Not Every Request for Help Is a Request to Learn

June 10th 2026

A few days ago, I participated in a conversation that left me thinking.

Two friends and fellows practitioners and I have been experimenting for a little bit more than a year with a new format of conversations, which we call "the Metaphor Project". We usually invite someone who finds themselves at a threshold: a professional transition, a personal dilemma, or a sense that something important is shifting internally, but not yet fully visible. Far from wanting to help them "solve" their problem, we invite them to approach it and see it differently. We organize the conversation in a way that allows them to take a step back and widen their lens. Through creating more space around the framing they hold on to, we get them to climb on a symbolic "balcony" from which they can observe both the situation and themselves differently.

However, this time, with this guest - who was given the exact same information as the previous ones - the conversation quickly felt off. It never quite came "alive" as my colleague put it. We left frustrated and aware that something important had happened, that we needed to learn from.

If I had to describe my framing of the conversation, I would say that the guest arrived with a challenge he was facing and a desire to think it through. Then, in the context of what we thought was a shared understanding, we listened, we asked questions, we offered observations, stories, metaphors and alternative interpretations. We did our best to create space so he could move more freely. And yet, throughout this experience, I had the feeling that we weren't doing our job well.

It was only when we debriefed afterwards that I began to understand why. We had assumed that he had understood he was invited to actively participate in a learning process. But, if I had to guess, based on his words and his way of engaging, he may have understood the invitation differently, because he seemed to expect that we would at some point perform a kind of "problem-solving ritual" for him. It reminded me of Esther Perel's observation that some people arrive in couples therapy carrying their partner like a bag of dirty laundry. The implicit request is not "help me understand what is happening between us." It is "help me fix them." Here the expectation was: fix me so it doesn't happen again and I don't have to experience the pain it triggers in me.

As I reflected on the experience, I thought about how often I encounter this dynamic in organizations. People ask for feedback, for coaching, for the help of a mentor or the review of a supervisor. But not all of them are asking for the same thing through these requests. Of course, some are genuinely interested in discovering what they cannot yet see, putting their growth and development as a person and as a professional at the center. But many are looking for reassurance that what they already see is correct. And it takes time to see it clearly because the behavior and the requests are the same. As Carol Dweck would point out, one comes from the eagerness to grow, and the other comes from a fixed mindset.

Chris Argyris also wrote about this decades ago when studying the defense mechanisms of the highly intelligent and highly accomplished professionals he interacted with in his consulting work. What fascinated him was that the people who were often the most skilled at solving problems could also be the most resistant to learning, because they had become experts at promoting their way of thinking. By the same token, the very capacities that made them successful, made it harder for them to question their own assumptions.

I often think about that paradox. We tend to imagine learning as the accumulation of knowledge. But some of the most important learning experiences in my life have involved the opposite. Not adding something. Letting go of something - a conviction, an interpretation, a story or a narrative I was emotionally invested in without being aware of the losses it would imply - for me and for those who shaped my sense of identity - if I were to abandon it on the side of the road.

To me, far from being about helping people find answers, Leadership work is about helping people go back to being curious and question everything, just like Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, invited us to "hold the questions for themselves". That's what learning is for me: the ability to hold the question, even if it challenges the very foundation of what we thought we knew about ourselves and about the world. Learning is potential loss. Learning is sometimes painful growth. Learning, like leading, is an unreasonable act, a revolutionary act.