When should organisations investigate a problem instead of solving it?

A team starts to miss deadlines. It happens often enough that the manager holds a meeting to address it and the employees say that there have been conflicting priorities. The team had mentioned the issue before, so the manager clarifies the priorities, changes how work is being allocated, redefines responsibilities and checks in with the team more often. 

Everything that was done to tackle the problem seems reasonable, so does that mean that the problem is solved? Not necessarily. It’s important to ask whether the manager needed to do all of this or whether just one of the steps would have done the trick. To know which response makes the most sense, one needs to know enough about what is happening.

Was this problem investigated in any depth? Not really. The manager held a meeting, addressed the problem, asked about a possible reason and responded. 

Similarly, sometimes organisations already know what the problem is, why it is happening, what might correct it and whether that correction is low-cost or easily reversible. In such instances, further investigation may add little. Park et al. (2025) suggested that when problems are simple or familiar, and similar to the ones that managers have successfully dealt with before, existing heuristics (mental shortcuts) can support fast and efficient problem solving. 

Hence, an investigation isn’t always the more rigorous response. Sometimes it may be an unnecessary delay.

What happens when there’s another team in the same department facing a similar issue? They have also been missing deadlines but even after discussing the issue with their manager and taking steps to address it, the issue persists. Here, the team may be experiencing conflicting priorities too but that doesn’t tell the organisation what keeps creating the conflict. So what looked like the same problem was managed in one team but persisted in another. Why?

There’s a difference between simple problems that are well-defined and complex problems that are ill-defined. Such problems might initially appear through symptoms that provide little to no information about their underlying causes (Ananth et al., 2025). 

So even when the problems in both teams are similar, the underlying cause may be different or more complex in the other team where even after taking all the seemingly right steps the problem keeps returning. It’s possible for strategic problems to have observable symptoms produced by multiple interconnected causes, many of which may not be known beforehand (Park et al., 2025). 

Now, to answer the question, when should organisations investigate a problem instead of solving it? If an organisation can describe the symptom more confidently than it can explain the cause, then an investigation has value. 

Hence, a problem becomes worth investigating when there are many plausible explanations that would need different responses. Problem framing shouldn’t be treated as a linear step, but as an exploratory process that looks at multiple dimensions of the challenge to ensure that the organisation addresses the right problem before trying to solve it (Magistretti et al., 2025). Similarly, Pham et al. (2023) described problem framing as building mental representations that help structure and simplify an ill-defined problem.

Therefore, if the same priority problem could reflect unclear decision rights, conflicting stakeholder demands, frequent changes from leadership or weak coordination between or within the teams, then these explanations would point to different interventions. 

What happens then when we choose the wrong intervention? Solutions can consume substantial time and resources, which makes the trial and error around poorly formulated problems costly (Park et al., 2025). So a low-cost and reversible intervention can allow for more room for learning through action whereas a disruptive or difficult-to-reverse intervention can raise the value of establishing the problem more carefully first. 

But in urgent situations the choice isn’t always between investigating and acting. Sometimes organisations may need to reduce immediate harm first before they can investigate why it happened (Patterson et al., 2024). 

All in all, before deciding whether more investigation is warranted an organisation can ask:

  1. Do we actually understand what the problem is?
  2. Do we understand why it is happening?
  3. Would different explanations lead to different interventions?
  4. What happens if our explanation is wrong?
  5. Are there multiple symptoms or plausible causes that we have not yet explained?

The stronger the uncertainty across these questions, the stronger the case for investigation before committing to a solution. But when the problem, cause and corrective action are already clear and the consequences of being wrong are limited, taking action may make more sense than investigating further. The question isn’t whether investigation is better than action. It’s whether the organisation understands the problem well enough for its action to be more than a plausible guess.

References

Ananth, P., Baer, M., & Deichmann, D. (2025). Developing Problem Representations in Organizations: A Synthesis across Literatures and an Integrative Framework. Journal of Management, 51(6), 2212–2244. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063241291532

Magistretti, S., Pham, C. T. A., & Dell’Era, C. (2025). The creative process of problem framing for innovation: An integrative review and research agenda. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 42(6), 987–1018. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12783

Park, C. H., Baer, M., & Nickerson, J. (2025). Looking at the trees to see the forest: Construal level shift in strategic problem framing and formulation. Organization Science, 36(5), 1962–1979. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.19134

Patterson, C. M., Nurse, J. R., & Franqueira, V. N. (2024). “I don’t think we’re there yet”: The practices and challenges of organisational learning from cyber security incidents. Computers & Security, 139, 103699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2023.103699

Pham, C. T. A., Magistretti, S., & Dell’Era, C. (2023). How do you frame ill‐defined problems? A study on creative logics in action. Creativity and Innovation Management, 32(3), 493–516. https://doi.org/10.1111/caim.12543