10/05/2026
How many times have you heard, “We need better communication?”
Maybe that's true.
But that’s not a problem statement. Neither is:
“We need more training.”
“The process is broken.”
“People aren’t following the procedure.”
“Customers are unhappy.”
Those are concerns.
Sometimes they’re even good instincts.
But they don’t tell a team enough to know what is actually happening, where it is happening, how often it is happening, or what evidence they should go look for.
And that matters, because vague problems tend to produce vague solutions...
More reminders.
More meetings.
More training.
Another email.
A new checklist.
A new policy.
Sometimes those things help.
But if the team hasn’t clearly defined the problem, it’s hard to know whether the solution is addressing the cause or just responding to the frustration.
A useful problem statement forces us to get more specific.
Instead of:
“Finance takes too long to respond.”
Try:
“Over the last 30 days, 42% of requests from department managers took more than three business days to receive a response, creating repeated follow-up emails and delaying decisions.”
Now we have something we can investigate.
Where are the delays occurring?
Are certain request types taking longer?
Are handoffs unclear?
Is information missing when the request arrives?
Is the workload uneven?
Is the current response expectation realistic?
A well-defined problem doesn’t give you the answer.
It gives you a much better place to start looking.
That’s one of the problem-solving habits we work to build with our clients and their frontlines though Yellow Belt Plus.
Not jumping faster to solutions.
Getting clearer about the problem first.
Before your team proposes the next fix, try asking:
“What exactly is happening that shouldn’t be happening — and how do we know?”
If your teams are spending a lot of time solving vaguely defined problems, message me “YB+.” I’d be happy to show you how we build this capability through real improvement projects.
