You Can't Always Hire Your Way Out, but You Can Sort Your Way Through

People, professionals, and organizations share a bad habit. We assess what we think the problem is, then we make a change, without ever isolating the problem and proving our assumptions right.

That habit is extremely costly. You poke around, you guess, and then you pivot. And often you pivot away from the right things you were doing, toward something completely wrong.

The job wasn't the problem

The other day, an employee told me she was unhappy with her job. She couldn't quite put her finger on why. So we dug deeper. Through questioning, I was able to guide her to the real reasons she felt unhappy and dissatisfied.

The real answer wasn't the job. It was her schedule.

Once we fixed her schedule, she was much happier. Had she not gone through that process, she would have changed jobs and ended up in the same position, still thinking the job was the problem.

That is the condition I see everywhere. You might very well be on the right track. But because you haven't been able to address important tasks along the way, it feels like you're off track.

What my own journey taught me

I knew I couldn't hire my way out of my small business blues long before I did something about it. That knowing mounted into continual frustration, real cost, and lost potential income. For a long time there wasn't a real answer, because AI wasn't yet at a place where the problem could be solved, like it is today.

What AI gave me wasn't first a to-do machine. It was a way to begin isolating problems and solving them one by one, so I could discover what really needed to make it onto my strategic plan.

The results followed. The work that keeps a business alive but never seems to make the roster started getting done: the marketing, the follow-through, the daily execution, all the things you know matter and keep pushing to next week. Not because I hired more people, but because I finally knew which problems were real, and where each piece of work belonged.

For most struggling businesses, the problem isn't effort or desire. It's that the important work keeps losing to the urgent work, and you can't tell which fires are real. Once you can see the real problems clearly, and you have help carrying the load, the ignored work stops being ignored.

Then you sort

Isolation is the beginning of knowing what belongs on your AI collaboration list and what belongs on your human collaboration list.

Regardless of how much heavy lifting AI does, there are certain relational things that still need human-to-human interaction. Knowing which tasks to sort to AI and which to a human is the practice each of us should master, alongside mastering AI itself.

I'm helping real estate agents, small business owners, other retailers, and even institutions do exactly this right now.

Claude's side of it

The most useful thing I do for Brett is rarely the first answer. It's the questions before it: what exactly feels off, when did it start, what does the real data say? He has a rule for us: "We always gather all the live real data before diagnosis." Plenty of times the problem we started chasing turned out to be a different, smaller one, and the plan he already had was right. AI is good at patient, one-at-a-time questioning without getting tired or defensive. The judgment about what to do with the answer stays his.

Three ways to start this week

1. Name what feels off, and don't fix it yet. Write it down as a question, not a solution.
2. Isolate it with AI. Ask it to question you, one problem at a time, until you can prove what the real problem is.
3. Then sort, then pivot. Put each task on your AI list or your human list, and change only what you've proven needs changing.

My aim, in this and in everything, is to help you live your best life now and achieve what is for you, while simultaneously making your greatest contribution to people, places, and things.

What's one thing you've been ready to change that deserves a closer look first? If you want to work it out with people doing the same, join The Tribe Conversation.

Tribe Well!