The result: organizations and individuals waste a lot of time solving the wrong problems. It’s so much easier to treat the symptoms than find the underlying disease, to put out fires rather than prevent them, or to simply punt things into the future.

Most of the teams we work with are wicked smart. With enough perseverance and grit they’ll find answers. Our concern is they might be working on the wrong question.

Many attempts at strategy lack a good diagnosis. Hence, it is useful to have mental tools for working backward from a guiding policy to the realm of diagnosis and fact. There is nothing deep about this process other than realizing that it can and should be done.