Solving Business Problems That Keep Coming Back
- Afzul Soobedaar
- 24/01/2023
- 18:23
- 0 comments
Most business owners know how to start solving business problems. They know when sales are slowing, staff are under pressure, customers are unhappy, or work is falling through the cracks.
The difficulty is not usually noticing the problem. It is getting underneath it.
Many problems persist not because the people involved are careless or incapable, but because the process being used was not designed to produce resolution. It was designed to produce discussion.
This guide sets out a practical process for doing exactly that. It can be used by any business owner or small team dealing with a problem that keeps coming back.
If you want to understand in depth why business problems keep coming back — the patterns of poor diagnosis, discussion without closure, and diffused focus that keep most teams stuck — we have covered that in detail in Recurring Business Problems.
What this guide focuses on is what comes next. A practical, step-by-step process for working through a significant business problem and arriving at a clear decision and action plan. One that any business owner or small team can apply.
A Practical Framework for Solving Business Problems
The following framework can be applied by any business owner or small team dealing with a complex, unresolved challenge. It is structured enough to impose discipline, flexible enough to adapt to different types of problems.
Step 1: Assemble the right people
Start with the question of who needs to be involved, not who is available or most familiar with the issue.
A good problem-solving group is small, four to six people works well in most situations. It draws on different parts of the business where relevant. It includes both the people with relevant knowledge and the person with the authority to make or confirm the final decision.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Many problems persist specifically because the people working on them do not have the authority to resolve them. And no one has been explicitly asked to close that gap.
Step 2: Define the longer-term goal before addressing the problem
It may seem counterintuitive to start by looking ahead rather than at the problem itself. But the longer-term goal provides context that changes how you interpret and prioritise what you are working on.
A supply chain bottleneck looks different if your goal is to scale rapidly over the next 18 months versus to maintain steady operations.
A talent gap looks different if you are planning to enter a new market versus to consolidate your current one. Without the goal, you are solving in a vacuum.
Set a goal that is specific enough to be meaningful, typically one to three years out. Then use it as the reference point for everything that follows.
Step 3: Identify the one critical problem
This is where most teams struggle, and where the quality of your outcome is largely determined.
Under pressure, teams tend to conflate multiple issues and try to address them all at once. This produces broad action plans with shallow commitments and limited impact. The discipline is to work through the full range of issues standing between the team and its goal, and then isolate the single most important one to address first.
This does not mean the other issues are irrelevant. It means that focus is more valuable than comprehensiveness, and that resolving the most critical problem often clears the path for the others.
A useful test: If we could only fix one thing, and fixing it would make the most difference to our goal, what would it be? Work toward a clear, agreed problem statement before moving forward.
Step 4: Generate possible solutions
Once the critical problem has been clearly defined, reframe it as an open question before generating solutions. A prompt like "How might we..." shifts the conversation from diagnosis to possibility without losing focus.
This reframe matters because it opens up the solution space. "We have a customer retention problem" generates defensive energy. "How might we make it meaningfully easier for our best customers to stay?" generates ideas.
Generate options individually before discussing them as a group. This reduces the influence of dominant voices and first suggestions, and tends to surface a broader range of ideas. Aim for quantity before quality at this stage, evaluation comes next.
Step 5: Evaluate options against agreed criteria
Not all good ideas are practical. Not all practical ideas are impactful. Evaluating options against agreed criteria introduces enough structure to ensure that the decision rests on considered judgment rather than preference, seniority, or the order in which ideas were raised.
The criteria will vary depending on the nature of the problem, but typically include some combination of: likely impact on the goal, feasibility given current resources and constraints, speed of implementation, and risk.
The aim is not false precision. It is to avoid the common failure mode of choosing the most appealing option rather than the most useful one.
Step 6: Build a specific action plan - not a to-do list
A workshop that ends with insight but no execution has not solved anything. The final step is to translate the preferred solution into a clear, time-bound action plan.
This means specific tasks (not vague intentions), named individuals with defined responsibilities (not team ownership, which in practice means no ownership), agreed deadlines, and defined measures of progress. Each action should have an owner who is present in the room and who has explicitly accepted the commitment.
The difference between this and a to-do list is accountability. The point of this step is not documentation, rather it is to ensure that the work leaves the room with momentum, owners, and a mechanism for follow-through.
These six steps form the basis of Perispec's Decision Sprint - a facilitated session designed to move a business through this process in a matter of hours rather than weeks of circular discussion.
How to Diagnose Which Type of Problem You Are Dealing With
Solving business problems more effectively starts with recognising which type of problem you are actually dealing with. Business problems tend to cluster into five broad categories, and each category has its own common misdiagnosis, and solving the wrong version of the problem is one of the most reliable ways to stay stuck.
Commercial problems
How to recognise them: Declining revenue, weak conversion, poor customer retention, pricing pressure, or growth that has stalled without an obvious external cause.
The most common misdiagnosis: Owners and managers typically treat commercial problems as marketing problems. When sales are down, the default response is to generate more leads or increase visibility. But declining conversion usually points to a misalignment between the offer and the customer, a breakdown somewhere in the sales or retention process, or a pricing structure that no longer reflects market reality. More volume fed into a broken process produces more failure, not more sales.
The right starting question: Are we losing because too few people find us, or because too few people who find us are choosing to stay?
Operational problems
How to recognise them: Recurring bottlenecks that reappear despite repeated fixes, processes that have outgrown the systems supporting them, quality issues that are attributed to individuals but keep happening regardless of who is in the role.
The most common misdiagnosis: Managers typically treat operational problems as people problems. When something keeps going wrong, the instinct is to find the individual responsible and address their performance. But if the same issue recurs with different people, the system is the problem. Fixing the person without fixing the system produces a temporary improvement followed by an identical recurrence.
The right starting question: If we replaced everyone involved in this process with competent, motivated people, would the problem persist?
Strategic problems
How to recognise them: A direction that exists on paper but has never been fully committed to, priorities that are unclear or contested, important decisions that keep getting deferred, or a feeling that the business is active but not making progress.
The most common misdiagnosis: Strategic problems are frequently treated as communication problems. The owner or leadership concludes that the direction is sound but has not been properly communicated. More communication follows, but nothing changes, because the real issue is that the strategy has never been translated into a small number of clear, owned actions. People cannot execute a direction - they can only execute specific tasks. Without that translation, a strategy remains an intention.
The right starting question: Can everyone in the business name the two or three most important things we are focused on right now - and do they all give the same answer? If the answer is no, the Strategic Clarity Check is a useful starting point.
People and team problems
How to recognise them: Persistent friction between people or departments, accountability that exists on paper but not in practice, decisions that get made but not followed through, or important work that falls into the gaps between roles.
The most common misdiagnosis: These problems are often treated as personality or culture issues. When people are not working together effectively, the instinct is to improve communication, run team sessions, or address interpersonal dynamics. But in most cases, the issue is structural: it is not clear who owns what, incentives are pulling in different directions, or the way decisions get made forces everything to escalate rather than getting resolved at the right level. Improving relationships within a broken structure produces warmer friction, not less friction.
The right starting question: When something important does not get done, is it because no one knew it needed doing, or because it was not clear who was responsible for doing it?
Change problems
How to recognise them: Something new that was supposed to happen has not happened - an initiative has lost momentum, a decision keeps getting revisited, or the business has been trying to shift how it operates for longer than anyone is comfortable admitting.
The most common misdiagnosis: Most owners and managers treat change problems as resistance problems. When progress stalls, they assume people are not sufficiently on board. More pressure or communication follows, which typically deepens resistance rather than reducing it. In most cases, the real issue is that the change has never been made concrete enough to act on. People are not resisting the direction so much as they are unclear about what it actually requires them to do differently day to day.
The right starting question: Is this moving slowly because people do not want it, or because they do not know specifically what it requires of them?
A Worked Example: When the Formula Stops Working
A small professional services business had built a strong foundation over its first four years. It had found a service offering that worked, a client profile that suited it, and a referral engine that kept the pipeline reasonably healthy. Revenue had grown steadily, the team had expanded, and leadership felt confident about the direction.
Then growth stopped.
Not dramatically - there was no crisis, no significant client loss, no obvious inflection point. Revenue plateaued, new business became harder to convert, and the referrals that had previously arrived without much effort began to slow. The team kept doing what had always worked. It just wasn't working as well.
Leadership's initial read was that the business needed to do more: more marketing activity, more networking, more visibility. Effort increased. Results didn't follow. After twelve months of pushing harder on the same levers, the question was no longer whether the business had a problem. It was what the problem actually was.
Diagnosing the real problem
Using the Decision Sprint, the leadership team set a goal for the next 18 months: to return the business to deliberate growth, not by doing more, but by understanding clearly what was and wasn't working, and making sharper choices based on that.
When the obstacles were examined, the early discussion produced familiar explanations. The market was more competitive. The business needed a stronger brand. The team needed better sales skills. Each had some surface plausibility. None fully explained why a business with genuine capability and a solid track record had stopped growing.
The structured discussion pointed toward something less comfortable. The way the business had been operating - the services it offered, the clients it pursued, the value it led with - had worked well in the conditions that existed when the business was younger. Those conditions had changed. More competitors had entered the space, several with sharper pricing and tighter focus. Clients had more options than before, and the reasons they had previously chosen this business were no longer as distinctive.
The business had not changed. The market around it had. And because growth had come relatively easily in the early years, there had never been a pressing reason to ask whether what they were doing still made sense.
The real problem was not effort or execution. It was that the business was working hard at an approach that no longer fitted the market it was operating in.
What changed
The team made two decisions. First, they cut the services that were bringing in revenue but stretching the team without playing to their strengths, and focused more deliberately on the work where they consistently got the best results. Second, they got clearer on who they were actually best for - moving away from a broad, loosely defined client category toward a more specific type of client where their particular strengths were most valued.
Neither decision was easy. Both required letting go of revenue that felt safe.
Within six months, the pipeline had improved, not in volume, but in quality. Conversion was higher because the business was having conversations with clients it was genuinely the right fit for. The team had more capacity because it was doing less work that stretched it without building it. Growth had not returned to its early-years pace, but it had become purposeful again rather than effortful.
When to Work Through This Alone vs. When to Bring in Outside Structure
Not every attempt at solving business problems requires a facilitated session. Many can be worked through effectively by a business owner and their team using the framework above, particularly when the problem is relatively well-defined, the team has a track record of productive decision-making, and there is no significant internal tension around the issue.
A structured external session tends to add the most value when:
You are too close to the problem. When an issue has been discussed internally for an extended period, perspectives harden and it becomes difficult to distinguish the real problem from accumulated frustration about it. An external facilitator provides the structure to reset that dynamic.
Internal dynamics are distorting the process. In any small team, seniority, relationships, and history shape what gets said and what gets left unsaid. A structured process with an external facilitator creates conditions where the quieter voice with the critical insight is as likely to be heard as the loudest one.
You need to move faster than your normal rhythm allows. Working through a complex problem in a concentrated session often produces sharper thinking and faster decisions than spreading the same discussion across weeks of fragmented meetings.
Previous attempts have not produced resolution. If the same problem keeps returning despite genuine effort, the issue is almost certainly the process rather than the people. A different structure is more likely to produce a different outcome than more of the same.
A Better Way Forward
Solving business problems well is rarely about finding a clever answer in the room. It is about creating the right conditions for clear thinking, honest diagnosis, and practical follow-through,and then protecting that process from the habits and pressures that tend to erode it.
The framework above can be applied immediately. Start with the right people, set a clear goal, isolate the real problem, generate options deliberately, evaluate them honestly, and end with specific commitments rather than general intentions.
If your business is dealing with a challenge that has stayed unresolved despite genuine effort, a structured problem-solving session may be what moves it forward.
Book a free 30-minute consultation to explore whether this approach could help with the challenge you are facing.