Stuck? You May Be Solving the Wrong Problem

Most small business owners and nonprofit leaders I talk with are not short on effort. They are short on traction. They have tried the new marketing push, the new software, the extra staff meeting, and the problem is still there.

When that happens, the issue is rarely a lack of hard work. More often, the work is aimed at the wrong target. The team is solving a symptom with care and skill, and the cause keeps producing new symptoms.

Why smart teams solve the wrong problem

This is not a small-business failing. In a Harvard Business Review article on problem diagnosis, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg reported that 85 percent of the 106 senior executives he surveyed agreed their organizations were bad at diagnosing problems, and 87 percent agreed the weakness carried significant costs. Large companies with analysts and consultants struggle with this too.

Dwayne Spradlin made a similar case in his 2012 HBR piece: organizations move to solutions before they have defined the problem well enough to know what a good solution would look like.

In a small organization, the pressure to act is even stronger. You are the person who has to fix it, and you are also the person who has to keep the doors open while you do. Acting feels responsible. Pausing to diagnose can feel like a luxury. It is usually the faster path.

Symptoms and causes look alike from the inside

A symptom is what you notice. A cause is what produces it. From inside the work, they are easy to confuse because the symptom is loud and the cause is quiet.

Each row in that table would lead to a different fix. If you treat “sales are down” as a marketing problem, you may spend on ads that bring more people to an offer that no longer fits them. If you treat it as an offer problem, you talk to buyers first.

Reframe before you solve

Wedell-Wedellsborg describes reframing as a deliberate step: before choosing a fix, you look at the problem from other angles and ask whether a different framing points to a better solution. A few questions do most of the work:

• What else could this be? Write at least two other versions of the problem statement.
• What is missing from the picture? Look at who is not in the room and what data you have not checked.
• Where is this not happening? A location, program, or staff member without the problem is a clue.
• What would the customer say the problem is? Their answer is often different from yours.

Reframing does not require a retreat or a long report. It requires a short pause before the fix is chosen, and someone willing to ask the second question.

Start by listening to the people closest to the work

My own approach to this started in education research. In my doctoral study, I was working with first-year special education teachers. Before designing anything, I listened. The teachers kept describing the same experience: they felt isolated, had limited materials, and had gone through a short training period before taking on full classrooms. The response we built, a small peer community, came from that need, not from a program I had already decided to run.

It was a small, one-semester study with four teachers, so I treat it as a lesson about process rather than proof of a model. The lesson has held up in every setting since: the people who experience the problem every day usually know where it lives. They may not have the language for the cause, but they can show you the moment it shows up.

For a small business, that might be your front-desk person, your two most loyal customers, and the one customer who left. For a nonprofit, it might be a volunteer, a program participant, and a board member who has seen three cycles of the same issue.

What a problem-diagnosis engagement looks like

When StrideForward is brought in to help with a stalled project, the first phase is diagnosis. It is short and specific:

• Listening sessions with the people who feel the problem, including customers, staff, volunteers, or partners.
• A quick look at the evidence you already have: sales records, attendance, complaints, renewal rates, and timelines.
• A reframed problem statement that the whole team can agree on, with the symptom and the likely cause named separately.
• Two or three options for what to do next, with the trade-offs laid out so you can decide.

Then we build the thing that addresses the cause: a revised offer, a clearer process, a better handoff, or a new program design. You get a working result, not only a set of recommendations.

Signs you may be solving the wrong problem

• You have fixed the same issue more than twice.
• Each person on your team describes the problem differently.
• The fix you are considering is the one you already know how to do.
• No one has asked a customer, participant, or front-line staff member about it.
• You are spending more to get the same result.

If two or more of those sound familiar, a short diagnosis will likely save you time and money.

If you would rather build this skill yourself, the NextReady Studio post on checking whether your idea solves a real problem walks through a 20-minute version. And if you learn best out in the world, Thrive Vibes has a field exercise for spotting problems worth solving when you step outside your routine.