Strategy · 5 min read

The problem you arrive with is rarely the problem that needs solving

Most founders arrive with a diagnosed problem. My sales are slow. My marketing isn't working. I can't find good people. And they want help solving that specific problem — the one they've already named.

The trouble is, the named problem is almost never the real problem. It is a symptom. A surface manifestation of something sitting one or two layers deeper that hasn't been examined yet.

I have seen this pattern more times than I can count. A founder comes to me convinced they have a sales problem. We talk for twenty minutes and it becomes clear they have a positioning problem — they are talking to the wrong people about the wrong thing, and no sales technique in the world will fix that. The sales conversation is just where the positioning problem becomes visible.

Or a founder is convinced they have a motivation problem. They know what they need to do but they can't make themselves do it. We dig a little and find a clarity problem underneath — they are not actually sure the thing they are building is the right thing, and their resistance is not laziness but a kind of unconscious intelligence refusing to sprint in the wrong direction.

This is why the first question is almost never the right question. Not because founders are bad diagnosticians — they are often remarkably good at identifying where things hurt. But pain and cause are different things, and the cause is always downstream of the symptom.

The practice I find most useful is simple: when a problem is presented, ask what would have to be true for this to be the real problem. What would the business look like if this were genuinely the core issue? And then ask whether that matches what you actually see.

Usually it doesn't. Usually there is something else — a decision that hasn't been made, an assumption that hasn't been tested, a conversation that hasn't been had. Find that thing, and the original problem often dissolves.

This is not comfortable work. It requires a founder to stay in the question a little longer than feels natural, to resist the pull toward action, to sit with uncertainty while the real problem comes into focus. But it is the most valuable work there is.

The problem you arrive with is a starting point. Treat it as a door, not a destination.