Most leadership failures are just misdiagnosis.

Ron Heifetz at Harvard has a claim I find hard to argue with: the most common failure in leadership isn't laziness or weak strategy, it's a diagnostic failure. People in authority keep throwing technical fixes at problems that aren't technical. The fix doesn't take, the problem persists and eventually everyone's just disappointed it was never solved.

His distinction is simple. A technical problem has a known answer, expertise and procedure will close it. An adaptive challenge doesn't. It needs people to change how they work, what they value, how they behave. No tool closes that gap.

By the way, this was part of my personal research when i took this course: Exercising Leadership: Foundational Principles.

Now back to our topic. You see it most clearly in digital transformations. A pile of research says the majority of them fail and not for technical reasons. Companies make huge investments into new platforms and processes, then can't understand why adoption stalls or ROI is weak. The real problem was never the technology. It was the human change the technology demanded, and that part got no attention at all. An adaptive challenge, attacked as a technical one.

As an engineer, this one stings, because we're mostly trained to reach for the technical fix first. It's the move we trust. But some problems don't yield to better code or a new system. They yield to harder conversations.