There are a lot of situations where the problem is not a lack of information.People know things.
The Realtor knows real estate.
The auctioneer understands how to create movement around assets, timing, and buyer behavior.
The attorney knows the legal pieces.
The lender understands financing.
The heirs know the family history.
The owner knows what they want - or at least what they think they want.
And yet somehow, the situation can still sit there.
Everybody owns a piece.
But who owns the outcome?
That is a question I have found myself thinking about a lot lately.
Because there is a real gap between knowing what could be done and actually getting something done.
And that gap has a cost.
Knowing the answer is not the same as moving the problem
This is not just something I have noticed in my own work.
The Project Management Institute's 2023 Pulse of the Profession research asked project professionals which skills were most critical to helping them accomplish organizational objectives.
Communication - 68%
Problem-solving - 65%
Collaborative leadership - 62%
Strategic thinking - 58%
Those results were remarkably consistent across industries, regions, experience levels and certification status.
I find that interesting because none of those skills is simply "know your technical field."
They are the skills required to work across boundaries, understand the larger problem, communicate what matters and help people move toward an outcome.
Technical expertise matters tremendously.
But technical expertise by itself does not guarantee movement.
You can assemble several highly competent professionals around a problem and still have a situation that goes absolutely nowhere.
Time has a cost
Sometimes the cost of that gap is very literal.
A property is still being carried.
Taxes continue. Insurance continues. Utilities continue. Maintenance continues. Interest continues. Mowing, cleanup, security, repairs - whatever that asset requires - continue.
Time is not always neutral.
McKinsey & Company studied organizational decision-making and found that only 37% of respondents said their organizations consistently made decisions that were both high-quality and fast. Their research also found that faster decision-making and faster execution were linked with higher reported returns. Organizations that made decisions quickly were also twice as likely to report high-quality decisions as slower decision-makers.
Now, that certainly does not mean every estate, property or family decision should be rushed.
Some decisions need time.
Some need research.
Some need prayer.
Some need legal advice.
Some need people to cool off before anybody says another word.
But waiting is still a decision.
And sometimes waiting has a price.
Opportunity has a window
Sometimes the cost is not what you are paying today.
It is what is no longer available tomorrow.
The professional you need may have availability now and not three months from now.
A buyer may be ready today and gone later.
A crew may have an opening.
The market may shift.
Financing may change.
A family member may finally be ready to make a decision after months - or years - of resistance.
There are moments when enough of the pieces line up that something can actually move.
If nobody recognizes that window, it can close.
That does not mean forcing movement simply because something is available.
It means understanding that lost opportunity is also a cost.
The wrong conversations are expensive
One of the most costly patterns I have seen is not necessarily a lack of communication.
Sometimes everybody is talking.
They are just not talking to the right people, in the right order, about the right things.
A family member explains the situation to one professional.
That person hears one version.
Someone else gets involved later and hears another piece.
Another professional starts working from assumptions that made perfect sense based on the information they were given - but the information was incomplete.
Then somebody else comes in and asks questions that were already answered six weeks ago.
Eventually, hours of professional work and emotional energy may have been spent solving slightly different versions of the same problem.
And the people who actually needed to speak directly may still never have had a real conversation.
Sometimes one of the most valuable questions you can ask at the beginning is simply:
Who actually needs to be in this conversation?
Because the wrong conversations do not merely waste time.
They can create commitments.
They can create assumptions.
They can create resentment.
And sometimes they create an entirely new problem on top of the one you were originally trying to solve.
Sometimes the hurdle is not disagreement. It is translation.
People can look at the exact same problem through completely different lenses.
An attorney may be talking about risk.
A seller may hear delay.
A lender may be discussing feasibility.
A family member may hear rejection.
An auctioneer may be talking about market response.
An owner may hear a judgment about the value of something they have spent a lifetime building.
They may be discussing the exact same hurdle and still feel like they are having completely different conversations.
Communication style matters too.
Some people need facts first.
Some need reassurance.
Some need time.
Some want the bottom line immediately.
One person may be primarily afraid of losing money.
Another may be afraid of making a decision they will regret for the rest of their life.
Another may be worried about what their siblings will think.
Another may simply be tired.
When those different pain points are not recognized, ordinary disagreement can become deeply personal very quickly.
Sometimes the communication gap begins before anybody even opens their mouth.
Different experience creates different perspective
This shows up regularly with heirs.
One family member may already have served as executor for two other estates.
They have been through the process.
They know that eventually decisions have to be made.
They understand that belongings will be sold, property will transfer, paperwork will be signed and the family will survive the discomfort of it.
Another heir may be liquidating an estate for the first time.
To that person, every decision may feel enormous.
They may feel a much sharper sense of responsibility.
They may question things the more experienced person considers routine.
They may need more explanation, more time or more reassurance.
Neither experience is invalid.
The person with lived experience may bring perspective and pattern recognition.
The person experiencing it for the first time may bring fresh scrutiny, important questions and a heightened awareness of responsibility.
Experience changes perspective. It does not cancel someone else's.
They may be looking at the exact same decision.
They are simply not carrying it from the same place.
And when that difference is not recognized, one person's caution can look like stubbornness while another person's experience can look like indifference.
That is a communication problem long before it becomes a decision problem.
More hands do not automatically create more progress
There is a tendency in complicated situations to assume that adding more professionals must make the plan better.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it makes the situation substantially harder.
Harvard Business Review reported Gartner research in 2024 finding that 78% of organizational leaders experience what Gartner calls "collaboration drag" - excessive meetings, too much feedback, unclear decision authority and other forms of coordination that actually slow work down.
That distinction matters.
Collaboration is powerful.
But simply involving more people is not collaboration.
If five capable professionals are each brought in before the entire situation is understood, you can end up with five competent people solving five different versions of the problem.
Then commitments start getting made.
Money gets spent.
Assets get divided.
Timelines get promised.
People get attached to their own recommendation.
And now the family is not simply trying to solve the original problem.
They are trying to reconcile all the decisions that were made before anyone understood the whole thing.
Stop confusing activity with progress.
A lot can be happening while very little is actually moving.
Collaboration can prevent duplicated professional work
This is where genuine collaboration becomes incredibly powerful.
A Realtor may be researching one piece of the situation.
An attorney may be researching something adjacent.
An auctioneer may be gathering information that overlaps with both.
A lender may need information somebody else already has.
When those professionals remain completely siloed, the client may essentially be paying several people to circle portions of the same problem.
At minimum, collaboration creates the opportunity to say:
I already have that.
You need to talk to this person.
Before you spend money on that, we need an answer to this.
That solution might work differently if we combine it with this option.
It can eliminate duplicated effort.
But it can also uncover opportunities that no single professional could see from inside one lane.
Sometimes a solution that appears impossible from one profession's perspective becomes workable once another discipline enters the conversation.
That is part of the value of looking at the entire landscape before hiring isolated pieces of a solution.
Do not spend your way into a plan you have not actually made
This may be one of the harder lessons.
People sometimes begin committing resources before they know what the overall plan requires.
They hire someone.
Then someone else.
They promise an asset.
They agree to a timeline.
They start cleanup.
They move belongings.
They repair something.
They list something.
They pay for an opinion.
Each individual action may be perfectly reasonable.
But reasonable actions taken in the wrong sequence can still work against the larger goal.
Sometimes the first useful step is not hiring another professional.
It is understanding enough of the whole situation to know:
Who needs to be involved?
What information is missing?
What should happen first?
What should absolutely not happen yet?
And what resources need to be protected until the plan becomes clearer?
Because once money, time, assets and goodwill have been spent, you do not always get them back.
A stalled plan does not have to remain completely stalled
The opposite is also true.
You do not always have to know the entire answer before anything can happen.
Maybe a house cannot be sold yet, but personal property can be sorted.
Maybe the family is not ready to liquidate, but documents can be gathered.
Maybe financing is not settled, but repair estimates can begin.
Maybe everyone cannot agree on the whole plan, but there is one piece they can agree on.
I have watched that matter.
I have worked with families who could barely agree on anything, but they could agree on one part of a plan.
So we started there.
That one piece created movement.
Movement created evidence.
Evidence created trust.
And sometimes that trust made the next conversation possible.
You do not always need everybody to agree on everything.
You need to understand what can move first without damaging what needs to come next.
That is a very different thing.
Assets and situations can deteriorate while everyone is deciding
Property does not politely sit still while everybody debates what to do with it.
Roofs leak.
Grass grows.
Pipes break.
Weather happens.
Vacant homes deteriorate.
Contents are damaged.
Maintenance gets deferred.
People become more frustrated.
Relationships wear down.
Markets change.
A situation that was manageable six months ago may become substantially harder simply because nobody moved.
That does not mean the fastest answer is always the best answer.
It means deterioration belongs in the calculation.
Sometimes doing nothing feels safe because no affirmative decision has been made.
But doing nothing can still change the outcome.
Sometimes the biggest obstacle is the answer we already decided was right
And then there is another kind of stuck.
The kind created by certainty.
Sometimes people are not really looking for professional judgment.
They are looking for professional confirmation.
They have already decided what the answer should be and are now looking for someone with a license, title or credential to agree with it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with knowing what you want.
There are plenty of professionals who are perfectly happy to execute a clearly defined request.
But that is a different relationship from asking somebody to evaluate the problem.
If you are asking for professional judgment, then you have to leave enough room for that judgment to change your thinking.
Otherwise, we waste your time too.
And ours.
Sometimes people have developed an enormous distrust of professionals.
Sometimes that distrust was earned through a bad experience.
Sometimes it comes from watching somebody else have a bad experience.
And sometimes it comes from a strong assumption that has never actually been tested.
All of those things are real.
But they can also create a situation where every possible solution gets disqualified before it can even be explored.
Sometimes the cost of staying stuck is not that nobody has an answer.
It is that everybody is holding too tightly to the answer they already have.
Knowing. Seeing. Moving.
The more I work in complicated situations, the more I find myself thinking about professional value in three different ways.
Knowing is expertise. It is knowing the law, the market, financing, assets, process, timing or the industry.
Seeing is recognizing patterns. It is noticing what does not add up. What has not been considered. Where two seemingly separate problems actually touch. Which assumption needs to be tested. Which resource needs to be protected. Which opportunity nobody else has recognized yet.
Moving means helping the right people, information and decisions meet each other closely enough that something can actually happen.
That work can look deceptively simple.
Questions.
Phone calls.
Follow-up.
Clarification.
Translation.
Sequencing.
Connecting professionals.
Bringing family members into the right conversation.
Recognizing different pain points.
Finding the piece everyone can agree on.
Stopping somebody from making a premature commitment.
Sometimes simply saying:
Before we do that, there is one more thing we need to understand.
None of those actions may look particularly dramatic.
But together they can be the difference between a collection of opinions and an actual plan.
And maybe that is the part we do not talk about enough.
You may already have all the experts you need.
You may already have most of the information you need.
You may even already have several good ideas.
The question may simply be:
Who is helping the experts, the information and the decision meet each other?
Because when everybody owns a piece, somebody still has to think about the outcome.
And there is a cost when nobody does.
Research Sources
Project Management Institute (PMI), Pulse of the Profession 2023: https://www.pmi.org/about/press-media/2022/pulse-of-the-profession-2023
McKinsey & Company, Decision making in the age of urgency: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organization/our-insights/decision-making-in-the-age-of-urgency
Harvard Business Review, Why Cross-Functional Collaboration Stalls and How to Fix It: https://hbr.org/2024/06/why-cross-functional-collaboration-stalls-and-how-to-fix-it
