The problem is often not the problem.

I have a tendency to keep asking why. I’m sure this is irritating in some circumstances, but it has served me pretty well in business.

“We need a rebrand.”

Why?

“Because the brand feels dated.”

To whom?

“Well, we want to attract younger customers.”

Why?

“Because our existing audience is getting older.”

Is that actually a problem?

And suddenly the conversation we thought was about visual identity is somewhere completely different.

This happens all the time. A business arrives with a problem that is actually a symptom, but because the symptom is the thing everyone can see, it becomes the thing everyone starts trying to solve.

Sales are down. Marketing problem. People aren’t converting. Website problem. Younger people aren’t buying us. Brand problem. Customers keep leaving. Retention problem.

Maybe. But maybe not.

I’ve started thinking about this as the thing beneath the thing. What is actually going on underneath the problem you can see?

It’s not about making everything unnecessarily complicated. Quite the opposite. Sometimes you pull the thread and discover the original diagnosis was completely right. Great. We can get on with fixing it.

But sometimes you discover everyone has been having an incredibly sophisticated conversation about the wrong problem.

I think this happens particularly easily inside businesses because you are living with the same information, language and assumptions every day. Everyone knows the backstory. Everyone has been in the meetings. The same explanation gets repeated until it stops sounding like an explanation and starts sounding like a fact.

An outside question can be incredibly basic.

“Why do we think that?”

And occasionally the answer is essentially, “Hmm. Actually, I’m not entirely sure.”

That’s normally when it starts getting interesting.