There is a particular kind of anxiety that arrives when we feel unwell but cannot name what is wrong. We sense that something is off, a dull discomfort, a vague wrongness, but we lack the vocabulary to describe it with any precision. In these moments, we do something our species has done for a very long time. We seek out someone who knows more than we do. We go to a doctor.
What we are really asking of the doctor is not medication. It is diagnosis. We want to understand what is happening inside us before we agree to any plan for changing it.
There are other occasions when we arrive at the pharmacy already knowing our diagnosis. We have been here before. We recognize the symptoms, we know the cause, and what we need is not a diagnostician but a guide through the available options. The pharmacist serves a real and valuable function. She helps us navigate treatment once the nature of the problem is already clear.
And then there is the third case, perhaps the most modern one. We know what is wrong and we know what to take, so we go and buy it ourselves. Or we let something else take over. We allow whoever appears in our social media feed to influence our choice. An influencer we admire has mentioned a supplement that bears no obvious relation to what ails us. Our mind, ever obliging, finds a connection. We buy it anyway, partly because it might help, but mostly because purchasing what someone we admire was paid to promote feels, briefly, like intimacy. We choose because someone looked into a camera with enough warmth that we forgot they were not looking at us.
The sequence of diagnosis, then treatment, has a logic that we rarely question when it comes to our bodies. We do not scroll through social media to identify an abdominal pain. We do not go to the pharmacist for a diagnosis. We go because the diagnosis is already done. We understand, instinctively, that skipping the diagnostic step is not a shortcut. It is a different kind of mistake. In medicine, at least, that mistake can be fatal.
It is puzzling, then, that we abandon this logic almost entirely when the pain is in our organizations rather than our bodies. When a company feels stuck, when there is conflict no one will name or an ennui that spreads through teams without explanation, the most common response is to reach for a framework. Someone has read about a model on LinkedIn. A consultant arrives with a set of established tools. An influencer who has never set foot inside a struggling organization, but has read widely about those who have, offers their signature program. These are all, in one way or another, pharmacists. The more generous interpretation is that they genuinely believe in the treatments they offer. The less generous one is that they are paid to believe. They are there to help us choose between treatments. But no one has yet asked what the diagnosis is.
We suffer less from not knowing than from the cost of pretending that we do.
The aspiration is easy enough to articulate. Most organizations, when pressed and stressed, want something like more trust, more creativity, less fear. But what made them fearful in the first place? What happened, in the founding of the company or in some forgotten crisis or in the particular dynamic between two people who have since left, that made the current culture calcify? These are diagnostic questions. They require someone willing to sit with the uncertainty of not yet knowing the answer. We are impatient with uncertainty. It is uncomfortable to say ‘we don’t yet know what is wrong.’ It is far easier to adopt a framework and begin. But the discomfort of a proper diagnosis is, in the end, far smaller than the cost of treating the wrong thing.
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