In my previous post, I argued that the correct diagnosis of a business problem is much cheaper than any attempt to apply the wrong solution. And yet, the disciplined approach to problem diagnosis is very rare. Why?  

The usual explanation is that people are impatient. They rush to a solution instead of thinking it through. Alas! This explanation does not survive the first contact with evidence.

JCPenney’s repositioning under Ron Johnson was not made on impulse; it was planned. Denver’s baggage system consumed two years of procurement. These were deliberate, effortful, expensive undertakings carried out by serious professionals.

So, impatience is the wrong diagnosis of why we misdiagnose. Then what?

Misdiagnosing fast…

Something subtler is going on, and Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky nailed it.

Their framework is widely known. There are two modes of thought. System 1 is fast, automatic, and effortless. It forms an impression before you have decided to form one. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and effortful. It weighs the options and checks the argument.

The mechanism that matters here is the one called attribute substitution. When we are faced with a difficult question, System 1 quietly replaces a difficult question with an easier one and then answers that instead. As a result, we find ourselves holding an answer and assume it belongs to the question we started with.

This swap takes seconds, requires no effort, and leaves no trace. By the time anyone convenes a meeting, the substitution has already happened, and what the meeting discusses is the easier answer.

…and slow

Wait a minute! We have System 2 that exists to catch System 1’s shortcuts. Why doesn’t it?

It does its job perfectly — and that’s the problem.

System 2 goes to work on whatever question it is handed, and what it’s handed is the substituted one. It evaluates vendors rigorously. It models the costs carefully. It runs the pilot, reviews the contract, interrogates the assumptions inside the plan. Every bit of that scrutiny is real, and every bit of it is pointed at the wrong question, because the swap happened before System 2 was called.

This is why wrong-problem failures look the way they do: hundreds of competent people do hard work, all of it downstream of a substitution nobody noticed.

Kahneman also explained why the swap is so hard to spot. He called it WYSIATI — what you see is all there is. System 1 builds a coherent story out of whatever information happens to be available, and it does not signal what is missing. Coherence, not completeness, is what produces the feeling of understanding. A neat story built on three facts feels more persuasive than a messy one built on thirty.

So “the elevators are too slow” (a complaint from the tenants in the previous post) does not feel like an assumption. It feels like the situation. There is nothing in the experience to indicate a step has been skipped.

Catching the swap

If the substitution happens in seconds and leaves no trace, you cannot catch it by trying harder. Effort is System 2’s contribution, and System 2 arrives late. You catch it by building a step that forces the original question back into the room.

Here are a few that may work.

Write down the question before the answer. Not the problem statement — the question. “Why do passengers complain about baggage claim?” is different from “How do we reduce baggage wait times?” Putting the first one on paper makes it possible to get concerned when every subsequent conversation has been about the second.

Ask what the person is experiencing, not what they think is wrong. A complaint is a person’s theory about their own discomfort, and they are no better placed to diagnose it than anyone else. Separate the symptoms they reported from the explanation they attached to them.

Treat a dead end as a signal about the question. When competent people conclude a problem is unsolvable, that rarely relates to the problem. It usually relates to framing. The elevator engineers were right that the problem as stated had no affordable solution. They were wrong that there was no solution.

Be suspicious when the fix is proportionate. Expensive problems don’t require expensive answers; they require accurate ones. If a proposed fix costs roughly what the problem feels like it is worth, that might be a sign the price was set by the feeling rather than by the diagnosis.

A few parting words

There is one more reason organizations find this hard — and it has nothing to do with psychology.

A solution can be assigned. It has a budget line, an owner, a deadline, and a finish. You can put “reduce baggage wait times” on somebody’s objectives and review it in November. A diagnosis has none of that. “Figure out why people are complaining” produces no deliverable, sits on no chart, and ends when somebody says it should.

And yet, diagnosis might be the most powerful and inexpensive approach to reaching your strategic objectives.