What if the problem you're solving isn't the real problem?
The problems that keep returning are usually pointing somewhere else.
What if the problem you’re solving isn’t the real problem?
I’ve been leaning into what I have learned about that question lately, and what I still need to own.
I have always worked very hard to curate environments, and early mornings were historically my safe place. I would get to the office before anyone else, leave the overhead lights off, and find peace in the glow of the light bar above my monitor and some Lo-Fi in the background. The quiet was a sanctuary, and the boundary was the illumination of the single light, protecting me from what I thought was more than I could handle.
That was not a time to look ahead. That ability had virtually become non-existent by then. I was playing catch-up from the day before, sometimes even the week before. Emails in the inbox, notes on the desk, files and ideas spread across Google Drive and Evernote. It was a place to breathe and organize, to put things in order and hopefully find some evidence that that day might go differently.
I built those mornings on purpose. It was supposed to protect deep work, thinking, and strategy. It became the ER, and the only option was triage.
It was the same environment I had intentionally created, but it was doing something entirely different. I could not have told you when the change happened. There was no specific morning when I decided; it was just an erosion of what was as it became something that felt like it had no way out. Those mornings shifted while I was sitting in them.
Welcome to Leading in the Tension.
I’m Josh. For two decades I built teams, ran organizations, and helped leaders see what I could see in them before they could see it themselves. Now I coach leaders through the tensions they’ve been carrying without language for.
This week begins six weeks organized around questions. One question each week. No framework to keep track of, no series to follow, but an invitation running throughout that asks something from you… if you want to give it.
Every step I gained, more came
The problem, as I understood it then, was time. That’s the same trap most of us step into first. There was not enough of it for what people needed from me.
So I solved it.
I got efficient, time-blocked, and watched more videos on YouTube to surface my productivity gaps. Then I started working at night to clear email with the idea that the mornings could be for something better. I even gave up weekends to plan and prepare just so the week would run cleaner. It started here and there, an investment I called it. And then I came in earlier, and then earlier than that.
Every one of those moves worked in some way or another. That’s the part worth sitting with because otherwise we are avoiding solutions to real problems. Each one increased my capacity and created more room. And every step I took forward, more came to backfill the newly created space.
C. Northcote Parkinson named this pattern in 1955.
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
People usually quote it as a warning about deadlines, meetings, and things that are time-wasting. I lived a different version of it. I kept manufacturing more space, and the capacity kept getting consumed, and I believed the symptom was evidence I had not created enough to solve my problem.
So I went back and solved it again, and again, and again.
How to tell the difference
Here is the thing I wish someone had stopped by one of those quiet mornings and disrupted my thinking with.
A problem you have solved more than once is not a problem you are failing to solve. It is a problem that lives somewhere other than where you keep aiming.
That’s the test, and it is almost embarrassingly simple when you read it. Solve something, then watch whether it comes back, and if it comes back after you did the work well, the pattern is data. Don’t get stubborn with it and will your way past it; stop and listen. It is telling you that your solution and your problem may look like the same diagnosis, but they are living at different levels in your system.
I knew I was excellent at time management because people told me, and honestly I even told myself quite often. If you had audited my systems, you would have found marginal improvements but nothing significant to change. In a lot of ways, that competence was the problem, because it kept producing enough success and growth to keep me believing I was close to some ne destination.
Ironically, it was never a productivity problem.
What the lie told me
Underneath the lack of time was a set of things I would have described as certainties about my situation.
First, there was no one else who could help. Everyone around me was already carrying too much. Second, people depended on me specifically. And honestly, that felt good most of the time. Lastly, I was uniquely made for this weight, and wore that as a calling, which meant setting any of it down would cost someone else something they could not afford. See the circular pattern now.
I want to be careful here and not dismiss all of it as bad or unhelpful, because a lot of that was true. And some of it was a gift. People did rely on me; I was good at carrying it as a means of serving others, and the work mattered. I can’t look back today and pretend I was only telling myself a story.
That’s why it all felt so real, because it was. A lie with nothing true in it does not survive the wrestle with an aware person. This pattern had truth underneath it, load-bearing truth, and that truth was what kept me from ever questioning the cost.
What I had actually built was a dependency. Mine on being needed, and theirs on me being the answer. And I want to say plainly that naming it did not fix anything on its own. I knew it existed and spent many of those mornings sifting things around trying to build a new puzzle. Seeing the dependency was not the end of the conversation because we can be self-aware and still stay on the inside of the pattern. What it eventually became was the beginning of an entirely new one.
This is where coaching starts. Not with a better system, and not with someone telling you what your real problem is. The reason a newsletter cannot name what’s underneath yours is the same reason you have not named it yourself. The mind living in the story wrote the story. You need someone outside it to hold up the mirror and ask different questions. If something here is stirring and you want that conversation, I’d welcome it. https://lp.novus.global/joshorwick
Thirty-eight years by the pool
There’s a scene in John’s Gospel that has stayed with me since I started doing this work, and probably not coincidentally, it is a place I have been able to see with my own eyes on a trip to Israel.
A man is lying by the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem. He has been disabled for thirty-eight years. Jesus walks among the crowd of people and sees him in the way only He can. Knowing he has been there for a long time, Jesus asks him a question.
“Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6, CSB)
The man does not answer the question. He diverts and avoids like so often we do. He does reply, but to an entirely different question.
“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, but while I’m coming, someone goes down ahead of me.” (John 5:7, CSB)
That is a doing answer to a desire question. And notice that his logistics are accurate. He genuinely has no one to help, and we can assume that someone genuinely does get there first. Nothing in his rebuttal is untrue.
Here is the truth, though: he was so focused on solving an access problem for thirty-eight years that he had been right about logistically, he couldn’t even answer the question that Jesus asks.
What strikes me is not the man’s current reality but his orientation to possibility. Jesus does not reach down, nor does He offer to carry him to the water, which is what the man assumed he wanted and needed to solve his problem. The original question comes from somewhere the man was not looking, and the answer, when it arrives, has nothing to do with access to the pool itself.
I have been the man with the accurate logistics and certain I had all the facts. When asked what I wanted, I described my constraints and all the reasons it wasn’t possible. I pride myself on systems thinking and knew the obstacles were real. They were also not the subject of the questions I was thinking about.
The narrowing
Here’s what that season cost that I did not notice while I was in it.
It narrows you. That’s the most honest word I have for it today. Not just the hours, or the effort, though those things were exhausting. What happened was that my sense of what was available shrank down to about the width of that light bar. Wherever the light shone was real, and everything past it stopped existing. It’s all I could imagine was even left.
Curiosity is the first thing to go in this situation. And I don’t mean dreams that are so far removed they lose all practicality, but the openness to consider a different possibility. When you are surviving, you cannot ask what else could even be. You do not have the room or the capacity to be anything but certain. The question feels like a luxury for people whose lives are not currently on fire, and so it never gets asked, nothing changes, and the fire keeps burning. And how often is that fire smoldering long before you ever feel the intensity of its full heat?
The worst part came later. At some point I realized I had stopped even trying. Not just forgetting what else was possible but that I had given up what those mornings were even intended to be. I built it for thinking, and that original intent had been overwritten so completely that I lost access to the memory of it.
That’s what I look for now in the leaders I sit with. Not whether they are tired, because most of them are tired and can tell you so. I get to listen for whether they can still describe a version of their work that is different from the one they are living in the moment. And some of them still can because while they may feel stuck, they are fully aware something is off. And others go quiet, and that pause carries more weight than any logistical answer could.
One question
I’m not going to hand you the layer underneath yours, because I don’t know it. And honestly, neither do you yet, which is the point of where we are today.
But there is a question you can answer right now, and it costs nothing to sit with it and begin to explore.
What problem have you already solved more than once?
Not your greatest success or the thing keeping you up at night now. The one you fixed, competently, and then fixed again, and are now bracing to fix a third time because it has resurfaced.
Write it down. Be neutral with your memories. Don’t explain it or defend it. Just look at it long enough to notice you’ve been here before and there is some pattern underneath.
That’s where the real conversation starts, and new possibilities begin. Because once you see a future that is so compelling you are connected to it, you never want to go back accepting what was.
Next week: What if your greatest strength has become your most invisible constraint?
If this named something for one leader you know, the one who is winning and quietly carrying it, forward it to them. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here.