By Michael Nagorski, Founding Partner, Double Loop Performance
Ask a leadership team what problem their quarterly goal is solving, and the answer is often just the goal, restated. “Our problem is we need to hit two million dollars.” That isn’t a problem statement. It’s a target dressed up as one, and it may be the single most common error in strategic planning — common enough that it rarely gets questioned in the room where it happens.
The error isn’t about which tool a team is using. It’s about sequence. Goal-setting theory — the discipline behind OKRs, Rocks, and quarterly priorities — governs what happens after a problem has been named and agreed on. Almost none of these frameworks build in a step for getting the naming right beforehand. That’s where the cost sits, and it’s specific enough to trace and fix.
What the research says about diagnosis
One large study surveyed C-suite executives across dozens of companies and countries and found that the large majority believed their organizations were bad at diagnosing problems, and nearly nine in ten said that weakness came with real costs. The explanation is straightforward: managers are biased toward action. Solving feels like progress; diagnosing feels like delay. So, teams skip the second step and go straight to the first.
The most cited illustration of this comes from a building where tenants kept complaining that the elevator was too slow. The obvious fixes — a faster motor, a smarter algorithm, a new lift entirely — were expensive and slow to implement. But “the elevator is too slow” wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that waiting felt unbearable. The fix was mirrors beside the elevator doors. People checked their reflections, lost track of time, and the complaints stopped.
That’s what reframing looks like in practice: testing whether the stated problem is the real one before committing resources to solve it. The process breaks into three moves — frame the problem as it’s currently stated, reframe it by challenging that framing (look outside it, question the underlying goal, search for a bright spot where something similar is already working), then validate the new framing before switching back into execution. The exercise works best run weekly: frame on Monday, reframe on Friday, once the week has produced new information.
Research on how executives frame strategic problems offers a mechanical explanation for why even careful teams get this wrong. Managers who move straight into abstract, big-picture thinking tend to overlook symptoms that don’t fit the mental model they walked in with — they’re not missing information so much as filtering it through an existing frame. Concrete, close-to-the-ground observation has to come first to surface the full range of symptoms; abstraction is useful only afterward, for organizing those symptoms into a coherent explanation. Skip the concrete step, and whatever problem the team lands on tends to be whichever symptom happened to match their assumptions going in.
Structured problem-solving research names the mechanism underneath why vague problem statements fail: mental contrasting. When a problem statement doesn’t specify a clear gap between the current state and the target state, people have nothing to contrast — no way to measure the distance they’re supposed to close. Two costs follow. Nobody knows when the goal has been met, so the work never resolves into a felt sense of completion. And because the problem was never specific enough to test, it tends to get solved with broad, generic interventions that rarely produce the intended result.
Four specific failure modes
Years of teaching this material to executives surfaced four recurring ways problem statements go wrong. Naming them individually is more useful than treating “define the problem” as a single undifferentiated step.
- Skipping problem formulation entirely. Teams assume they already agree, so they move straight to solving. Without an explicit conversation, everyone defaults to their own past experience, and there’s no guarantee those experiences converge. The failure shows up most clearly in meetings where three people nod along to three different mental models of what’s wrong.
- Writing the problem as a diagnosis or a solution already in disguise. “The problem is we lack the right IT capabilities” presumes the diagnosis. “The problem is we haven’t spent the money to upgrade our system” presumes the solution. Either framing skips the investigation and locks the team into a path before anyone has tested whether it’s the right one.
- No clear gap. “We need to improve our brand” and “sales have to go up” sound like problems, but neither names a measurable distance between where things stand and where they need to be. This is the mental-contrasting failure in practice: without a defined gap, nobody can tell when it’s closed.
- Scoping the problem too broadly. Broad problem statements tend to produce large, slow, expensive initiatives. A specific, observable instance of the problem — one narrow enough to measure — produces faster results and builds confidence for whatever comes next.
A well-formed problem statement, by this standard, does four things: it connects to something the organization genuinely cares about, states the gap in terms specific enough to quantify, stays neutral about diagnosis or solution until either has been tested, and stays narrow enough to act on quickly.
Putting it into practice
PRESSURE sequences this correctly by design. Problem comes first. Reflect comes second. None of the five phases that follow — Evaluate, Strategize, Sacrifices, Undertake, Reframe, Engage — begins until both have happened. That ordering reflects the research above directly: the failure is diagnostic, which means diagnosis has to happen before strategy, not somewhere alongside it.
Two moves worth trying before the next planning session, neither of which requires new tooling.
Run the reframe test on whatever problem statement is about to anchor a new goal. Write it down, then ask three questions: Does it presume a diagnosis or a solution? Is there a specific, measurable gap here, or is this an aspiration wearing a problem statement’s clothes? Is there a version of this already working somewhere in the organization that hasn’t been examined?
Look at how people show up around the initiative, not just what they say about it. A room full of people who approve quietly but never advocate, or who comply without believing, often signals that the group never actually agreed on the problem — they agreed to stop arguing about it out loud. Approval without follow-through is what compliance looks like when it’s dressed as consensus, and it’s a reliable early sign that the goal about to be set rests on a problem nobody has tested.
Before the next OKR cycle, Rock-setting session, or strategic priority meeting, have everyone in the room write the problem statement on their own, without conferring. If the answers don’t match, that’s the meeting that needs to happen — not the goal-setting one that was scheduled next.
About The Author
Michael Nagorski is the Founding Partner of Double Loop Performance, where he helps organizations unlock sustainable revenue growth through sales strategy, organizational transformation, and workshop facilitation. A three-time University of Delaware graduate with an MS in Organizational Development & Change, Michael brings 15+ years of experience across Fortune 500 sales organizations and consulting engagements. He writes about leadership, coaching, and the human side of performance at doubleloopperformance.com.
Contact Double Loop Performance or contact Mike directly through LinkedIn.