Really good at solving the wrong problems
If you are a senior leader, you have probably become really good at solving problems. And often, they are the wrong problems. I was there, too.
It wasn’t a lack of experience. I had plenty. But at some point, experience stops being the solution. It becomes a filter instead. Every new situation gets interpreted, categorized, and acted upon through that lens. And often, something doesn’t quite fit.
Nobody talks about this in leadership contexts. We talk about strategy, execution, culture, transformation, goals, programs. About resilience and agility. We build frameworks and fill pipelines. Most of it is useful, until the situation in front of you no longer fits the pattern you’ve spent twenty years refining.
The higher the stakes, the more our patterns run the show. Neither our skills, nor our hard-won experience. Our patterns. The unexamined assumptions about what a good decision looks like and how to get there. The reflexive moves under pressure. The blind spots we don’t see. That’s the nature of blind spots. Dunning-Kruger gets cited a lot in this context, usually about other people. The more interesting version is this: the moment competence hardens into certainty, and that certainty closes off perception. We — or at least I — stop asking whether we’re solving the right problem, because we’re so good at solving problems.
I see this in companies. I see it in politics. I see it in leaders who are genuinely talented, genuinely committed — and genuinely stuck in their own perspectives, without quite knowing why. I can’t rule out that I’m doing the same thing here, in this very piece.
What helps isn’t more knowledge or better frameworks. It’s the capacity to recognize your own operating logic while you’re inside it. To notice your perception as perception. To hold complexity without collapsing it prematurely into a solution. To distinguish whether a pattern is serving you — or magnificently running you.
That’s slower work. Less comfortable than a two-day offsite or a 360-degree feedback report. Sometimes it’s unsettling or simply uncomfortable, because we uncover sides of ourselves we may not like. But it’s this work that actually moves something.
This is where most leadership development stops. And it’s where mine begins.