For a long time I started client conversations the same way most consultants do: so, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? It seemed reasonable enough. Organizations would describe declining customer satisfaction, communication issues, accountability challenges, slow decisions, teams that weren’t collaborating. Every conversation sounded different. Over time I noticed something I couldn’t ignore: different organizations were using different language to describe remarkably similar experiences.
Eventually I stopped asking “what’s the problem” and started asking “how did you conclude that this is the problem?” That single question changed almost everything, because it slowed the conversation down. Instead of jumping to solutions, leaders started explaining how they’d arrived at their conclusions, describing unproductive meetings, disagreeing departments, inconsistent customer experiences, projects that lost momentum halfway through. And a second pattern emerged: most organizations weren’t actually describing problems. They were describing observations, and those are two very different things.
Observations Are Facts. Problems Are Interpretations.
An observation is something you can see. A problem is your interpretation of why that observation exists.
And we confuse the two constantly.
If customer complaints rise, we conclude service must be declining. If projects run late, we assume accountability is weak. If departments disagree, we decide communication needs work. Sometimes those conclusions are right. Sometimes they’re just the first explanation that felt plausible, because human beings are remarkably good at explaining what they observe and not always as good at identifying what actually caused it, the same way experienced engineers don’t replace the first suspicious-looking component when a machine breaks. They investigate and test assumptions first. Business leaders often skip that step because the pressure to move fast rewards action, and someone proposes a solution the organization implements, only to discover later that they solved the wrong problem exceptionally well.
I’ve watched organizations redesign entire processes when what they really needed was a shared definition of success. I’ve seen companies invest heavily in new communication platforms when the real issue was that leaders interpreted the strategy differently. I’ve seen culture initiatives launched because collaboration had weakened, only to discover departments had simply been pursuing different priorities all along, closely related to the pattern behind The Hidden Cost of Organizational Misalignment. None of those solutions were wrong on their own terms. They just weren’t solving what was actually happening underneath the symptom.
Curiosity Over Speed
I’m now far less interested in helping organizations solve problems quickly and far more interested in helping them understand problems deeply, which rewards curiosity over speed. Instead of “who’s responsible,” curious leaders ask “what assumptions are influencing this.” Instead of “how do we fix communication,” they ask “how differently are people understanding the situation.” The quality of the question changes the quality of the conversation, and eventually the quality of the decision that follows.
Problem definition might be one of the most underrated leadership capabilities there is. Organizations often assume everyone agrees on the problem simply because everyone’s talking about the same symptoms, and that assumption gets expensive fast: if leaders define the problem differently, every department ends up solving a different version of it, and months later leadership wonders why the organization worked so hard without making real progress. The answer usually isn’t a failure to execute. It’s that people never shared the same understanding of what needed solving in the first place.
At Spring2 Innovation, this thinking eventually became part of our Deeper Clarity™ Method: before exploring solutions, we spend real time exploring understanding, how each leader defines the challenge, where perspectives overlap and diverge, what assumptions are quietly shaping everyone’s thinking. Those conversations feel slower at first and, ironically, tend to make everything after them dramatically faster, because once people are solving the same problem, decisions get easier and priorities get clearer. The longer I do this work, the more convinced I am that organizations rarely struggle because they lack solutions. They struggle because they haven’t yet developed a shared understanding of the challenge, and once that understanding exists, the path forward usually becomes surprisingly clear.
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