Are you solving the right problem?

Now, I’m not a gambler, truth be told. But I’m willing to bet that you’ve had this moment at least once before.

You’re partway through a piece of work that you’ve been directed to do (a report, plan or project perhaps) when you experience a small but uncomfortable gut feeling that what you’re working on isn’t what’s needed.

Do you keep going? It’s very risky to stop. You’ve already committed to your boss that you’d get it done, and they were pretty clear about what they wanted. Everyone important has already agreed on it.

Framing is not the step before the real work. It is the real work.

We’re talking today about problem framing - the discipline of getting deliberate about the question you are asking, before you build anything to fill the gap.

It sounds completely obvious and reasonable. But I promise you, in practice this is one of the most consistently skipped steps in strategic and leadership work. It doesn’t get skipped because people are careless, but because the conditions that make skipping it are genuinely hard to resist.

But not solving the right problems has a cost to each of us – not just the financial cost and wasted time cost, but the soul-destroying emotional heartache that comes with working on something that in the end has no real value.

There are three main ways that problem framing goes wrong: they aren’t usually separate failures, but layers that build upon each other.

01 | It doesn’t happen at all

The most basic failure is the most common one: the problem framing never gets done because nobody felt it was their place to do it.

You’ve been handed a significant piece of work, told what the problem is, what the output should look like, and implicitly, how long you have to deliver it. Something about the brief doesn’t feel right to you. Maybe the scope seems off, the question being asked doesn’t match the situation as you understand it, or you suspect the thing being asked for isn’t actually the thing that’s needed.

But you execute anyway. Because questioning the brief feels above your pay grade. Because it will probably create friction or make your boss think you’re being difficult again. Because you’ve learned, in this organisation or a previous one, that what gets rewarded is delivery, not deliberation.

This is an understandable choice. A path of least resistance, one might say! It is also a deliberate choice to spend your time doing work that may add no real value to anything or anyone.

The cost of skipping framing is not always visible upfront. It tends to surface later on when the final output misses the mark with someone higher up, or when a project loses the support of its executive sponsor. By that point, the connection back to the framing that never happened is easy to miss. It just looks like the work didn’t succeed. It might even look like failed change – that’s always a good reason.

There’s a version of this that is purely cultural — organisations that genuinely don’t create space for people to push back on the brief. But there’s also a version that is personal. The question worth asking yourself, before you dive into any significant piece of work, is a simple one: do I understand what problem I’m trying to solve, and do I believe it’s the right problem to be solving?

If the answer to either part is no, that’s the starting point.

Solving the wrong problem brilliantly still leaves you polishing a turd.

02 | It happens, but without rigour

Let’s say you do stop to frame the problem. Maybe you’re organisation mandates “problem statements” at the beginning of projects. You give it some thought, you write something down and feel reasonably clear about what you’re doing and why. Excellent. But the second failure mode is more subtle: it happens when the framing is built on contested ground, and you haven’t noticed.

The most useful tool I know for framing a problem properly is called SCQA — Situation, Complication, Question, Answer. It’s a four-part structure that forces you to be precise about what you know, what you’re interpreting, and what you’re trying to figure out.

But the tool is only as good as the discipline you bring to it. And the most common place people come unstuck is in the distinction between Situation and Complication.

Situation versus Complication

The Situation is what is objectively, undisputably true. It is the current state of the world that nobody in the room would argue with. “What is so.”

The Complication is different. It is an interpretation of the thing that has changed, or is creating tension, or is triggering the need for a response. It is a narrative about why this matters right now. And unlike the Situation, it can be debated.

Most people mush these together without realising it. They present their interpretation of the problem as though it were an objective fact. And when the interpretation is contested — by a stakeholder, by a senior leader, by new information that emerges mid-project — the whole framing wobbles around a bit, because it wasn’t clearly separated from the facts it was built on.

Getting this separation right matters because it keeps the conversation honest. When you can say: “here is what we know to be true” and separately, “here is what I believe that tells us” — you open space for genuine co-design and alignment. People can agree on the facts while testing the interpretation. That is a much more productive conversation than one where the facts and the interpretation are tangled together and it’s hard to tell which one is being debated.

How the question shapes everything

Once you have the Situation and Complication clear, the Question matters enormously. And this is where framing makes its biggest practical difference — because two questions that look almost identical on the surface can send you in completely different directions.

Take this example.

Question A: “How do we improve staff retention?”

This sends you straight to HR levers — exit surveys, pay benchmarking, benefits packages, onboarding processes. The assumption baked into the question is that retention is a systems problem, and that adjusting the right variables will fix it.

Question B: “How do we become a place people want to stay?”

This opens up something much wider — culture, leadership behaviour, purpose, the day-to-day experience of working here. The assumption is that retention is a symptom, and that the underlying condition is about what it actually feels like to work in this organisation.

In the framing of these two questions we have the same concern on the surface but completely different scopes, solution space, and likely outcomes. The question you choose to answer is a strategic choice — and it’s one that is worth making deliberately, not by default.

A well-formed question is specific enough to be answerable, broad enough to surface the real issue, and focused on what the decision-maker needs to move forward. Getting to that question — and testing whether it’s the right one — is the heart of good framing.

SCQA in practice: a simple example

S — Situation: Staff turnover in the division has increased from 12% to 19% over the past two years.

C — Complication: Exit interviews suggest people are leaving not for better pay, but because they don’t feel they are doing meaningful work or growing in their roles. This suggests the issue is not primarily a compensation problem.

Q — Question: How do we become a place where people feel they are doing meaningful work and building real capability?

A — Answer (hypothesis): The conditions for meaningful work are not currently designed into how work is structured, assigned, or recognised — and addressing that will have more impact on retention than any change to remuneration.

The question you choose to answer is a strategic choice. Make it deliberately.

03 | It stays in your head

But what about this. You’ve separated Situation from Complication, refined your question wording, and you have a clear sense of what you’re trying to solve and why. The third failure mode is the most consequential: you keep it to yourself.

Framing done privately is just personal clarity. Useful, but not sufficient. The real value of problem framing is in what happens when you share your interpretation of the problem with the people who need to act on it, fund it, or sponsor it, and you test whether they see it the same way.

This is where alignment gets built. Not in the project plan or the committee terms of reference but in the early, often uncomfortable conversation where you say: here is how I understand the problem we are trying to solve — and then you find out whether the people in the room agree.

Surfacing your framing is not a sign that you don’t yet know what you’re doing. It is a sign that you understand what it takes for good work to happen: iteratively, collaboratively, with the thinking visible enough to be tested and improved.

Why this is harder than it sounds

Good framing, shared honestly, sometimes names things that people in the room would prefer to leave unnamed. The real problem might sit with a particular leader. The complication might implicate a decision that was made above your pay grade. The right question might require the organisation to confront something it has been avoiding.

This is why framing is not just a thinking skill. It is a leadership act. It requires the confidence to put an interpretation in front of people who may push back on it. The conviction to hold your framing when the pushback is about discomfort rather than substance. And the judgement to know when the pushback is telling you something genuinely important about the problem you haven’t yet understood.

The same qualities that help you navigate ambiguity — like staying grounded when others are panicking, resisting the rush to certainty — help you here too. Because surfacing a problem frame before you have a solution can feel exposing. It is easier to wait until you have the answer and then present the problem and the solution together as a fait accompli.

But by then, the opportunity to genuinely align around the problem has usually passed. You are presenting conclusions, not building shared understanding. And if your framing was even slightly off, you will feel it come down like a tonne of bricks at the back end.

Framing kept private is another problem waiting to surprise you.

The question underneath all of this

These three layers build towards something that is not really about technique. It is about the kind of work you want to do.

Skipping the framing — executing without questioning, blending facts with interpretation, keeping your thinking private — is always the path of least resistance. It is faster in the short term and avoids friction by keeping you out of conversations that might be uncomfortable.

But it is also the path most likely to produce work that doesn’t add value or give you any real satisfaction. Work that brilliantly answers the wrong question or loses its way because the people who needed to be aligned around the problem, weren’t.

Problem framing is what separates people who complete tasks from people who create value through solving real problems. It is not glamorous, and it is rarely the part of the work that gets celebrated. But it is the part that determines whether everything else was worth doing.

So the question is a simple one: do you want to just do what you are told, or do you want to do work that makes a difference?

Thanks for reading. Let’s unsquiggle this, good people!