Are You Solving the Right Problem?4/9/2026 Why the problem you can see may not be the problem you need to solve. Sales are down. Someone says Marketing needs to generate more leads. Marketing points out that plenty of leads are already being generated. Sales simply isn’t converting enough of them. Sales disagrees. The leads aren’t good enough. Someone suggests sales training. Someone else thinks the website needs attention. There is some discussion about pricing. Competitors are mentioned. So is the economy. Before long, several possible solutions are on the table. There is only one slight problem. Nobody has established what the problem actually is. This happens remarkably easily in business. Something isn’t working as expected. A result disappoints us. A target is missed. A project stalls. A customer behaves differently from the way we hoped. Naturally, we want to do something about it.  The difficulty is that somewhere between noticing the result and deciding what to do, we can make an extraordinarily important leap without realising it.
We move from what happened to why we think it happened. And then we start fixing the latter. Consider those disappointing sales figures. Sales are down is an observation. The sales team is underperforming is an interpretation. It may be the correct interpretation. But it isn’t the same thing. Perhaps the sales team is underperforming. Perhaps the leads really are poor. Perhaps the market has changed. Perhaps the proposition no longer feels sufficiently distinctive. Perhaps customers are interested but encountering friction later in the buying process. Or perhaps customers simply don’t understand what the business is offering — or why it matters to them. Same disappointing number. Very different problems. And therefore very different solutions. We are remarkably quick to name things This line of thinking began for me somewhere rather removed from business. I was recently writing about the word lazy (https://medium.com/@phil_34991/before-we-call-it-laziness-87723f932070?sharedUserId=phil_34991). More specifically, I was thinking about how easily we can observe that something hasn’t been done and then decide we know why. The task hasn’t been completed is an observation. I am lazy is an interpretation. Sometimes it may even be an accurate one. I am perfectly capable of procrastinating with the best of them. But it occurred to me that organisations do something remarkably similar. A member of staff repeatedly misses deadlines. Performance problem. A project keeps stalling. Execution problem. Website enquiries have fallen. Marketing problem. Customers aren’t buying a new service. Demand problem. Maybe. But a label can create an illusion of understanding. Once something has been named, it feels as though it has been explained. And once it has been explained, we can get busy solving it. That is where things can become expensive.
The business remains busy. People are doing things. Money is being spent. Progress feels as though it ought to be happening. But activity and progress are not necessarily the same thing. A business can execute brilliantly and still get nowhere if it is solving the wrong problem. Where a problem appears may not be where it began Problems rarely respect departmental boundaries. A problem becomes visible in Sales, so Sales is asked to fix it. But perhaps its origins are in Marketing. Or product design, pricing, customer experience, strategy. Or somewhere between several of them. Likewise, what appears to be an employee performance problem may have remarkably little to do with the employee’s willingness to perform. Imagine someone who repeatedly fails to deliver a particular piece of work on time. The obvious response might be to discuss time management, accountability or motivation. And, perhaps that is exactly what is needed. But suppose the employee is receiving competing instructions from two managers. Suppose three things have all been described as the top priority. Suppose responsibility for the work is clear, but authority to make the necessary decisions isn’t. Suppose the process depends upon information that routinely arrives two days late. No amount of motivational language solves those problems. The employee may be where the failure becomes visible. That doesn’t necessarily mean the employee is where the failure began. The location of the symptom is not necessarily the location of the cause. Businesses can experience referred pain too. The rush to action There is an understandable reason we do this. Business culture tends to reward action. When something goes wrong, leaders are expected to respond. What are we doing about it? It is a perfectly reasonable question. But it can arrive too early. A campaign can be launched. Training can be booked. A new process can be announced. A person can be put on a performance plan. Those are visible actions. Saying we don’t yet understand why this is happening can feel considerably less impressive. Yet there is nothing inherently decisive about acting on a guess. Speed matters, execution matters, as does momentum. But speed of action has little value if we have been too quick to decide what the problem is. Sometimes the fastest route forward begins with stopping long enough to understand what is actually happening. That isn’t indecision. It is diagnosis. What do we know — and what have we inferred? Perhaps one of the simplest questions a business can ask when something isn’t working is also one of the most useful: What do we actually know? Not what do we suspect. Not what has somebody confidently announced in a meeting. Not what happened last time. What do we know? Sales have fallen by 15%. We know that. Why? Now we are investigating. A project is three weeks behind schedule. We know that. Why? Still to be established. An employee has missed four deadlines. We know that. Why? Again, investigation. This sounds almost absurdly basic when written down. In practice, separating evidence from interpretation can be surprisingly difficult because our interpretations often arrive disguised as facts. Customers think we’re too expensive. Do we know that? People aren’t interested in this service. Do we know that? The team is resistant to change. Do we know that? Our marketing isn’t working. Which marketing? Working towards what? At which stage? According to which measure? A confident explanation is still an explanation. It doesn’t become evidence simply because everybody in the meeting nods. Clarity before execution This is one reason clarity sits at the beginning of the C.L.E.A.R.worx™ approach we use at Future Point 4 Business. Not because businesses should spend forever analysing themselves. There is a point at which further investigation becomes another form of avoidance. But execution works best when we have established enough clarity to know what we are actually trying to change. Before What should we do?, there are better questions.
And perhaps most importantly: What would we need to discover to know whether our explanation is right? That last question changes things.
This isn’t about making business more complicated. Quite the opposite. It is about avoiding the enormous complication that follows when we implement solutions to problems we never properly had. Clarity doesn’t promise a comfortable answer There is another reason diagnosis matters. Investigation isn’t a promise that we will discover a nicer explanation. Sometimes the sales team really is underperforming. Maybe the campaign really isn’t good enough. Perhaps somebody isn’t taking responsibility. Sometimes customers genuinely don’t want what we are selling. Sometimes the strategy is wrong. Clarity isn’t an exercise in finding an explanation that makes everybody feel better. It is an attempt to find the one that is true. That may require a difficult conversation. It may require changing direction. It may well expose something a leader would rather attribute to somebody else. Perhaps the team has executed precisely what it was asked to execute. The uncomfortable question then becomes whether it was the right thing to ask them to do. That is one of the dangers of premature diagnosis. It doesn’t merely waste resources. It can place responsibility in the wrong place. Tell a capable employee repeatedly to improve their time management when the actual problem is an impossible workload and you haven't solved the problem. Push Sales harder when customers don’t understand the proposition and you haven't solved the problem. Spend more on advertising when the customers you already attract encounter a poor buying experience and you haven't solved the problem. Worse, the intervention itself can make the original problem harder to see. Curiosity has commercial value We don’t often describe curiosity as a business discipline. Perhaps we should. Not curiosity in the vague sense of endlessly wondering about things. Disciplined curiosity. The willingness to delay a conclusion long enough to test it.
There is humility in that. But there is also a hard commercial edge. Wrong diagnoses cost money. They consume time, exhaust teams, damage confidence, generate activity without necessarily generating progress. And sometimes they persuade organisations that a problem is insoluble when, in fact, they have simply been repeatedly solving something else. Back to that meeting So perhaps Sales is underperforming. Perhaps Marketing needs to change, the website does need work, pricing is the issue. Any one of the suggestions made in that opening meeting might turn out to be right. The mistake wasn’t suggesting them. The mistake would be treating a suggestion as a diagnosis. There is a small but important space between recognising that something isn’t working and deciding what to do about it. That space can feel uncomfortable. We want the answer, the action plan. somebody to own it. But that space is where clarity lives. And what happens there can determine whether everything that follows becomes purposeful action or simply more activity. So the next time something in the business isn’t working, perhaps the first question isn’t: What are we going to do about this? There is another question worth asking first. What, exactly, is the problem we are trying to solve? Because the problem you can see may not be the problem you need to solve. And sometimes the most productive thing a business can do before taking action is make sure it has understood what it is acting upon. #BusinessStrategy #StrategicThinking #Leadership #ProblemSolving #BusinessGrowth By Phil Avery ACIM Future Point 4 Business | Founder For more than 15 years, we’ve supported businesses across the UK, the EU, Africa, and Asia in shaping, refining, and strengthening their brands—strategically, visually, and commercially. Whether you’re starting from scratch or improving what already exists, we help you gain clarity, sharpen your message, and align your brand for sustainable growth. Leave a Reply. |