So… What Do You Think We Should Do?

Why problem solving, judgment and doing the next right thing may be some of the most important leadership skills we’re not teaching.

I’ve been noticing a pattern lately. We spend a lot of time teaching leaders how to communicate, delegate, give feedback, manage performance and execute against a strategy. We give them processes, playbooks, templates and best practices. But I’m not sure we spend enough time teaching them how to figure things out.

I mean actual problem solving, especially the messy kind. The answer isn’t obvious. The information is incomplete. Three things are changing at once. Nobody is quite sure who owns the problem. There isn’t a policy to reference or a subject matter expert waiting with the answer. And yet, someone still has to decide what happens next.

Increasingly, I think that is leadership.

We May Be Creating Great Problem Reporters

There’s a difference between identifying a problem and solving one. I see plenty of people who are very good at explaining what’s wrong. They can tell you why something won’t work, who dropped the ball, what information is missing and all the reasons the situation is complicated. That information can be useful, but eventually I find myself wanting to ask one more question: “So… what do you think we should do?”

Sometimes that question is met with silence.

I don’t necessarily think that’s because people aren’t capable. I wonder if it’s because many of us have spent our careers working in systems that reward getting the answer right more than figuring out how to get to an answer. When certainty disappears, our instinct is often to gather more information, schedule another meeting, escalate the issue, ask someone more senior or look for precedent.

Sometimes that’s exactly what we should do. But sometimes it’s a way of avoiding the uncomfortable part of problem solving: eventually, somebody has to make a call without knowing for certain that it’s the right one.

That ability to move forward without perfect certainty isn’t something we should assume people automatically know how to do. It’s a leadership skill, and I think we need to develop it much more intentionally.

Problem Solving Is Bigger Than Capability

This is where I keep coming back to the People Stack. At first glance, problem solving seems like a Capability issue. Have we taught people how to define a problem, separate symptoms from root causes, challenge assumptions, evaluate options and make a decision? Those are absolutely skills that can be learned.

But Capability is only one layer of the Stack.

People also need Clarity about the problem they are trying to solve and the outcome they are trying to achieve. They need Alignment around priorities, because good judgment is nearly impossible when everything is supposedly equally important. They need Belief in their own ability to make a decision, along with the belief that they actually have permission to make it. And they need Sustainment, meaning an environment that continues to reinforce independent thinking instead of slowly teaching people that escalating every difficult decision is safer.

Underneath all of those layers is Trust. If I make a thoughtful decision based on the information available and it turns out not to be the right one, what happens next? Do we learn and adjust, or do I get punished for not predicting the future correctly?

That question matters more than we sometimes realize.

Organizations can tell people to “take ownership” all day long. But if leaders routinely override decisions, provide the answer whenever someone struggles, punish reasonable mistakes or require approval for every deviation from the norm, people learn what the organization actually values.

And what they learn may be: Don’t solve it. Escalate it.

Maybe the problem isn’t simply that we haven’t taught people how to solve problems. Maybe we’ve built organizations that have inadvertently taught them not to.

Doing the Next Right Thing

One reason problem solving becomes difficult during uncertainty is that we want resolution. We want to know how the story ends before we decide what to do in the middle of it. Unfortunately, leadership rarely gives us that luxury.

I’ve found that when the answer isn’t clear, it helps to make the problem smaller. What do we actually know? What are we assuming? What needs to be decided now, versus what can wait? What is within our control or influence? And based on all of that, what is the next right thing we can do?

That last question matters because you don’t always need the next 20 steps. You certainly don’t need the entire plan neatly packaged into a PowerPoint with a green status indicator. Sometimes you just need enough information to take one thoughtful step forward.

Make the decision. Have the conversation. Ask the uncomfortable question. Test an idea. Bring the right people together. Try something small enough to learn from. Then look at what happened and ask the questions again.

That isn’t indecisiveness. It’s adaptive problem solving. You make the best decision you can with the information available, learn from what happens and adjust as new information becomes available.

Leaders Have to Stop Being the Answer Factory

There’s another part of this that I think we need to talk about: if we want people to become better problem solvers, leaders have to resist the urge to solve every problem for them.

This is hard because giving someone the answer is often faster. If you’ve been doing the job longer, you may have seen the situation before. You know what you would do, and you can probably save everyone 20 minutes by simply telling them.

The problem is that efficiency comes with a cost. Every time we immediately provide the answer, we remove an opportunity for someone else to develop judgment.

Instead, one of the most useful leadership questions may be the simplest one: “What do you think we should do?”

Then we can help people think through their recommendation. What led you to that conclusion? What other options did you consider? What are the risks? What information are you missing? What would change your mind? What is the smallest next step you could take?

Judgment develops through practice. People need opportunities to make decisions, experience the consequences, learn, adjust and try again. If we constantly give them the answer because it’s faster, we may solve today’s problem while creating tomorrow’s dependency.

AI Makes Judgment More Important, Not Less

I also think this conversation becomes more important as AI becomes embedded in our work. We now have tools that can gather information, identify patterns, generate options and think through scenarios at incredible speed. That is enormously useful, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for human problem solving.

Someone still has to decide whether we are solving the right problem in the first place. Someone has to understand the context that isn’t captured in a prompt, recognize the assumptions behind the recommendations, weigh competing priorities, consider the human consequences and ultimately decide what makes sense.

Having access to more answers doesn’t eliminate the need for judgment. It may actually make good judgment more valuable.

Maybe This Is What Calmfidence Looks Like

We may have spent too much time teaching leaders how to have the answer and not enough time teaching them how to find their way to one.

Leading through uncertainty isn’t about pretending you know exactly what comes next. It’s being comfortable enough to say, “I don’t know yet,” and confident enough in your ability to figure out what to do next.

That requires the entire People Stack. We need enough Clarity to understand the problem, enough Alignment to know what matters, enough Capability to work through the options, enough Belief to trust our judgment, and an environment that Sustains that kind of thinking. Underneath all of it, we need enough Trust to act without a guarantee that we’ll get it exactly right.

Maybe that’s what Calmfidence looks like in practice. It isn’t certainty, and it certainly isn’t having all the answers. It’s staying grounded enough in uncertainty to think clearly, make a reasonable decision, learn from what happens and keep moving.

Because sometimes leadership really does come down to one question:

What’s the next right thing?

The BGPD Rule

You don’t need to know the whole way forward. You need enough judgment to figure out the next right thing, and enough Calmfidence to actually do it.