain I had it right from day one.
During one engagement, my initial read was straightforward: blame the stores and the retail environment.
The customer wasn’t going to the mall. That was the issue. Clean the stores up, optimize the fleet, build it right and they will come. Confident diagnosis. Logical next step. Completely wrong.
The real constraint was SKU count. “Stack them high and watch them fly” had been the operating logic for years and it had stopped working. When customers walked through the door they didn’t want volume. They wanted access, experience, and a product story clear enough to guide them. We figured that out through trial and error, modifying stores to fit geographic needs and customer mindset rather than applying a single fix across the fleet.
The detail that sharpened everything came from an unlikely direction. The Taylor Swift Eras Tour was moving through the country at the time, and wherever she went, our sales followed. While we were debating fixture counts, Queen Taylor was telling us exactly who our customer was and what she was in the mood for.
The answer was in curation. A refined selection of the best, supported by the items that made the whole picture make sense.
“We were looking at the wrong problem. The stores weren’t the constraint. The edit was.”
I’ll say this one more time for the people in the back: the first thirty days is not the transformation. It is the foundation that makes transformation possible rather than performative.
Most people skip it. That is why most turnarounds take longer than they should.
The Transformation Brief is where Jann Parish writes about what enterprise transformation actually looks like from the inside.
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