Why Businesses Keep Solving the Wrong Problem
- Afzul Soobedaar
- 22/07/2026
- 11:34
- 0 comments
Most businesses do not struggle because they cannot solve problems. They struggle because they keep solving the wrong problem.
A problem appears. A meeting is called. Someone proposes a solution, and the discussion quickly shifts from understanding the issue to implementing the fix. Everyone leaves feeling productive. Six months later, the problem is still there. The business has invested time, money and management attention in a solution that never had a realistic chance of succeeding because it was aimed at the wrong target.
This is what solving the wrong problem looks like in practice. The problem is rarely poor execution. More often, it is poor definition.
Russell Ackoff, one of the pioneers of systems thinking, made the point fifty years ago: "We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem." Half a century later, most organisations still prove him right.
Why organisations keep solving the wrong problem
Most of the time, this has nothing to do with intelligence or commitment. It happens because of the way people and organisations naturally respond to pressure.
Jumping to solutions
Leaders are expected to act. Managers are expected to fix things. Business owners make difficult decisions every day. Under pressure, moving quickly feels like good leadership. The difficulty is that speed creates assumptions. A symptom becomes mistaken for a cause. A quick explanation becomes accepted as fact. Before long, the organisation is investing its energy in solving the wrong problem instead of understanding the right one. The pressure to act often arrives long before the understanding required to act well.
Bias
Every leader sees the business through a particular lens. Finance sees a financial problem. Operations sees a process problem.Sales sees a market problem. Human Resources sees a people problem. Past experiences, personal preferences and previous successes all influence how people interpret what they see. Without deliberately challenging those assumptions, organisations define problems according to familiar patterns rather than objective evidence. A practical safeguard is to invite a second function to frame the issue before anyone starts diagnosing it. If Finance and Operations describe the same situation in completely different terms, that difference is valuable information.
Ego and hierarchy
One person speaks first. Everyone else adjusts. This is rarely intentional. It is simply how groups behave when hierarchy exists and the perceived cost of disagreement is high. The danger is that problems become defined by influence rather than insight. Seniority gives someone the authority to decide, but it does not automatically improve diagnosis. Some of the most expensive business mistakes begin with solving the wrong problem because nobody felt comfortable questioning the original definition.
Team structures that suppress disagreement
Many organisations claim they value honest discussion. Far fewer create the conditions for it. When people do not feel comfortable expressing different views, disagreement does not disappear. It simply moves into the corridor conversation after the meeting, leaving important information outside the decision-making process. That's not a communication problem. It's a structural problem.
The cost of solving the wrong problem
The consequences are greater than many leaders realise.
The scale of the problem is well documented. In research published in Harvard Business Review, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg surveyed 106 C-suite executives across 91 companies in 17 countries. Eighty-five percent agreed their organisations were bad at problem diagnosis. Eighty-seven percent agreed that this failure carried significant costs. Fewer than one in ten said they were unaffected.
For SME owners, the risk is particularly high. The same person who identifies the problem often approves the solution and ultimately carries the consequences. There is no independent function to challenge the diagnosis and no second line of defence.
If the diagnosis is wrong, the entire business can move in the wrong direction.
This is why solving the wrong problem is often more damaging than moving slowly. A misdiagnosed problem does not simply waste the money spent on the wrong solution. It delays the moment the organisation starts working on the right one.
Activity creates the illusion of progress.
Once budgets are approved, projects launched and teams assigned, questioning the original diagnosis becomes uncomfortable. People become invested in proving the solution right instead of asking whether it was ever the right solution.
Meanwhile, the real problem waits.
Over time, the organisation learns to treat symptoms as causes. The same issues return. The same conversations take place. The same frustrations resurface.
If you have ever solved a problem only to find it returning a few months later, the original diagnosis was incomplete.
How to avoid solving the wrong problem
Step back before you step in
When a problem emerges, the instinct is to move immediately, and sometimes that is necessary. More often, a short pause creates far more value than immediate action. Taking time to understand the problem feels slower at the beginning but usually proves faster in the end because it reduces rework, false starts and expensive detours. The question is not how quickly you can act. The question is whether you understand enough to act intelligently.
Reframe the question
The way a problem is defined determines the solutions that become available.
Ask: “How do we fix this?”
and you will usually generate incremental improvements.
Ask: “How do we prevent this from happening altogether?”
and the conversation changes.
Ask:
“What opportunity does this reveal?”
and entirely different possibilities emerge.
Different questions often reveal different problems.
Wedell-Wedellsborg illustrates this with the slow lift problem. Tenants in an office building complain that the lift is too slow. Framed as an engineering problem, the answers are expensive: upgrade the motor, replace the lift. Reframed as a waiting problem, a far cheaper answer appears: install mirrors next to the lift. Complaints drop, because people lose track of time when they have something to look at. The lift never got faster. Speed was never the real problem.
Distinguish between glass and plastic problems
Not every problem deserves the same level of attention. A useful distinction is between glass problems and plastic problems.
Plastic problems bend and recover because the business can absorb the impact.
Glass problems shatter. Once they break, the damage is permanent or very expensive to reverse.
A temporary delay in a non-critical process is plastic. Running out of cash, losing a major client or becoming dependent on a single customer is glass.
Knowing the difference helps leaders allocate attention where it matters most.
When a plastic problem is misdiagnosed, you lose time. When a glass problem is misdiagnosed, there may be no second attempt.
Test your diagnosis
Before committing resources, state your diagnosis clearly.
Then ask one simple question:
What would have to be true for this diagnosis to be wrong?
This forces assumptions into the open before significant resources have been committed. If the answer cannot be tested, the organisation probably does not yet understand the problem well enough.
Listen to the people closest to the issue
Senior leaders often work from reports, dashboards and summaries. The people experiencing the problem work with reality. Leadership does not need to surrender decision-making authority. It does need to gather information from those closest to the issue. The quality of every solution depends on the quality of the diagnosis that came before it.
Defining the problem should be a deliberate process
One of the biggest mistakes leadership teams make is assuming that everyone shares the same understanding of the problem, when in fact, they they rarely do.
Ask five executives to describe the issue, and you will often receive five different answers. Each is valid from their perspective, yet each points towards a different solution.
That is why defining the problem should be a structured exercise rather than the first ten minutes of a meeting.
In a Perispec Decision Sprint, the team deliberately challenges assumptions, explores alternative ways of framing the issue, evaluates constraints and agrees on a shared definition of the problem before discussing possible solutions.
Only once everyone agrees on the problem does the conversation move to deciding what to do about it.
That sequence may feel slower but, in practice, it prevents months of effort being invested in solving the wrong problem.
What solving the wrong problem looks like
A business experiences declining sales and concludes that the sales team needs training.
A manufacturer responds to rising customer complaints by retraining customer service staff.
An engineering firm introduces more project meetings because deadlines keep slipping.
In each case, the organisation acts quickly. In each case, the solution is reasonable. In each case, nothing improves.
Only later does the real problem emerge.
Pricing was confusing. Production scheduling was unreliable. Critical decisions were bottlenecked through a single executive.
The organisations didn’t fail because they acted too slowly. They failed because they solved the wrong problem.
Once you have the right problem, solving it becomes easier
Problem definition is not the whole of problem solving. It's the part that determines whether everything else is worth doing.
Once the real problem is understood, solutions become easier to evaluate, decisions become easier to make and resources become easier to allocate.
The organisation stops chasing symptoms and starts addressing causes.
If the same issues keep appearing on management meeting agendas, there is a good chance the business is solving the wrong problem.
Working harder will not fix that. Better problem definition might.
Still solving the same problems?
If the same issues keep resurfacing despite repeated effort, the problem may not be execution. It may be that your team is solving the wrong problem.
Perispec’s Decision Sprint is a structured, facilitated workshop that helps leadership teams define the real problem, challenge assumptions, evaluate options and agree on a clear way forward.
Instead of debating opinions, you’ll leave with a shared understanding of the problem that actually needs solving—and a practical action plan to address it.
Ready to stop solving the wrong problem? Get in touch to discuss a Decision Sprint for your leadership team.