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Why Your Team Keeps Fixing the Wrong Problems—And How to Stop the Cycle

Have you ever felt like your team is working hard but not actually making progress? Do the same issues keep resurfacing, even though they’ve supposedly been “solved” multiple times?

If so, your team isn’t struggling with effort—it’s struggling with problem selection. Instead of tackling the real underlying issues, they’re stuck treating symptoms. This cycle leads to wasted time, poor execution, and frustration at every level.

But why does this happen? And more importantly, how can you fix it?

Symptoms of Solving the Wrong Problems

Teams spend time fixing issues, but the same challenges reappear.
Resources are allocated to projects that don’t deliver real impact.
There’s constant debate over priorities, but no clear direction.
Quick fixes get implemented, but deeper issues remain untouched.

If your team is busy but not producing meaningful change, they aren’t solving the right problems—they’re just patching symptoms. Here are some root causes

No Root Cause Analysis

Most teams jump straight to solutions without diagnosing the problem. They see a visible issue—like a spike in customer complaints—and react instead of investigating the real cause

What This Looks Like:

Teams rush to fix what’s obvious without asking, “Why is this happening?”
Problems keep resurfacing because solutions are shallow, not deep.
Leadership grows frustrated as the same issues persist despite “fixes.”

Pressure to Act Quickly

In fast-moving environments, teams feel pressure to be seen fixing things rather than taking the time to address them correctly. The result? Short-term band-aids instead of long-term solutions.

What This Looks Like:

Quick decisions are made under pressure, often without full data.
Teams fix what’s easiest to change, not what will have the biggest impact.
Leadership praises fast action over smart action, reinforcing the habit.

No Prioritization Rubric

Even when teams do identify multiple issues, they can still struggle to prioritize because they dont have a structured methodology to evaluate what matters. They focus on activity vs impact.

What This Looks Like:

The loudest voice in the room dictates what gets worked on.
People default to “urgent” problems rather than important ones.
Efforts are scattered, leading to inconsistent progress.

Teach Teams to Diagnose

Implement a structured approach like root cause analysis before jumping to action. Use techniques like:

The 5 Whys Method (asking “why” repeatedly until you reach the root cause).
Logic trees to break down complex problems into manageable parts.
Data validation to confirm you’re solving the real issue.

When teams diagnose first, they stop treating symptoms and start eliminating problems at the source.

Shift the Culture from Speed to Impact

Fast action feels good—but effective action drives results. Encourage teams to:

Slow down before speeding up—taking time to analyze first.
Define success up front—ensuring solutions create lasting impact.
Reward problem selection, not just problem-solving—so teams focus on the right issues.

Create a Framework for Prioritizing Problems

Give teams a structured way to evaluate which problems deserve attention. Consider:

Impact vs. Effort: Will solving this create meaningful results?
Urgency vs. Importance: Is this critical, or just loud?
Alignment: Does solving this support key business goals?

With a shared framework, teams align on where to focus instead of spinning their wheels.

If your team keeps revisiting the same problems, check their ability to conduct a real root cause analysis

If you can shift symptom-fixing to root cause resolution, replacing urgency with impact-based decision-making, and adopting a structured prioritization method, you’ll break the cycle

Want to stop fixing the wrong problems?

Join our webinar Wednesday, April 2nd at 1:00pm Pacific. Click here to register

more insights

Stop the Firefighting: Make Time Visible and Reclaim Strategic Bandwidth

I counted up my strategic time last quarter and it was ugly. Less than 15% went to our operating model redesign, the thing that’s supposed to transform how we work. The rest went to vendor fires, site issues, and endless escalation calls. When I mentioned this to my CPO, she laughed and said she hadn’t touched her roadmap in six weeks. As COO, you own the operating rhythm of the business. Time to fix how your leadership team spends their time. Run a half-day workshop with your peers. Call it “Calendar Recovery” or something equally straightforward. Everyone brings their calendar from the last month. In the room, each person categorizes their own time into strategic versus reactive work. No judgment, just math. You go first. Put your terrible ratio on the board and own it. When the COO admits to 85% reactive time, it makes everyone else comfortable sharing their reality. Your CEO might discover they’re at 40% strategic when they thought they were at 70%. Your CFO might realize why that pricing transformation keeps sliding. Together, set realistic targets for each role. You know operations means more reactive time, so maybe you target 50% strategic while your CMO aims for 65%. The key is everyone chooses their own target based on their role and current initiatives. Then the practical part: each executive identifies their three biggest time drains and picks one to fix before next quarter. Maybe it’s that second ops review that never drives decisions. Maybe it’s personally handling escalations that a director could manage. Everyone commits to one specific change and shares it with the group. The workshop ends with calendar blocking. Right there, everyone protects time for strategic work over the next month. Four-hour blocks minimum. Make it sacred. If the leadership team can’t protect twelve hours a month for strategy, you’re just playing executive. Run this workshop quarterly. Each time, share what worked and what didn’t. Did killing that standing meeting free up time, or did it just fill with other fires? Did delegating vendor management work, or did it create more problems? Learn together, adjust together. The beauty of the workshop format is that nobody’s monitoring anyone. You’re solving the problem as a team. Plus, when your CFO sees your calendar chaos firsthand, they stop scheduling those “quick syncs” during your strategy blocks. Between workshops, keep it simple. In your Monday leadership meeting, anyone can flag when they’re going underwater on reactive time and ask for help. No dashboards, no weekly reporting, just peers helping peers protect strategic time. Some specific changes that work: Kill the second review: Most topics don’t need two meetings. Pick one forum, trust it. Batch the small stuff: All sub-$50K approvals on Friday afternoon, 30 minutes, done. Create escape valves: If someone’s over 80% reactive for two weeks, they can skip all non-critical meetings without asking. Your operating model redesign keeps dying because you only touch it between fires. Same with your CPO’s roadmap. Your CEO hasn’t thought past next quarter in months. The workshop breaks this pattern. A quarter from now, you want different problems. Instead of “why didn’t this happen?” you want “how do we scale this?” Instead of fighting today’s fire, you want to be preventing next quarter’s. That only happens when executives have time to think. Start with scheduling the first workshop. Three hours, full leadership team, calendars in hand. The conversation alone will change how your team thinks about time. The Tuesday Test: Can you name what strategic work you’ll do this week? Not what meetings you’ll attend or fires you’ll fight, but what you’ll actually move forward? If not, you’re just responding, not leading. Book the workshop. This quarter’s strategic initiatives are already at risk. Every week you wait is another week of executive time burned on things that won’t matter in six months Calendar Recovery Workshop Calendar Recovery Workshop Q1 2024 Leadership Team – Current State Analysis COO (You) 85% REACTIVE Top Time Drains Vendor escalations (12h/week) Site issue war rooms Double-checking ops reviews What’s Dying Operating model redesign Process automation roadmap CEO 45% STRATEGIC Top Time Drains Customer fire drills Board member 1:1s (reactive) “Quick sync” meetings (8h/week) What’s Dying 2025 vision work Strategic partnerships CPO 90% REACTIVE Top Time Drains Customer escalations Feature request reviews (15h/week) Engineering standups (daily) What’s Dying Q2 product roadmap Innovation sprints CFO 40% STRATEGIC Top Time Drains Budget variance meetings Investor updates (ad-hoc) Approval bottlenecks What’s Dying Pricing transformation FP&A system upgrade CTO 55% STRATEGIC Top Time Drains Vendor negotiations Incident response (on-call) Hiring interviews (10h/week) What’s Dying Tech debt reduction Platform modernization Commitments: One Thing to Fix This Quarter COO Delegate all vendor escalations to VP Ops with clear decision matrix CEO Kill “quick syncs” – move to written updates CPO Create escalation triage process; only P0s come to me CFO Set approval thresholds; delegate under $50K CTO Hiring committee owns interviews; I only do final round Protected Strategic Time – Blocked Together Now COO: Tues 1-5pm – Op Model CEO: Wed mornings – Vision CPO: Thurs 9-1pm – Roadmap CFO: Fri AM – Pricing CTO: Mon PM – Architecture

Make Latency Tracking Routine

“Last month our pricing decision took 47 days. We discussed it in six different meetings. Twice, someone was supposed to follow up by email and just… didn’t. By the time we finally approved it, two competitors had already changed their pricing. I tracked back through our other Q4 decisions; average time from identification to action was 31 days. Our fastest competitor reorganized their entire sales team in 22 days…” You probably track operational metrics obsessively. But I bet you don’t track how long decisions actually take. Neither did I. Pick five decisions that directly impact your P&L. Not everything; just the ones that matter. Project budgets. Headcount moves. Pricing changes. Vendor selections. Strategy changes. For each one, define when the clock starts (first email? someone raises it in a meeting? formal request submitted?) and when it stops (money moves? email sent? org chart updated?). Track these for one month. Just timestamps in a spreadsheet. No fancy tools. What you’ll find will piss you off. That “quick approval” that took three weeks. The budget reallocation that sat in someone’s inbox for 10 days. The strategy change everyone agreed to in January that still hasn’t happened. Share the data with your leadership team. Not as blame, but as diagnosis. “Our average project approval takes 28 days. 20 of those days are waiting for the monthly review meeting. Should we meet more often or let people approve smaller amounts without the meeting?” The patterns become obvious fast. Maybe every decision that needs IT takes two extra weeks. Maybe your CFO is the bottleneck on everything financial but didn’t realize it. Maybe you have three different meetings reviewing the same decisions because nobody trusts the first two. Run a quarterly workshop to fix the worst bottlenecks. Bring the data, identify the top three delays, and solve them in the room. If IT approvals are killing you, set a 48-hour deadline or let people auto-approve anything under $100K. If the monthly meeting is the bottleneck, add a weekly 15-minute call for urgent decisions. Some specific fixes that work: Give each exec a quarterly budget: $500K to approve instantly for anything under $50K Use a one-page template: Clear recommendation at the top; if it doesn’t fit, it’s not ready for a decision Set expiration dates: Any decision not made in 14 days automatically comes to you Don’t create a surveillance state. You’re not tracking individual performance; you’re fixing system problems. When the data shows monthly meetings are killing speed, you can finally make the case to meet every two weeks. When it shows every cross-functional decision stalls, you can justify appointing one person who owns the decision. A warning: your first month of data will be incomplete and probably wrong. People forget to timestamp. They argue about when decisions “really” started. That’s fine. Even bad data will show you where the problems are. Your competitors are making faster decisions with less information. But you can’t improve what you don’t measure, and right now, you’re not measuring the one thing that determines whether your plans actually happen. Start simple. Five decisions, one month, timestamps in a spreadsheet. The conversation about what you find will change how your organization operates. Three months from now, that pricing decision takes 12 days instead of 47. Not because people work harder, but because you removed the friction. The monthly meeting that reviews everything now only sees decisions over $250K. The IT approval that took two weeks now happens in two days with a simple form. The email black hole where decisions went to die now has a 48-hour response requirement. The Tuesday Test: Pull up any major decision from last week. Can you tell me how long it took and where it got stuck? If not, you’re operating on hope instead of data. Schedule time next week to identify your five decisions and set up the tracking. That’s it. One hour of setup to finally see why everything takes so damn long.

Fixing analysis paralysis in your team

Some teams overanalyze everything, stuck in endless debates. Others make snap decisions without enough information, and thats costly. If your organization has trouble finding the right balance, you’re dealing with slow, inefficient decision-making. At first, this may seem like a leadership issue—perhaps people aren’t confident in their decisions or don’t have enough information. But in reality, this is a structural problem that stems from how your organization makes decisions. Some teams wait for more data before making even small decisions. Others jump into execution without validating their ideas. Meetings go in circles instead of leading to action. People get frustrated because priorities keep shifting. Employees second-guess their choices instead of moving forward. Teams wait for leadership to sign off on everything. If your organization struggles with indecision, the issue isn’t your people—it’s because they don’t have a clear decision-making system. By putting the right frameworks, training, and expectations in place, you’ll create a team that makes better decisions, faster. Want to move from slow, inconsistent decisions to confident execution? Join our webinar Wednesday, April 2nd at 1:00pm Pacific. Click here to register

Why Your Team Keeps Fixing the Wrong Problems—And How to Stop the Cycle