When something about the way you or your business is being perceived isn’t working, the temptation is to start changing things immediately.
Rewrite the website. Change the messaging. Pick a different title. Redesign the visuals. Reposition the business. Become more polished. Become more visible.
But there is a problem with trying to fix something before you understand what is actually happening.
You can end up operating on the wrong problem.
Diagnosis comes before intervention
In 2024, I used to describe this idea as “diagnose before you operate.” At the time, I was applying it primarily to businesses considering a rebrand.
I offered a 90-minute diagnostic service called a Brand Power Hour. Before recommending a major change, I wanted to examine what was already happening: what was working, what wasn’t, what the business was communicating and where the disconnect might actually be.
The Brand Power Hour no longer exists, and my work has evolved considerably since then. But the underlying principle survived.
Before you decide what needs changing, you need to understand what people are already seeing.
You are too close to yourself to see everything
This is one of the difficulties with trying to diagnose your own public presence.
You know what you intended to communicate. You know the context behind your decisions. You know your history, capabilities and motivations. Other people don’t have access to all of that information.
They encounter what is visible and make sense of you from there.
Your language, behaviour, appearance, stories, credentials, online presence and repeated patterns all give people information. Sometimes the conclusion they form matches the one you intended. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Changing the surface without first examining those signals can leave the underlying problem untouched.
The diagnostic became more interesting than the rebrand
Looking back, this was an early clue about where my work was heading.
I became increasingly interested in the diagnostic part itself: what can you see when you stop trying to fix someone and simply examine what is already there?
That question eventually became part of the thinking behind my Human Brand X-Ray.
Like a medical X-ray, the point is not to decide in advance what should appear. It is to look closely at what is already present and make the invisible easier to see.
Before you change anything, ask a different question
If you feel misunderstood, overlooked or disconnected from the way you are presenting yourself, the first question does not necessarily need to be, “What should I change?”
Start with:
“What are people currently being given to interpret?”
Once you understand that, the changes you make have a reason behind them.
Diagnosis first. Intervention second.
