Skill description
Expose problems
Making a problem prove itself before any solution earns a budget.
Most transformations begin with an answer already chosen: a platform to buy, a system to replace, a tool everyone has agreed to adopt. The problem it is meant to solve is assumed rather than established, and the project inherits a goal no one ever tested. This is how expensive programmes end up solving the wrong thing well.
Exposing problems is the discipline that comes before all of that. It refuses a solution until the problem beneath it has been named, measured, and shown to be worth solving: what exactly is failing, for whom, at what cost, and how you will know it has improved.
Before you begin
How this works
Anonymous, unscored until the end, and about 15 minutes long.
You will step into a realistic scenario and make 10 decisions under pressure, each one testing whether you hold the discipline when money, seniority, and momentum push the other way.
Scoring and interpretation
You complete 10 tasks within a single scenario. You are not told whether an answer was right as you go: every question, every option and the full reasoning are revealed together at the end, so nothing you learn mid-assessment influences your later judgement. Your score out of 100 reflects how closely your judgement matched expert judgement for that scenario. It is a developmental indicator, not a validated psychometric test, and it does not certify competence or rank you against others.
Privacy
This assessment is anonymous. It does not ask for your name or any personal details, and your responses are not collected, stored, or transmitted. Everything remains in your browser for this session only; reloading the page erases it.
The scenarios are fictional
Each scenario is a work of fiction created for teaching purposes, informed by a real, publicly documented transformation programme that is credited in full at the end. All organisations, people, products, software and IT systems, vendors, locations, figures, and events within it are either products of our imagination or are used fictitiously.
Resemblance to real names is coincidental
Because the names in these scenarios are invented, any of them, whether a company, an individual, a product, an application, an IT system, a vendor, or a place, may happen to coincide with something that exists in the real world. Any such resemblance is entirely coincidental and unintended. Nothing here refers to, describes, evaluates, or comments upon any real organisation, product, system, or person that shares a name with our fictional ones. If you arrived because this page carries a name associated with you, the scenario bears no relation to you and no connection is intended.
Choose your track
2 seats vs 1 skill
The same discipline looks different depending on where you sit.
Exposing problems is judged by what you do with a problem once you find it, and that depends entirely on the levers you hold. A leader can fund, stop, mandate and announce. An analyst can investigate, design and persuade, but cannot decide. Both are tested on the same question: did you make the problem prove itself before anything else moved?
The leadership track puts you in a seat where money and mandate are yours to spend, and the temptation is to protect what has already been committed.
The operational track puts you where the evidence is, with no authority to act on it, and the temptation is to go quiet when the room prefers a different answer.
You do not need to hold either role today. Pick the vantage point you want to be tested from. Many people take both: the second reveals what the first could not see.
Head of Digital Transformation
You inherit a €84M programme at a national broadcaster, 2 years in and in trouble.
Your levers:
- Funding: what to invest in, and what to stop paying for.
- Mandates: what the organisation is required to do.
- Stop or continue: whether a programme lives or dies.
- The narrative: what the board and the public are told.
Business Analyst
You own no budget. A European car-rental group is replatforming its booking sites with a global systems integrator, and you are asked to write the requirements.
Your levers:
- Evidence: the facts and numbers you uncover.
- Design: how you shape requirements and recommendations.
- Influence upward: moving the people who do hold the budget.