What detective work can teach us about understanding before deciding.
A broken window may indicate forced entry, or it may have been broken from the inside. A missing object may have been stolen, or someone may have moved it before the detective arrived. A witness may confidently describe what happened while unknowingly filling gaps in memory. The first explanation may eventually prove correct, but the detective doesn’t know that yet. Understanding requires remaining curious long enough to discover what the scene is actually saying.
The Scene Has a History
A crime scene doesn’t begin when the detective crosses the tape. The detective has entered something already in progress, and understanding what is visible now requires understanding what happened before now. Who was here? What happened first? What happened next? What changed? What doesn’t belong? What should be here but isn’t?
The scene offers evidence of what occurred, but it rarely provides its own explanation. That is why detectives listen to different accounts. No single person necessarily possesses the entire story. One witness saw what happened outside. Another heard an argument. Someone else understands the relationships among the people involved. Physical evidence may support one account while contradicting another. As these different pieces are examined together, individual observations gradually begin forming a larger picture. Even then, the detective has to remain willing to redraw that picture when new evidence demands it.
This is where detective work begins to provide an interesting lens for leadership. Leaders also enter scenes already in progress. A leader walking into a struggling organization isn’t encountering something that suddenly became troubled that morning. A team experiencing conflict has a history. So does an employee who appears disengaged, a department that doesn’t trust another department, or an organization that seems resistant to change.
What the leader sees today may be the visible result of months or years of decisions, relationships, successes, disappointments, incentives, habits, and experiences. The current situation is evidence of that history, but it is not necessarily an explanation of it.
Suppose a leader enters a team where people rarely challenge senior leadership. It would be easy to look at the situation and conclude that employees lack initiative or simply aren’t willing to speak up. Perhaps that is true. But perhaps people once did speak up and learned that disagreement accomplished nothing. Perhaps a previous leader reacted badly to criticism. Perhaps the real conversations happen before the formal meeting. Perhaps employees possess information senior leadership has never asked them to share.
There are numerous possible explanations, and the leader’s first responsibility isn’t to choose the most convenient one. It is to understand more of the scene. “I don’t know yet” can be an important starting point for understanding.
Emotion Enters the Investigation
There is another part of detective work that is easy to overlook: the detective isn’t emotionless. A crime can create anger, a victim can evoke sympathy, and a grieving family can create an intense desire for answers. A difficult witness may create frustration, while a promising piece of evidence can generate excitement. As an investigation progresses, a detective may also become increasingly confident that a particular person is responsible.
Pretending those emotions aren’t present doesn’t make the detective more objective; it may simply make their influence harder to recognize. Emotion itself isn’t necessarily the problem. Used well, it can sharpen attention and deepen engagement with the investigation. A feeling that something isn’t right may prompt another examination of the evidence. Frustration may signal that pieces of the story aren’t fitting together as expected. Empathy may encourage the detective to listen more carefully to someone who has experienced trauma. The desire to provide answers can sustain the patience and determination necessary for a difficult investigation.
Emotion can contribute to understanding when the detective recognizes it and uses it deliberately. The same emotion, however, can narrow the investigation. The desire to solve the crime can quietly become the desire to prove a particular solution. Sympathy can influence how testimony is interpreted. Anger can make one explanation feel more satisfying than another. Confidence can turn a promising theory into a conclusion before the evidence warrants it.
The discipline is not to suppress confidence, but to keep it from outrunning the evidence. The discipline isn’t to eliminate emotion from the investigation. It is to understand its presence without allowing it to determine the evidence’s meaning.
Leaders face much the same challenge because leadership situations create emotion precisely because leaders care about outcomes. Declining performance creates frustration. Slow adoption of an initiative can create impatience. A disappointing decision by a trusted employee can feel personal. A strategy a leader strongly believes in can create excitement and optimism.
Those feelings aren’t inherently problematic, nor should leaders pretend they don’t exist. They are part of how the leader is experiencing the situation and may even reveal something worth examining more closely. The difficulty begins when emotion starts determining what the leader believes the situation means.
A leader frustrated by slow adoption may begin interpreting every question as resistance. A leader enthusiastic about a new strategy may hear legitimate concerns as negativity. A leader disappointed in an employee may begin noticing every subsequent mistake while overlooking information that doesn’t fit the emerging judgment.
Emotion has moved from being part of the leader’s experience to becoming part of the leader’s evidence. Like the detective, the leader has to return to the scene.
What do I actually know? What am I feeling about what I know? How might that feeling be influencing what I think is happening? What information doesn’t fit my current explanation? What else do I need to understand before I decide?
These aren’t questions designed to suppress emotion. They are questions that help prevent emotion from becoming an unnoticed filter through which every other piece of information is interpreted. The emotion may be real. The interpretation may be wrong.
Don’t Fall in Love With Your First Theory
Eventually, detectives have to develop theories. So do leaders. The challenge is remembering that a theory is an explanation of the evidence, not the evidence itself. As additional information becomes available, a good theory becomes stronger, weaker, or changes altogether. The willingness to change an explanation isn’t evidence of poor judgment. In many cases, it is evidence that understanding is improving.
Consider the statement, “They’re resisting change.” It sounds like an observation, but it isn’t. Perhaps the observable fact is that only 40 percent of employees are consistently using the new process. Resistance is one possible explanation, but lack of training is another. Conflicting priorities might explain it, as might poor technology, unclear expectations, workload, distrust, previous failed initiatives, or legitimate problems with the new process itself.
The leader’s first theory might ultimately prove correct, but understanding requires testing it rather than merely collecting evidence that confirms it. The detective’s discipline is useful here.
What do I actually know? What am I assuming? What evidence supports my explanation? What evidence doesn’t fit? What else could explain what I’m seeing? Who might know something I don’t? What would cause me to change my mind? And, importantly, what am I feeling about this situation, and how might that be shaping what I see?
These questions don’t prevent action. They improve the understanding from which action comes.
Read the Scene
Detective work offers leadership an important reminder: don’t rush past the scene in pursuit of the solution. Observe what is there and understand something of its history. Listen to people who experienced the situation differently. Look for what doesn’t fit. Separate what you know from what you think it means. Pay attention to your emotional response without allowing that response to write the story for you.
Most importantly, remain willing to change your explanation when the evidence demands it. A good detective doesn’t arrive at a crime scene determined to prove the first theory correct. The detective is trying to understand what happened.
That understanding develops through observation, evidence, context, competing explanations, conversation, intuition, emotion, and the willingness to keep looking when the pieces don’t fit. Solving the crime matters, but the quality of the solution depends greatly on the quality of the understanding that came before it.
Leadership deserves the same discipline. Before trying to change the situation, solve the problem, correct the behavior, or influence the people involved, leaders would do well to understand the scene they have entered.
What appears obvious at first may be correct, but it may also be only one interpretation of a much larger reality. Sometimes the most important leadership realization isn’t “I know what’s happening.”
It is “I may need to look again.”
