When being good at fixing things keeps you from fixing the problem.

“It's always a recommendation anyway.”

That's why an executive search firm had stopped asking new clients how they'd heard about them.

But “a recommendation” doesn't tell you very much.

Who recommended you? Why did they think of you for this particular client? What did they say about you? What did the new client hear that made them decide to get in touch?

Knowing that business comes through recommendations doesn't tell you what made the recommendation happen.

Then I heard what else the firm had stopped doing.

They no longer asked candidates why they accepted or rejected offers. Every situation was different, so they didn't see much value in collecting the answers.

They had also stopped interviewing clients after placements. They already knew what good service looked like.

At several points where someone outside the business could tell them something about how they experienced it, the firm had decided it already knew enough.

Not because they had stopped caring about their brand.

Quite the opposite.

They were running quarterly brand-awareness surveys and benchmarking themselves against competitors.

But those things were giving them a different kind of information.

A brand-awareness survey can tell you something about whether people know you.

Competitor benchmarking can tell you something about how you compare with other firms.

Neither tells you why a client thought of recommending you when someone in their network needed help. Or what candidates valued enough to accept an offer. Or what clients experienced after trusting you with an important placement.

Those were things the firm had once been learning through ordinary conversations with clients and candidates.

And one by one, the firm had stopped listening to them.

Meanwhile, revenue had been flat for four years.

That doesn't prove that stopping those conversations caused the revenue problem. There could be any number of reasons for flat revenue.

But if I were trying to understand what was happening to this business, I wouldn't start by asking what they should change about the brand.

I'd start with what they had stopped learning about it.