What problem are we trying to solve? — critical thinking as a leadership discipline

What problem are we trying to solve? — critical thinking as a leadership discipline

If you want to be more productive at work, start with a single question.

What problem are we trying to solve?

It sounds almost too simple — so simple it barely feels worth writing about. And yet I am constantly surprised by how rarely it is asked.

In its absence, organisations fill their calendars, their inboxes, and their slide decks with work that nobody can properly justify. When you ask why, the answers are almost always the same: "I was asked to." "It feels like the right thing to do." "It's what we always do."

This is not semantics. It is orientation. Because productivity is not about doing more work. It is about doing the right work.

Busy work and the illusion of progress

In one organisation I worked with, I estimated that ninety percent of staff time was spent producing PowerPoint decks. When I asked what problem the decks were solving, I never received a clear answer — from the people making them or from the executives requesting them. Everyone was working hard. Almost no one knew why. Activity had replaced purpose.

In another organisation, senior leaders were investing over £100 million in a digital transformation. The stated reasons were broad and abstract: efficiency, modernisation, transformation. But no one could describe the concrete problems the programme existed to solve. As a result, it drifted. Lots of work happened. No one could tell when it was finished — because if you do not know what problem you are solving, you can never know when the work is done.

This is one of the quiet failures inside modern organisations. Plenty of effort. Very little orientation.

Why this question changes everything

"What problem are we trying to solve?" forces three disciplines into the room simultaneously: evidence (is there really a problem?), judgment (is it worth solving?), and focus (is this where effort (cost) should go?).

It turns motion into meaning. It becomes a decision-making filter, a prioritisation tool, a test of value, and a way to stop work that should never have started. Without it, organisations optimise noise. With it, they begin to shape direction.

Two questions that deepen the discipline

Once the problem is named, two further questions sharpen the thinking.

The first: is that always true? Whenever someone states a certainty — always, never, everyone knows — it is worth pausing. Most useful truths are conditional. Understanding when something is not true reveals the boundaries of the solution and prevents the false comfort of universal answers. Dogma thrives on absolutes. Progress thrives on nuance.

The second: if it's always true, is the opposite always false? Binary thinking simplifies reality to the point of uselessness. Two contradictory things can often both be true depending on context, constraints, and the level at which you are looking. Centralisation is efficient and stifles local knowledge. Structure enables creativity and prevents it. These are not contradictions to be resolved — they are trade-offs to be designed around. Asking the inverse question opens the door to second-order thinking.

Together, these three questions form a simple discipline for replacing opinion with inquiry, certainty with curiosity, and dogma with design. They are not a framework. They are a practice — one that takes about three seconds to apply and saves hours of misdirected work.

How it becomes cultural

When I first started asking this question consistently, people were startled. They had never been asked to justify work at this level before.

Over time, something shifted. People arrived at meetings having already asked themselves the question. Then they began asking it of each other. Eventually it became cultural — applied to every meeting, every initiative, every new piece of work before it began. Busy work quietly disappeared. Not because people worked less, but because they worked with intent.

This is what critical thinking looks like in practice. Not a workshop or a methodology — a habit, embedded in the ordinary rhythms of how work is discussed and decided.

Problems are not negative

Some people resist the language of problems. It sounds like something is wrong.

But business is, at heart, the craft of solving a never-ending stream of problems. Low sales is a problem — and an opportunity. Poor retention is a problem — and an opening to improve how people are managed. Weak quality is a problem — and a chance to raise standards across the system. A good organisation is not one without problems. It is one that chooses the right ones to work on.

Good problems energise people. They give work a direction and a finish line. They make it possible to know when something is done. And on the other side of all problems, are opportunities.

A quiet definition of productivity

Real productivity is not speed. It is direction — the steady conversion of effort into value.

And that begins, always, with orientation. Before solutions. Before plans. Before action. Ask the question. What problem are we trying to solve? Everything useful follows from there.

This question is not a tactic. It is a discipline. A behaviour. And once embedded, it becomes a quiet cultural upgrade — one that saves time, money, and human energy without a single new tool being installed.