Too often managers come up with great solutions but once applied, the problem doesn’t go away. One of the most common mistakes managers make when trying to solve a problem is asking the wrong question.

Hudson Guild is one of the oldest and largest nonprofit organizations operating in the Chelsea area of Manhattan in New York City, NY. With a “collaborative, community-building” approach, Hudson Guild is committed to addressing common interests and needs of their community based on shared social values. For more than 100 years, they have worked to make community information more accessible and provide community members skills and opportunities to learn and grow, ultimately creating and strengthening the social fabric that binds a community and enable its members to succeed in both good and bad times.

This organization, made up of about 150 staff members and 250 volunteers, had a problem: only a few of its clients were taking full advantage of the services available. Day care clients, for example, might also benefit from ESL programs and job counselling clients might also benefit from family counselling. In fact, many people who might benefit from the variety of programs offered were missing out simply because they were unaware that the services existed. Hudson Guild?s executives believed that an advertising campaign might help promote the organization’s programs and inform the community on how to best access the many available services.

In order to answer the question, “How might we develop an advertising program to promote our service to the community?”, Hudson Guild organized a creative thinking laboratory. As they were discussing how clients could access the full range of services whenever they needed to, a side conversation developed about the variable quality of the guild?s programs. Although people were proud of their own service offering, they were unsure about the quality of the services provided by their colleagues. Furthermore, they didn?t have essential information about other services available. For example, one of the day care managers said that she would not refer Spanish-speaking clients to the mental health program because its services were available only in English. However, the director of this program said that, although that had been true some years earlier, his staff now served clients in several languages, including Spanish.

Further discussion revealed that each of the guild?s services, having evolved separately to meet emerging community needs, was suffering from poor internal communication and coordination, and consequently program staff were left with a very poor understanding of other guild offerings. Once this was revealed, a different question emerged that led the guild’s leadersdown a very different strategic path: the problem might not be that the community didn?t know enough about Hudson Guild but rather that Hudson Guild didn?t know enough about itself.

Instead of “How might we develop an advertising program to promote our service to the community?”, the Hudson Guild?s team began to explore a very different question: “How might we know ourselves better so that we can feel comfortable referring clients to one another?” In a few hours, the group developed a Hudson Guild “ambassador” program, as well as a framework for job sharing and ongoing interdepartmental education.

Instead of spending money on an external advertising campaign, Hudson Guild began a comprehensive client referral program. The result was a better understanding of client?s needs and expectations, a more effective service offering, increased program use, and a dramatic improvement of its staff performance.

Too often, managers ask the wrong questions. You can plan your strategy carefully, allocate the best resources, and even spend more money than ever before, but if you are answering the wrong question, at the end you will be wasting time and resources.

Spending the time to find the right question gives you a chance to hold back and not jump to assumptions about what the problem is. It is too easy to start off with obvious and often incorrect problem statements. But, if you start with the wrong problem, it?s unlikely you?ll ever arrive at an effective solution. Tim Hurson, an expert in productive thinking and innovation says, “One of the most common reasons that programs, products, and change initiatives don?t work is that the wrong question has been asked.”

Most of the time, solving a problem within an organizational environment requires that we do not rush to find an answer, but instead hang back, continuing to ask questions even when the answer seems clear and obvious. One of the characteristics of a good leader is an ability to fully explore the symptoms in order to identify the right question, and thereby the root of the problem.

Roberto Alvarez, Ph.D. is a business consultant, corporate training expert and the founder of the Global Village Academy and the Executive Summary business newsletter.