A conversation this week with a team leader reminded me of one of the most common and costly mistakes I see leaders and their teams make when facing challenges, and one I’ve made myself.
Moving to solutions before understanding the right problem to solve.
Once I sat down with the leadership team of a large retail corporation — around $500 million in revenue — with an ambitious goal: triple their e-commerce business revenue in six months.
They came to the session ready to execute. Twenty-five items on the action list. Several team members had already started on some of them. The energy in the room was high, as everyone wanted to move fast.
Before we touched the list, I asked one question.
“Where in the process are we losing the most customers and why?”
Silence. Nobody had looked at it that way. They’d gone straight to solutions — new features, new design, new campaigns, new processes — without identifying where the actual problem actually was.
We pulled up the analytics and the data was clear. The overwhelming majority of customers who abandoned their purchase process did so at checkout page.
Customers had chosen what they wanted. They couldn’t figure out how to proceed and pay for it, as it was required to register first without the option to continue as a guest.
Fixing that one stage alone, without touching the 25 items on the list, would double the number of customers completing a purchase. And therefore double the revenue.
Twenty-five tasks. One problem. One fix that moved the revenue number more than everything else combined.
We kept asking the same question throughout the engagement — where is the real problem, and are we solving the right one? Revenues grew 5 times in 6 months. Not because the team worked harder. Because they started solving the right problems.
The industry doesn’t matter.
I’ve watched the same pattern in manufacturing companies, professional services providers, financial services and technology companies across Europe, Russia, the US and the Middle East. The pressure to act always arrives before the habit to pause.
“It’s not that they can’t see the solution. They can’t see the problem.” – G.K. Chesterton
Why it matters
Most teams are reasonably good at executing solutions. They are often not as good at defining the right problems to solve.
The instinct under pressure is always to take action, to show progress, to demonstrate that something is being done. Boards reward visible activity. Teams want to show progress. The pressure to act before you’ve fully understood what you’re solving is part of the culture in most organizations.
But the cost of solving the wrong problem isn’t just wasted effort. It’s the right problem going unsolved while resources, attention, and time are consumed elsewhere. In a growing business, this gap compounds faster than leaders realize.
Problem-solving is not a management task to delegate.
The ability to define the real problem, separate it from its symptoms, and focus the team’s energy on the highest-leverage point — that’s a core leadership skill.
It’s also the foundation of innovation and growth strategy. Every meaningful innovation started with someone who defined the right problem before everyone else started solving the wrong one.
Your action this week
The next time you or your team face a significant problem or challenge, start by checking what you’re actually dealing with – a decision or a problem.
A decision is a choice between two or more alternatives — “Should we expand to market A or market B?” You have options and need to pick one.
A problem is a situation where reality doesn’t match your intentions or expectation — “We expanded to market A and revenue doesn’t grow.” Something went wrong and you need to find out why.
The two require completely different thinking. Confusing them is very common and it leads to teams discussing options when they should be diagnosing root causes, or investigating root causes when a decision simply needs to be made.
Once you’re clear on which one you’re facing — work through these five questions before moving to solutions. They’ve helped me, my teams, and my clients for many years.
1. Am I emotionally or physically fatigued?
Start here before anything else. A problem that takes hours of struggle to solve when you’re exhausted might take twenty minutes when you’re fresh. Most leaders make their hardest decisions at the worst possible time. Recognize the fatigue before you try to solve anything. Get rest first and go back to solving.
2. In a single sentence, what is the problem?
If you can’t state it in one sentence, you don’t understand it yet. Write it down before you proceed. The act of writing it often reveals whether you’ve actually defined the problem or are still describing the symptom.
3. Why does the problem exist?
What caused it and how do you prevent it from recurring? Most problem-solving stops at resolution. Look for root causes. Every significant problem also contains a lesson about a system or decision pattern that needs to change. Identify it before you move forward or you’ll be back here solving the same thing again.
4. Of all potential solutions, which has the greatest potential to be right AND the lowest risk?
Weigh options before deciding. The instinct under pressure is to go with the first workable solution. The better approach is to surface two or three, stress-test them briefly, and then commit fully to the best one.
5. Who can help me solve this problem?
Don’t solve it alone if you don’t have to. Talk to an expert with relevant experience, someone with no stake in the outcome, who can see it clearly, a peer who has faced something similar. Outside perspective is one of the most underused resources in problem-solving. The instinct at leadership levels is to have the answer, not to ask for help finding it.
What problem is your team working hardest on right now, and when did you last stop to ask whether it’s actually the right one?
Cheers, Andrey Sergeyev
For short ideas on leading, living and scaling business with focus on what matters – follow me on Linkedin
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