Before You Fix It: How to Diagnose Problems Like a Leader
One of the most practical sessions from the 2026 AdaMarie Career Navigation Summit is now available inside the AdaMarie Professional Network. Here's what Jennifer Pakravan taught us about solving the right problem and how to watch the full replay.
Here's a pattern you've probably seen, or will: something at work isn't working, so someone decides to buy a tool, add a step, or stand up a new process. Sometimes it works. Often, though, it just moves the problem around and three months later, everything is still broken and everyone is still frustrated.
At this year's summit, operations leader Jennifer Pakravan explained why this happens, and what to do instead. As the founder of Blueprint Solutions with nearly two decades navigating messy, cross-functional problems in tech and life sciences, Jen has made a career out of one deceptively simple skill: diagnosing what's broken before reaching for a fix.
Her central idea is this. When we hear a complaint — "our CRM is broken," "nobody updates the spreadsheet," "approvals take forever" — we're hearing a description of what someone is experiencing, not a diagnosis of what's happening. And if we treat the description as the diagnosis, we're already halfway to the wrong fix.
To avoid that trap, Jen walked through her framework for sorting any operational problem into three types of constraints.
She also shared the questions that cut through the noise, like asking "walk me through the last time you did this" instead of "why isn't this working," because the first gets you evidence and the second just gets you an opinion.
Watch the full session inside the APN
The complete replay of Jen's session, including her diagnostic framework, the specific questions to ask, and the full AI conversation, is available now in the AdaMarie Professional Network, alongside the other workshop and panel sessions from this year's summit.
Inside, you'll find:
The full summit replay library, including the sessions you couldn't catch live
Live workshops and expert conversations year-round
Our spring Career Accelerator
A growing library of career resources
A Slack community full of people navigating their next steps right alongside you
