The Problem You’re Solving May Not Be the Real Problem
A few years ago, I got fired.
It was one of the most painful experiences of my career. It felt sudden. It felt confusing. And if I’m honest, my first instinct was to explain it.
I had just gone through a 360 review, and some of the feedback hit me like a truck. I remember reading things people were saying about me and thinking, That’s not fair. That’s not the whole story. They don’t understand the context.
That is what most of us do when someone points out something we cannot see in ourselves. We explain it. We defend it. We add context. And sometimes the context is real. But eventually I had to confront something much harder.
They were right.
Not about everything. Not in every way. But there were things other people could see in me that I could not see in myself. The signs had been there. I just wasn’t interpreting them correctly.
That experience taught me something I have carried into almost every organization I work with now:
The problem you see is not always the problem you have.
The Symptom Is Not Always the Problem
Organizations do the exact same thing.
Sales are down, so we call it a marketing problem. People are overwhelmed, so we call it a staffing problem. Projects are late, so we call it an execution problem. The website is not converting, so we call it a website problem. Maybe. But maybe not.
The danger is not that leaders are bad at spotting problems. Most leaders are actually pretty good at noticing when something is off.
The danger is that we correctly identify the symptom and then solve the wrong problem. That is where organizations waste enormous amounts of time, money, and energy.
A Growth Problem May Not Be a Marketing Problem
A company says, “We need more leads.” Fair enough.
So they hire an agency. Increase ad spend. Post more often. Try a new campaign. Maybe bring in another salesperson.
But what if the real problem is that the people already finding them do not understand what makes them different?
More traffic will not fix that. It will just send more people into the same confusion.
Or maybe people understand the offer just fine, but the follow-up is terrible. Now the issue is not lead generation. It is execution.
Or maybe the sales process is strong, but the market being targeted is wrong. Same symptom. Completely different problem.
That is why “we need more leads” is not really a diagnosis. It is a clue.
More People Won’t Fix a Broken System
The same thing happens inside organizations all the time.
“We need another person.” Maybe. But why?
Is the workload truly too large? Or are priorities unclear? Is work duplicated? Does nobody know who owns what? Are meetings producing conversation but not decisions? Are people spending hours working around a broken process that no one has stopped to question?
If you hire another person into a broken system, you may not have solved the problem. You may have just added another person to the confusion.
More Communication Can Create More Noise
Communication is another great example.
Leaders say, “We need to communicate more.” Maybe you do.
But maybe you are already communicating plenty and nobody knows what matters most. Those are different problems.
More communication in an unclear organization does not create clarity. It usually creates noise.
Slow Down Before You Solve It
This is one of the reasons I built my consulting process around slowing down the jump from problem to solution.
I call the framework CLEAR: Context. Locate the Gap. Existing Assets. Advantage. Response.
The order matters. Most organizations want to move from Context straight to Response.
Here is what is happening. Here is what we should do.
That jump feels productive because action feels productive. But the most valuable part of the process is often the middle.
Locate the Gap
What is actually breaking? Where does momentum stop? What keeps repeating? What symptom are we treating over and over? What are we assuming is true simply because we have repeated it enough times?
And maybe the most important question:
Is the problem we started with actually the problem?
That question can feel annoyingly slow when you are under pressure. Leaders want action. Boards want answers. Teams want decisions.
But a little more diagnosis on the front end can save months of activity on the wrong solution.
Find Where Momentum Stops
Think about growth.
There is usually some version of a journey:
Attention → Interest → Decision → Experience → Return or Referral
If growth is stalled, your job is not automatically to “do more marketing.” Your job is to figure out where momentum stops.
Are people not seeing you? That is an attention problem.
Are they seeing you but not caring? That may be a message problem.
Are they interested but not taking action? That may be a conversion problem.
Are they buying once and disappearing? That may be an experience problem.
Are happy customers failing to return or refer others? Now you are looking at retention or advocacy.
“Growth” is not one problem. It is a category of symptoms.
The same is true with almost everything else inside an organization.
Execution problems can actually begin with clarity. Alignment problems can begin with leadership decisions. Marketing problems can begin with a weak value proposition. Culture problems can begin with what leaders tolerate. Staffing problems can begin with terrible systems.
You Stop Seeing What You Learn to Work Around
That is why outside perspective can be so valuable.
When you live inside an organization long enough, you adapt to things.
Broken processes become normal. Confusing language becomes normal. Meetings that do not accomplish much become normal. Customers asking the same questions over and over becomes normal. A workaround that should have been temporary becomes “how we do things here.”
You stop seeing the friction because you know how to work around it. Everybody else just experiences the friction.
That is one of the strangest things about blindspots. Nothing necessarily changes when you finally see one.
You just finally see what was already there.
And once you see it, the response often becomes much simpler. Not easy. But simpler.
Maybe you do need more marketing. Maybe you do need another employee. Maybe you do need a new system. Maybe you do need to restructure the team.
But those decisions become much better when they are responses to the real problem instead of reactions to the loudest symptom.
Before You Solve the Next Problem
Before you solve the next big organizational problem, ask a few questions:
What is actually happening?
Where is the real breakdown?
What keeps repeating?
What are we trying over and over that is not changing the outcome?
What are we assuming?
Are we solving the real problem—or just the most visible one?
Sometimes the smartest next move is not doing more.
It is seeing better.
Where Is Your Organization Getting Stuck?
The Blindspot Assessment helps you identify whether clarity, leadership, execution or alignment may be creating friction inside your organization — so you can work on the right problem first.
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