Leaders are often rewarded for bringing answers. Yet many strategic failures can be traced to a much earlier mistake: moving too quickly from symptoms to solutions before fully understanding the challenge that needs to be solved.
I was meeting with an executive last week who's working on an ambitious plan to lower the overhead costs of organizations within a region who share a similar mission. Each organization has their own duplicate administrative overhead functions, services that are not unique to the organizations nor unique to the communities they serve. He envisions creating several new organizations to house and deliver those shared services, lowering cost and improving financial sustainability for all the participating agencies.
What struck me wasn't the quality of the proposal. The logic was sound. What concerned me was how quickly the conversation had moved from a perceived problem to a preferred solution, and how few voices had participated in defining either. Working entirely alone, he couldn’t know whether the executives of the other agencies would define the core problem similarly. Some may see talent recruitment as the priority, another the cost of revenue cycle, a third managing the supply chain. The “solution” may not be solving the most important shared problem.
I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in strategy work: Organizations rush to solutions because leaders prematurely narrow both the problem definition and the circle of people allowed to define it.
The first challenge is the tendency to rush toward a solution before fully understanding the problem. This is a common pattern among leaders. We are expected to bring answers, not questions, and we are rewarded for decisiveness. Yet many strategic failures begin with a problem that was framed too narrowly or defined too quickly. Once a promising solution emerges, our attention naturally shifts toward refining and defending it rather than continuing to explore whether we are solving the right problem in the first place. But the quality of the solution becomes less important if it is attached to an incomplete diagnosis.
The second challenge is that centering on a solution too soon can narrow the circle of participation. Once a leader becomes invested in a particular answer, other people are often invited into the conversation too late. Instead of helping define the challenge, they are asked to evaluate, refine, or support a solution that already exists. This changes the nature of the conversation. Participants become reviewers rather than co-creators, which may undermine their true commitment and ownership.
Our individual frame of reference is inevitably limited by our own experiences, assumptions, and biases. Bringing others into the conversation early broadens the range of perspectives available to define the challenge. It increases the likelihood that competing interpretations, undisclosed beliefs, and overlooked considerations will surface before significant time and resources have been invested in a particular direction. Just as importantly, it creates ownership. People are far more likely to commit to a path when they have participated in understanding the problem that path is intended to solve.
One reason this step is so frequently overlooked is that leaders are often rewarded for bringing answers, not for improving the quality of the question. Yet in our work, we have found that many execution challenges can be traced back to an incomplete or overly narrow understanding of the problem itself. This is why the first stage of the Shift Method is Discover. Before discussing priorities, initiatives, or action plans, we focus on broadening the frame of reference, gathering diverse perspectives, examining assumptions, and clarifying the strategic challenge beneath the symptoms. The objective is not analysis for its own sake. It is creating enough shared understanding of the problem that the organization can make better choices about what deserves attention—and just as importantly, what does not.
There's a quote famously attributed to Albert Einstein that reads something like if I was given an hour to save the world I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution. Whether or not Einstein actually said it, the underlying principle remains relevant to strategy. The challenge is not simply spending more time on a problem. It is resisting the urge to define it too quickly. The quality of our solutions is often constrained by the quality of our diagnosis.
Martin Reeves of the Boston Consulting Group writes that nearly every new client requires rediagnosing the problem they’ve been hired to address. He uses a process of broadening the frame of reference to help redefine the problem. When interviewing internal stakeholders about the problem they think they are solving, he asks, “What are other examples of this problem?” This line of inquiry helps create a more diverse set of inputs of examples of the problem. With this broader set of examples in hand, he asks a second question: “What are these problems an example of?” What I appreciate about this approach is that it deliberately interrupts prematurely—and perhaps falsely—aligning around a diagnosis. Instead of asking leaders to solve the problem they first identified, it asks them to reconsider whether they have identified the right problem at all.
Another useful technique for resisting the urge to rush toward a preferred solution is the premortem. Popularized by psychologist Gary Klein, a premortem asks a leadership team to imagine that a proposed initiative has already failed spectacularly and then work backward to explain why. Unlike traditional risk assessments, which often occur after a team has become invested in a plan, the premortem creates an environment for dissenting views and concerns that might otherwise remain unspoken. By temporarily suspending certainty about the solution, leaders broaden their frame of reference and expose their assumptions, overlooked obstacles, and competing interpretations of the challenge. The value is not simply identifying risks. It is forcing the team to stay longer in a state of inquiry before committing to a course of action, increasing the likelihood that they are solving the right problem rather than merely defending an attractive solution.
One recent client in my practice had skipped over the step of clarifying the core problem and gone straight to surveying internal stakeholders on what initiatives and projects they each felt were most important. Without agreement on the problem, every project seemed important. The conversation would become about competing initiatives with no mechanism for evaluating value or importance. A small step back with the leadership team allowed them the space and time to explore the primary strategic choices ahead, discuss the conflicts inherent in them, and decide on a focus. Now they are set to align the initiatives and projects that solve the problem they’ve defined.
The English poet John Keats coined the term negative capability to describe “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This is an uncomfortable space for many executives. And the pressure on leaders today is real. Boards want answers and teams want direction. Markets are demanding speed. But many failed strategies are not the result of moving too slowly. They are the result of moving quickly toward a problem that was never fully understood.
The pressure to move quickly is not going away. If anything, it is increasing. Yet the organizations that make the best strategic decisions are rarely the ones that arrive at solutions first. They are the ones that develop the clearest understanding of the challenge before deciding how to respond. A few extra weeks spent broadening the frame, testing assumptions, and involving the right people may feel inefficient at the outset. Compared to the cost of solving the wrong problem, it is often the fastest path forward.