The Real Problem You are Trying to Solve Starts With Better Questions

An executive team walks into a room knowing they have a problem. Revenue is down. A key initiative stalled. A market they counted on is shifting beneath them. The meeting is scheduled, the consultants are hired, and the pressure to move is real.

What do you suspect happens first? You guessed it! They start solving the problem.

Where did the diagnostic process go? What questions were asked about the challenges? What conclusions did these questions lead them to?

Unfortunately, nobody stops to ask whether they've correctly named what they're solving for. Sure they ask some technical questions regarding cashflow, marketshare, productivity numbers. But the problem they are trying to solve is already determinable from there, they claim.

Revenue is down? We have a revenue problem.

A key initiative stalled? It must be a productivity problem.

The market is shifting? It must be an organizational innovation problem.

Yet nobody thought to ask the following: : "what is the problem we are really trying to solve?"

Consider a mid-size organization that had been losing ground in its core market for three years. Management had tried pricing adjustments, a rebrand, a restructured sales team. Each decision made sense on paper, yet none of it moved the needle. By the time they asked for outside help, the dominant belief in the room was that they had a performance problem.

But that was not the issue at all. Rather, it was a problem with the market as a whole.

Their share within the market was actually holding on very well. The problem was discovered after a wise consultant began asking about what the real problems were. With enough prodding and reflection, the focus went to the market itself, and the data of sales from their competitors.

Based on what data they could find, all of their competitors were also suffering. The issue was the contracting of the market category itself. The story the collection of new and current data told over time was completely different from the story the executive and management teams had been telling in every quarterly review to date.

Three years of solutions were build on a house of cards: they were solving the wrong problem.

This is more common than most organizations want to admit. A problem gets named early, often under pressure, and that name sticks. It shapes every conversation, every budget decision, every hire. Since everyone is working hard on the named problem, it then takes a long time to question whether the name was ever right.

The most useful thing an outside perspective can do is slow that process down before it starts. Not to delay the decision for the sake of delay. Rather, it is do a thorough job and due diligence of a strong diagnosis before ever taking action on the proposed experiments, interventions, or solutions.

Thus, the questions that matter most at the beginning are rarely about solutions at all. They are about the following:

• History: what does this problem look like over time, and when did it actually start?

• Alignment: does everyone in the room define this problem the same way?

• Prior Actions: what has already been tried, and what happened after?

Here's a tip: if you've tried multiple things, or tried the same thing multiple times, with no success thus far: then you probably have not figured out the real problem you are trying to solve.

For any decision that is large, expensive, and consequential, clarity around the problem is most important investment a leadership team can make. Speed may feel productive, but it lacks real progress when the problem is still not defined.

After all, the precise answer to the wrong question is still precisely wrong answer.