What Problem Are We Actually Trying to Solve?
Key Takeaways
Every problem competing for attention is usually real. The hard part isn’t spotting a problem. It’s telling the obvious one from the one actually worth solving.
Real effort spent on the wrong problem is expensive — the reorg that fixed nothing, the comp change that moved a number for one quarter. The cost isn’t wasted effort; it’s effort aimed at the wrong target.
The discipline is refusing to answer how until you’re sure what problem you’re actually solving. One question does most of the work: what problem are we really trying to solve?
Around the leadership tables I’ve sat at, the problems competing for attention were almost always seemingly clear ones — the kind that fill a people strategy agenda. Turnover was climbing. Targets were being missed. The compensation plan had drifted out of line with the market. A team couldn’t seem to get along, an initiative had stalled, HR had three complaints about the same leader or policy. These were visible, they were named, and they did need to be discussed.
The problem everyone names vs. the one worth solving
Not one of those problems was imaginary. They were all real, and they surfaced real concerns. What wasn’t clear, and almost never is, was whether the problem everyone named was the one actually worth solving, or just the most obvious thing to reach for. Sometimes, as those problems were being identified, it wasn’t even clear the right questions were being asked.
The question I keep asking
So before I help solve anything, I ask the question I’ve apparently been asking long enough and often enough that people now quote it back to me:
“What problem are we really trying to solve?”
It sounds too simple to be useful, but it isn’t. That one question is the difference between pouring real money and effort into a problem that’s obvious but won’t move the needle or focusing on the core issue that actually makes a broad, lasting impact.
Every number a C-suite watches tends to have a quieter problem underneath it. Sales are soft — is it the pipeline, or a team that isn’t built with the right people in the right seats? Productivity has stalled — has the team lost focus, or are people carrying impossible workloads? The metric is what shows up on the board decks. But what you’re actually trying to solve usually sits a layer beneath it — and surfacing it is what an honest diagnosis is for.
“The breakdown is almost always a few steps above the problem everyone named, which is why solving the obvious problem so rarely drives real results.”
What it looks like to skip the question
You stand up a sharp 90-day retention program to fix turnover, but the sales and profit you expected to follow, didn’t. That’s because the real problem isn’t that you’re losing too many people; you’re hiring the wrong people, having never defined what the role truly requires. You give across-the-board raises to answer a pay complaint, but morale doesn’t budge. That’s because the problem was never the dollars, but people carrying loads no raise was going to fix. You move the manager everyone complains about to a different role, and the same issues surface under the next manager. That’s because the problem lived higher up the chart, in an organization that hasn’t equipped its managers or empowered them to act.
In every case, the solutioning work went beautifully. The program launched, the raises went out, the manager moved — real, measurable effort that left the problem actually worth solving exactly where it was. And still, the most important metrics on the board decks unchanged.
More often than not, the real problem was upstream of the one everyone named – a broken connection between strategy and the people asked to execute it, or between what leaders intend and what their systems actually reward.
Nobody sets out to solve the wrong problem. Everyone is busy and heads-down on what they personally must deliver, anxious to solve the problem and move forward quickly. The pull toward the obvious, measurable thing is strong enough to distract good leaders from the more important problem all the time. And it can be an expensive distraction: the reorg that didn’t fix anything, the comp plan that moved the number for a quarter and gave it back by year-end, the training everyone sat through and no one used. These are not failures of effort. They’re examples of the right effort, spent on the wrong problem, because no one stopped to ask which problem they were solving.
The discipline of seeking clarity
So the discipline isn’t having a better answer when someone asks how to solve a problem. It’s refusing to answer until we’re sure what problem we’re actually solving. That means looking past what people say to understand what key stakeholders are expecting and what the underlying infrastructure supports. The approach — seeking clarity — is simple to say and hard to do, because it asks you to (briefly) pause in front of something urgent at the exact moment everyone wants you to move. But the alternative is the thing I have watched happen over and over: real effort, spent on a real problem, that was never the one worth solving.
If you’re not sure whether you’re looking at the obvious problem or the one worth solving, that’s exactly what a first conversation is for.