SHIFT in Practice: Insight

What if the problem you’re trying to solve isn’t actually the problem?

In this episode of The Leadership Shift, Nicola Martin FBCS explores Insight, the I in her SHIFT framework: Situation, Human, Insight, Forward and Take Action.

Drawing on examples from modern technology teams, Nicola looks at what happens when people unknowingly become the contingency plan, why assumptions about AI adoption can hide what’s really going on, and why understanding the ‘why’ matters before deciding what to do next.

For people working and leading in technology who want to think differently about their work, careers and the challenges they face.

Hosted by Nicola Martin FBCS, Career and Leadership Coach for people in technology. Visit nmcandc.com to learn more about coaching, speaking and The Leadership Shift newsletter.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Leadership Shift. I'm Nicola Martin. I'm a career and leadership coach for people in technology. Over the past couple of episodes, we've explored the first two parts of the shift framework. We started with situation, taking the time to understand what's happening before rushing to solve it. Then we looked at human because every challenge at work is experienced by a person, and if we ignore that, we often miss what's really going on. Today we're moving on to the I in Shift, insight. Before we dive in, let's remind ourselves where we are. Shift is the framework I use in my coaching practice, and each letter builds on the one before it. So for example, situation asks what's happening. Human reminds us to understand the person behind the problem. Insight helps us discover what's really happening beneath the surface. Next comes forward where we explore the options available to us, and finally we take action, where we decide what we're actually going to do. There's a deadline, a production issue, a difficult conversation, a delivery problem. Our instinct is to fix it. But without understanding the situation, the human and the insight, there's a real risk that we solve the wrong problem. That's why insight sits right at the heart of shift. When people hear the word insight, they sometimes think it means having a brilliant idea or a sudden light bulb moment. Sometimes it does, but more often, insight is quieter than that. It's recognizing a pattern. It's noticing an assumption you've been making without realizing it. It's understanding why something keeps happening rather than simply accepting that it does. One of the reasons I think this matters so much in technology is because we're trained to solve problems. That's what we do. Software engineers solve problems, quality engineers solve problems, architects solve problems, product managers solve problems, engineering managers solve problems. It's one of the reasons many of us enjoy working in technology. But coaching asks us to slow down for just a moment. Before solving the problem, we need to work out whether or not we're solving the right problem. Let me give you an example. I was having a conversation only last week with someone working in a software engineering team. They were frustrated because delivery plans kept slipping whenever someone was on annual leave, off sick, or unexpectedly unavailable. The immediate reaction was that the team needed more people, or perhaps they simply needed to plan better. They're all reasonable conclusions. But insight asks us to look a little deeper. As we talked, it became clear that the real issue wasn't the people, it was the way the work had been designed. Certain areas of the product relied heavily on one person's knowledge. Some technical decisions could only be made by one individual. There were parts of the system that only one engineer really understood. The people had unknowingly become the contingency plan, or perhaps more accurately, the lack of contingency. In modern engineering, we talk a lot about reducing bottlenecks. Agile has encouraged us to spread knowledge, collaborate across disciplines, and avoid creating single points of failure. Yet sometimes we become so focused on optimizing delivery that we forget the system is made up of human beings. People take annual leave, people get ill, people have caring responsibilities, people have emergencies, people need to take time away from work. In fact, one of the ironies of modern agile ways of working is that in our drive for speed, flow, and efficiency, we can sometimes lose sight of something that older project approaches, for all their flaws, often did better. Remembering that people are human beings, not interchangeable resources to be pushed through a delivery plan. None of these things should be treated as unexpected interruptions. They're entirely normal. The insight wasn't that someone needed to work harder or cancel their holiday or avoid taking sick leave. The insight was recognizing that the team had unintentionally built a system that depended on everyone being available all the time. Once they saw that, the conversation changed. Instead of asking, how do we stop people becoming bottlenecks? They started asking, how do we build a team where knowledge is shared, resilience is designed in, and people can step away without the whole system falling apart. That's a completely different conversation, and it starts with insight. Here's another example. Many organisations have invested heavily in AI over the past couple of years. They've introduced coding assistance, AI search tools, or generative AI into everyday work. Leadership expects productivity to improve. Some people embrace the technology immediately and others barely use it. The easy assumption is that people are resisting change, but insight encourages us to ask a very different question. What's stopping people from trusting the tool? As those conversations develop, the answers are rarely technical. One engineer worries that relying too heavily on AI will weaken the skills they've spent years developing. Another has seen AI confidently generate code that looked convincing but introduced subtle defects. Someone else simply isn't sure when AI is helping and when professional judgment should take over. The insight isn't whether people are using AI. It's understanding what confidence, trust, and professional judgment look like in a team that's learning to work alongside it. One of my favourite moments in coaching is when a client pauses halfway through a sentence. They stop talking, not because they've run out of words, but because they've just realized something. They've connected two ideas that never seemed connected before. Those moments are rarely dramatic. Often they're very quiet, but they've changed everything. Because once you've genuinely seen something, it's very difficult to unsee it. It's about understanding enough to make a decision next time. That's all. And if those assumptions weren't true, what different possibilities might you begin to see? You don't need to answer these questions immediately. Sometimes insight arrives during a coaching session. Sometimes it happens on a walk, driving home, over a coffee, or halfway through a conversation with someone who simply asks a different question. Give yourself permission to notice. One of the things I've learnt from working in technology is that we're surrounded by information. We have sprint metrics, delivery dashboards, incident reports, velocity charts, AI-generated analytics, they're all valuable, but they mostly tell us what happened. Insight helps us understand why. And when we understand why, we're much more likely to solve the right problem. That's why insight sits at the centre of shift. Situation helps us understand what's happening. Human reminds us that work is always experienced by people. Insight helps us see the patterns, assumptions, and pressures that aren't immediately obvious. Only then do we move forward, exploring the options available to us. And finally, we take action, choosing our next step with greater confidence because it's based on understanding rather than on assumption. That's the difference shift is trying to make. Not helping people necessarily move faster, but helping them move in the right direction. Next time we'll explore the F in Shift. How do we turn understanding into meaningful options without rushing towards the first solution we can think of? Thank you for listening to the Leadership Shift. If this episode has given you something to think about, I'd love to continue the conversation. You can find the accompanying newsletter on LinkedIn and Substack, and you can subscribe on both of those, where I explore these ideas in more depth and share practical reflections to help you apply them in your everyday work. Until next time, take care of yourself and keep asking good questions. And remember that better leadership often starts with better thinking. I'm Nicola Martin, thanks for listening.