The right question changes everything
Five live in our discovery process. Here’s one that consistently surfaces something new.
MIT researcher Hal Gregersen interviewed more than two hundred leaders for his book Questions Are the Answer, researching what separates people who see disruption coming from those who get blindsided by it. One answer kept surfacing, again and again, regardless of industry: isolation. The higher people rise, the more the information reaching them has already been filtered, softened, and shaped to fit what they expect to hear.
Charles Schwab CEO Walt Bettinger put it plainly when Gregersen asked him to name his single biggest challenge. The answer was immediate: isolation. Not competition. Not regulation. The simple difficulty of finding out what he didn’t already know he didn’t know.
The same isolation shows up in channel relationships, just at a different altitude. A provider doesn’t need to run a company to be isolated from what an advisory firm actually thinks. It happens the moment information starts arriving pre-shaped — filtered through politeness, through what a firm assumes a provider wants to hear, through a relationship that feels too settled to disturb.
Gregersen’s point was simple: the fix isn’t more information. It’s better questions — the kind he calls catalytic, because they dissolve an assumption instead of confirming one.
In our own discovery work, five questions have proven, again and again, to surface exactly that kind of insight — things a standard partner meeting never would. We don’t share all five. But here’s one:
“If you had one wish for this partnership, what would it be?”
It’s simple enough that no one feels interrogated, and open-ended enough that the answer is almost never what you’d expect. A wish reveals something a complaint never will.
The other four live in the room, not on the page — which is exactly where a real discovery conversation belongs.
This is the fourth story in an ongoing series on how sales organizations engage with advisory partners.