The question your next strategy meeting should start with.

The real problem is rarely the one you've been solving.

A reorganisation that was supposed to fix the structure. A change programme that was supposed to fix the culture. A new strategy that was supposed to fix the direction. You hired the right people, followed the right frameworks, applied the right methodology. And somewhere between the plan and the reality, it stopped working.

So you tried again. Harder. With more data. With a bigger budget. With another consultant.

And the problem is still there.

There is a fundamental distinction that most leadership teams never make explicitly, but that quietly determines the outcome of almost every major intervention they attempt.

Some problems are complicated. A complicated problem has a definable answer. It may require significant expertise, sophisticated analysis, and disciplined execution, but there is a correct solution. You can find it, implement it, declare it done. Complicated problems respond to best practices, because best practices were built by people who solved the same problem before you.

Other problems are wicked. A wicked problem has no definable answer. Every attempt to frame it changes it. Every intervention reshapes the system in ways that cannot be fully predicted.

Most of the persistent challenges leadership teams carry, year after year, are wicked. Most of the tools they reach for were designed for complicated problems.

There is a moment in most organisations where a complex, systemic problem gets classified as something more manageable than it actually is. It happens quickly, usually in a meeting where there is pressure to decide, to act, to show progress.

The problem gets a familiar label. It gets assigned a familiar response. And a best practice gets deployed against something it was never designed to handle.

For a while, the symptoms improve. There is movement. There is visible action. And then, gradually, the problem reasserts itself. Under a different name. In a different team. In a different quarter. With the same underlying architecture that was never actually touched.

The cost of this is not just the wasted budget on the intervention that didn't hold. It is the accumulated credibility loss every time leaders announce a solution that doesn't last.

Wicked problems do not ask to be solved. They ask to be navigated.

That is a different orientation entirely. It means stepping back from the instinct to identify the right answer, and instead asking something more uncomfortable: what type of challenge are we actually dealing with?

Those questions do not produce a slide deck. They produce something more valuable: a fundamentally different relationship to the problem.

This is upstream work. It does not address the strategy, the structure, or the process. It addresses the thinking that produces all three.

Not “what is the solution?” Not “who is responsible?” Not “what did we try last time?”

But: what kind of problem are we actually holding?

That single question, asked seriously and answered honestly, changes everything that follows. It changes which voices need to be in the room. It changes what success looks like. It changes the time horizon.

Most leadership teams never ask it explicitly. They assume the answer and move directly to solutions.

That assumption is where the cost begins.

Think of a persistent challenge in your organisation,
the one that keeps returning regardless of what you do.

What if the problem was never the problem,
but the way you were framing it?

That is the conversation we are built for.