Every Leadership Team Has A Thinking Problem

A few years ago, I had a client who led manufacturing for his company. To this day, I’ve never encountered anyone who had to deal with so many problems at once. You name it, it happened: an explosion at a plant, bribery and espionage, wars, supply chain disruptions, strikes, and walkouts.

In spite of it all, he maintained an incredibly positive view of his work and would say, “I love problems. My job in Operations comes down to how we think about problems, talk about problems, and solve problems.”

In that statement, he captured the essence of leadership at senior levels and what is absolutely core to the role. Senior leaders are paid to think about, talk about, and solve problems, and all three elements are necessary to achieve sustained success.

Even so, you’ll find that most organizations spend most of their energy on the second and third parts of his equation. Consider your own company. Chances are you’ll find significant effort dedicated to improving communication, collaboration, decision-making, and execution. What’s often missing is the time spent examining the first question: How are we thinking about the problem in the first place?

How Faulty Thinking Cost a Commercial Team Millions

I once worked with a commercial organization preparing to implement a significant price increase. The economics supported the decision, leadership agreed the strategy was necessary, and extensive planning had gone into the rollout.

Publicly, employees nodded along, but privately, many were thinking something very different: “Our customers won’t pay that.” “We can’t sell at that price.” “We’ll price ourselves out of the market.”

Before long, those beliefs took on a life of their own. As more employees adopted a shared view about the higher pricing, they began questioning the strategy and doubting that the company’s actions, including new sales training and enablement, would be effective. Unsurprisingly, they hesitated to have new pricing discussions with customers, continuing to honor legacy, lower rates. It wasn’t long before doubt crept in at the executive level, and the decision was made to scale back the new pricing strategy.

What’s interesting isn’t that the team held those beliefs about higher pricing. It’s that almost no one recognized them as beliefs. They experienced them as facts. The conversation about how the company might introduce higher pricing while retaining and growing market share was a whisper compared to the much louder message that said, “This isn’t going to work.”

The Turning Point: The Team Started to Think Differently

The turning point came when the team saw that a competitor selling a nearly identical product had already implemented a similar price increase successfully. They saw that customers accepted the higher pricing and that the market adapted. The takeaway was not lost on anyone: the pricing strategy had never been the problem. The organization’s thinking about the strategy was. To the team’s credit, they pivoted quickly, and once their thinking shifted, execution improved dramatically.

Thinking About Problems Requires a Different Type of Intelligence

For decades, organizations have emphasized technical expertise and subject-matter depth as defining qualities of senior leaders. More recently, they’ve invested heavily in emotional intelligence, helping leaders become more self-aware, build stronger relationships, and communicate more effectively.

As leaders move into enterprise roles, however, another capability becomes increasingly important: Enterprise Intelligence.

Enterprise Intelligence is the ability to distinguish facts from interpretation, recognize the assumptions shaping a discussion, make sound judgments despite incomplete information, and challenge stories and assumptions that have become accepted as truth over time.

The strongest leaders I’ve worked with demonstrate exceptional Enterprise Intelligence. They recognize assumptions before they become decisions, and because of that, they often see possibilities others miss.

I’ll Believe It, Then I’ll See It

The problems organizations face will only continue to grow in complexity, requiring better strategy, stronger execution, and leaders who can adapt as circumstances change. But before any of those comes something even more fundamental: how we think about the problem itself.

There’s an old saying: “I’ll believe it when I see it.” The most effective leaders understand that solving today’s challenges isn’t simply about taking different actions. They understand that what we believe shapes what we notice, the opportunities we pursue, the risks we’re willing to take, and the possibilities we’re able to imagine.