So often we start working with teams when they have identified a problem they want some help to solve. Lets take an example… A few years ago, I worked with a team that had a problem – employee survey results suggested communication was poor. Leaders felt people weren’t engaging with important messages. Updates were being missed. Change programmes were struggling to land.
Everyone reached the same conclusion.
“We need to improve communication.”
It sounded reasonable. The only issue was that communication wasn’t actually the problem. After spending time with employees, managers and leaders, a different picture emerged. People weren’t confused because messages were unclear. They were confused because decisions kept changing. Managers didn’t have enough context to answer questions. Priorities shifted faster than anyone could keep up with them.
No amount of better communication was going to fix that.
The organisation had done what most organisations do. It had looked at a symptom and mistaken it for the problem. And that’s where many well-intentioned People, HR and Internal Communication teams get stuck.
The strange downside of expertise
Experience is a wonderful thing. It helps us spot patterns quickly. It allows us to make sense of situations faster. It helps us avoid mistakes we’ve seen before.
But expertise has a hidden risk.
Sometimes we become so good at recognising familiar challenges that we stop investigating whether this challenge is actually the same. Psychologists refer to this as a form of cognitive shortcut. Faced with uncertainty, our brains naturally reach for explanations that fit previous experience.
This is useful when we’re crossing a road. It is less useful when we’re trying to understand complex organisational problems.
- A communication lead sees low comms scores on the survey and quite naturally assumes there’s a communication issue.
- HR leader sees poor retention and thinks managers are the issue.
Sometimes they’re right…. but not always. And the more familiar the symptom feels, the easier it becomes to jump directly to a solution.
Why organisations often solve the visible problem
Most workplace challenges arrive disguised as something else.
Take onboarding. If new starters aren’t settling in quickly enough, the obvious response might be to redesign the induction programme.
- New content.
- New workshops.
- New resources.
- New checklists.
Possibly useful interventions… But what if the real issue is that managers aren’t making time for new starters? What if expectations are unclear? The onboarding programme becomes the visible problem because it’s the easiest thing to see.
But often the real problem sits underneath.
The pressure to act quickly
Part of the problem is entirely understandable, most teams are under pressure. Leaders want action and employees want improvements. Nobody gets rewarded for spending six months exploring a problem without proposing a solution.
So organisations develop a habit….a challenge appears, a solution is chosen, activity begins, and there is progress. Or at least the appearance of progress. The trouble is that activity and progress are not the same thing.
We’ve all seen projects that produced a huge amount of output:
- Communications plans
- Workshops
- New processes
- Toolkits
- Training programmes
- Launch events
Yet somehow the original problem remains stubbornly present. That’s because the organisation became highly efficient at solving the wrong problem.
The future of work creates a new risk
This challenge becomes even more important as AI becomes more embedded in work. Much of the conversation around AI focuses on speed.
- Faster analysis.
- Faster content creation.
- Faster planning.
- Faster reporting.
And those benefits are real. But there is a question we don’t hear often enough.
‘What happens if we become dramatically faster at solving the wrong problem?’
If organisations already have a tendency to jump from symptom to solution, giving them tools that accelerate solution creation doesn’t automatically improve outcomes. In fact, it may amplify poor problem framing.
A beautifully written communication plan still won’t solve a leadership clarity issue.
A sophisticated AI-generated onboarding programme won’t fix a manager who has no time to support new starters.
A perfectly analysed dataset won’t create change if nobody addresses the underlying cause.
The risk isn’t AI replacing judgement, but organisations assuming judgement is no longer required.
At People Lab, we think the opposite is true. As answers become cheaper, judgement becomes ever more valuable.
The question before the question
One of the most useful shifts a team can make is surprisingly simple.
Before asking:
What should we do?
Ask:
What is really happening here?
That sounds obvious. Yet it is remarkable how rarely organisations create space for that conversation. Instead of beginning with interventions, begin with curiosity.
- Talk to employees.
- Observe behaviour.
- Explore alternative explanations.
- Look for evidence that challenges your assumptions, not just evidence that confirms them.
- Ask what else might be true.
Sometimes the answer will validate your original diagnosis And sometimes it won’t. Either outcome is valuable, because the aim isn’t to prove a theory, but to understand reality.
Smart teams stay curious
The most effective teams we work with are the ones that remain curious despite their expertise. They resist the temptation to rush towards answers. They treat first explanations as hypotheses rather than facts. They understand that people rarely experience workplace challenges in neat organisational categories. And they are willing to spend a little longer understanding a situation before deciding how to respond.
That approach can feel uncomfortable and tt can feel slower at the start. But it is almost always faster than implementing a solution that never addresses the underlying issue.
A final thought
Most organisations don’t struggle because they lack smart people. They are full of smart people. The challenge is that smart people are often very good at finding answers. The harder task is making sure they’re answering the right question.
Perhaps that’s one of the most important skills for the next few years.
Not generating more solutions.
Not producing more activity.
Not doing everything faster.
Simply developing the discipline to pause and ask:
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
Because when the wrong problem is solved brilliantly, the actual problem still exists.
And that’s a trap even the smartest teams can fall into.
