Nobody had an answer

What problem are we trying to solve?

A few years ago I joined a local community action group, wanting to do my bit for the community I live in. The first meeting was mostly talk – lively, thoroughly minuted, accompanied by good tea and biscuits, and, as far as I could tell, about nothing in particular. Everyone seemed to enjoy it enormously though, which was nice.

The second was much the same: plenty of discussion, though I couldn't have told you what about. I assumed the fault was mine – I was new, I hadn't yet grasped the local issues the group existed to serve – so I came to the third determined to concentrate. More words. More nodding. More pen to paper. And again, no clearer sense of what we were actually there to do.

At the fourth, I finally asked. What problem, I said, are we all trying to solve?

Silence. The very uncomfortable kind. Nobody had an answer.

Our workplaces often run on this exact scenario more often than we'd care to admit: lots of discussion, lots of opinion, lots of cheerful momentum, all circling something nobody's quite clarified. It's why, years ago, running a change team trying to make a large company smoother and quicker and a bit cheaper to run, I started opening every meeting and discussion with a single, really annoying question – or rather, its two-faced version.

What problem are we trying to solve? And its more optimistic twin: what opportunity are we trying to open up?

Two sides of one coin, and if we couldn't answer either of them cleanly, we didn't have clarity, and our finite resources of time, energy and attention, were probably better spent elsewhere. (Unless the whole point of the gathering was to define the problem — which is a perfectly good reason to meet, so long as everyone knows that's what they're doing.)

The effect was slow, and then totally culturally changing. People began arriving already knowing what we were there for, because they'd learned I would ask. Then they started asking it of each other. And it turned out to be useful for everything, not just meetings. It's the question worth asking at the start of any piece of work, any initiative, any idea that hopes to become something valuable.

What problem are we solving, or what opportunity are we opening? Get that clear and a remarkable amount of pointless work simply never gets started.

Two more questions do most of the remaining work, and both are worth asking with curiosity. The first: how do we actually know this is a problem? Not a hunch, not a mood, not someone's opinion but some evidence – which does double duty, because the thing that tells you a problem is real is also the thing that later tells you whether you've solved it.

And the second, which sounds almost insulting until you try it: is this problem even worth solving? Every organisation, and every person, has more problems than they could ever get round to solving, and most of the skill in work is in choosing which ones deserve the effort and letting the rest simply be problems. A significant amount of good people, with good intentions, spend a significant amount of time fixing things that would have been perfectly fine left alone.

None of this is semantics; it's orientation, and it's the difference between doing more work and doing the right work. Without the question, organisations tend to fill their calendars and inboxes and slide decks with effort nobody can properly account for – and when you ask why, the honest answers are always some version of "I was asked to," "it feels like the right thing," or "it's what we always do."

I once worked somewhere where, by my rough estimate, ninety percent of people's time went into making PowerPoint decks; when I asked what problem the decks were solving, nobody could tell me – not the people making them, not the executives commissioning them, other than a vague statement about PowerPoint slides are how we share data and align people. For the record that didn't work – people weren't informed, nor aligned. Everyone was working hard – genuinely hard, with proper effort – but almost nobody could say what problem is was actually solving.

Somewhere else, a leadership team was pouring over a hundred million pounds into a "digital transformation" justified entirely in abstractions – efficiency, modernisation, transformation – with not one single exec or manager able to name a single concrete problem it would actually fix. At one point nobody even knew what they were transforming towards. True story. An enormous amount happened. Nobody could say when it was finished, nobody had a clear future state to transform into and everyone was remarkably busy. Underneath it all stems the same simple reason that if you don't know what problem you're solving, you can never know when you're done.

There's a smaller pair of questions I've come to lean on for almost anything that arrives as a fact or evidence.

The first: is that always true? The moment someone reaches for an absolute – always, never, everyone knows – it's worth a pause and a thought, because most useful truths are conditional, and knowing where a thing stops being true helps to give you the edges of your solution.

The second: and is the opposite always false? Two contradictory things can, in fact, be true depending on where you're standing. Centralising is efficient on a spreadsheet, and it smothers local knowledge too. Structure enables creativity, and too much strangles it. Those aren't contradictions to be resolved; they're trade-offs to be designed around – and the inverse question, is the opposite always false, is what stops you mistaking a trade-off for a truth. Each takes about three seconds to ask, and routinely saves hours of confidently misdirected work.

Some people flinch at the word "problem," as though naming one admits something has gone wrong. But business is, underneath everything, just the endless craft of solving problems, and every one of them is also an opening. Low sales is a problem and an invitation. Poor retention is a problem and a chance to treat people better. Weak quality is a problem and an open door to doing something about it. A good organisation is not an organisation without problems — it's one that keeps choosing the right ones to work on with a critical approach to it. And the good problems actually energise people; they give the work a direction and, thankfully, waypoints, so you can tell when it's done.

Which is really a better definition of productivity than the one we tend to hear in the workplace. It is not about speed. It's about direction – the steady turning of effort into value – and that begins, every time, before the solutions and the plans and the action, with orientation. So ask the question. What problem are we trying to solve; what opportunity are we opening up? Almost everything useful follows from there, and it costs nothing – no new tool, no new platform, no new system. Just the willingness, in the community hall and the boardroom alike, to stop for three seconds and ask that powerful question before everyone reaches for the biscuits and declares victory on the meeting.