How Many Different Coats Do You Wear?
Sunday morning, at the foot of Cnicht (the Welsh Matterhorn), if you squint at it from just the right angle. I'm about to send six teenagers off on their Gold Duke of Edinburgh expedition.
This is just one of the jobs I do, and I enjoy them all enormously — sometimes. It might not look like it has anything in common with the rest of what I do: running a business advisory practice, or the physics teacher I used to be.
Three different coats — belay jacket, lab coat, blazer. Same job, different day, different coats.
Looking inside the kaleidoscope
One of my heroes was Richard Feynman. He's the reason I went into teaching in the first place — I wanted to be able to explain physics with the same clarity he did.
But Feynman's real skill was never the equations. It was spotting the pattern underneath, understanding how it actually worked, and then breaking that down into something simple enough that somebody else could take it away and use it.
This is what I do. I look inside the kaleidoscope. I see the patterns. I understand how they turn up. Then I turn it into something simple, something easy enough to act on.
I do that on a Welsh hillside with six teenagers. I do it on a Zoom call, or across a desk in the office, with a business owner.
Different terrain. Same kaleidoscope.
So here's what I actually watch for
Whether it's a group on a mountain or a client on a screen.
Do they have a plan, or are they just walking?
Plenty of groups set off with total conviction and no actual plan — they're just moving, and moving feels like progress.
It's the same in business.
Motion is not the same as progress; a dog chasing its own tail is very busy indeed.
The first thing I look for is whether anyone can tell me why they're going this way, not just that they're going.
What happens when the plan goes wrong?
It always does, eventually — the path's washed out, the numbers don't add up, the client you were relying on goes quiet.
This is where you learn everything.
Do they stop and wait for someone to rescue them, or do they pull out the map again, admit the last hour was wrong, and adjust?
Nobody's coming to rescue them, not on the expedition, and not in the business.
That's not a design flaw. That's the resilience the expedition is there to teach, and it's the same resilience a business owner needs, for the same reason: nobody's coming to bail them out either.
I'm not marking anyone down for getting it wrong.
I'm watching what they do next.
Who speaks up when it matters?
Every group has someone who asks the questions — "are we still on the path," "has anyone actually checked," "why are we doing it this way."
What I'm watching for is whether that's the right person asking the right question, and whether they ask it early, out loud, before it costs anything.
The businesses that struggle are usually the ones where everyone's nodding along in agreement, and nobody's asked whether the ladder's up against the right wall.
Always testing. Always trying to ask the right question.
None of this is theory to me. It's tried and tested, properly tested.
The scientist in me has always wanted to break things apart to see how they actually work, not just read about it in a book.
Once you've found the pattern, you start spotting it everywhere: in the rain on a hillside in Snowdonia, in a business that's quietly drifted off route without anyone noticing.
Always testing. Always trying to ask the right question.
It's not about getting everything right
The six teenagers I sent off on Sunday didn't get it right the first time, by the way.
They went missing for the best part of two hours — properly lost, not just a wrong turn and a quick map check.
But they turned up in the end, grinning, already telling it as the best bit of the whole expedition.
Which is, genuinely, all I'm ever hoping to see: not a clean run, but a group that gets lost, works it out themselves, and comes back better for it — whether that's on a mountain or in a business that's found itself a bit lost.
Hope is not a strategy
On a mountain or in a business.
If the pattern you recognise is not knowing where your next client is coming from, that's exactly what a diagnostic session sorts out — one proper look at what's actually happening, not a ten-year overhaul, and enough to start finding your next client with rhythm, not hope.
Finding yourself a bit lost?
You don't necessarily need to change everything.
Sometimes you just need to stop, pull out the map and work out where you actually are before deciding what happens next.
That's what the Diagnostic is for.
One proper look at what's actually happening. One clear place to start. And a better idea of where your next client is coming from.
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