Teach them something they didn't know they needed
The Challenger
You already have a point of view. You're just not sure you've earned the right to say it yet. That caution is costing you. The most valuable thing you can do for the person across the table isn't to build rapport or respond to their stated needs, it's to teach them something that changes how they see their own situation. I help you sequence it right: demonstrate you understand their world, then introduce the perspective they haven't considered, then make the cost of their current thinking undeniable. The challenge isn't aggressive. Done well, it's the most generous thing you can offer.
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A preview of real coaching output — toggle between a first meeting and your fifth to see how depth builds over time.
Teaching Narrative
Acknowledge their world first. Meridian is managing complexity at scale: multi-warehouse operations, seasonal demand swings, a supplier base spread across three continents. That's genuinely hard.
Surface what they probably believe: that their current supply chain problems are a data problem, if they just had better reporting, they could manage it better.
Introduce the reframe: the data problem is a symptom. The root cause is that their decision architecture is still designed for a world where lead times were predictable. Every workaround they've built assumes linear supply chains.
Make the cost concrete: the $2.1M in expediting freight isn't a cost of doing business, it's the invoice for a broken decision model. And it's growing.
Point toward the new way: companies that have solved this didn't get better reports. They changed when and how decisions get made, visibility became a trigger, not just a record.
The Reframe
Your supply chain problems aren't a visibility problem. They're a decision latency problem. You already have most of the data, it arrives too late and goes to the wrong people. Adding another dashboard won't fix that. Redesigning when decisions get triggered will.
Tailored Challenge
Sarah presents the problem as 'we need better real-time visibility across warehouses'
Ask: 'When you say visibility, who's looking, and what decision do they need to make within what timeframe?' Then listen for the gap between what they have and what they need to act, not just see.
Reframes the requirement from 'dashboard' to 'decision trigger', opens the door to a fundamentally different solution architecture
She references the two failed ERP rollouts as reasons for caution
Validate the caution, then reframe: 'Both of those projects tried to solve a data capture problem. What if this one is designed around a different question, not how do we capture more, but how do we decide faster?'
Separates this initiative from the past failures in her mental model without dismissing her experience
How The Challenger prepares
Core skills are always active. Optional skills can be toggled based on your needs.
Core Skills
Optional Skills
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