How Interviews Reveal the Real Problem — Not the One You Expected
Feb 24, 2026
Why do assessments often uncover problems no one saw coming?
Because people describe how work actually happens — not how leadership thinks it happens. When you talk to 20, 40, or 60 people across an organization, the truth surfaces.
What’s an example of a hidden problem uncovered through interviews?
At a major airport preparing for a massive capital expansion, leadership believed they had a document management problem. Business case files were missing, systems were outdated, and documents were scattered across Box, file servers, and legacy tools.
But after 64 interviews in two weeks, a different truth emerged:
They didn’t have a document problem — they had an asset data problem.
What does that mean?
Teams couldn’t find the data tied to physical assets — elevators, boilers, lighting, railings, gates — because it lived in:
- Outdated maintenance systems
- Old document repositories
- Personal drives
- Scanned files with meaningless names
- Department-specific tools
When construction finished a project, engineering couldn’t maintain it because the handover data was incomplete, inconsistent, or missing.
Why does this matter for today’s workforce?
Because every industry — energy, infrastructure, tech, healthcare — is drowning in systems. More tools don’t equal more clarity. In fact, they often create more confusion.
How do organizations fix this?
By bringing together the people who own the work — construction, engineering, finance, operations — and building a shared understanding of:
- What information they need
- Where it lives
- How it moves
- Where it breaks
Only then can you design a solution that works.
What’s the big takeaway?
Your first guess about the problem is almost never the real problem. Interviews reveal the truth.
For more on uncovering the real information problem inside an organization, listen to What Counts by TrailBlazer Consulting, Episode 1.
