Step 2: Keep Asking Until You Reach the Real Problem

Ananth calls this peeling back the onion layers. The first answer you hear is often a symptom, so you keep going. “You need to go deeper. You need to keep asking questions; you need to keep checking,” he told me. Aditi Singh Ulvskjold uses questions in a similar way with specialist teams. Rather than learning every technical detail, she asks them to “unearth for me what will drive the impact.”

Ananth is clear that this is not a case against process. “I’m not trying to say that… structured process is not right. It is important, it is good,” he said. “But… very often a problem may be sitting somewhere else, and it may be completely oblivious to you.”

Once he finds the real problem, Ananth sizes it up before acting. In his words, you decide whether “this problem looks humongous, or this problem is small, or this problem is medium, and then how do you break it into bite-sized pieces?”

Step 3: Say “I Don’t Know Yet” and Take the Next Step

Ananth is direct about uncertainty. “Get comfortable saying, I don’t know yet… you don’t need to have certainty before you begin,” he said. “Because if you have certainty before you begin, you’re also starting with a presumption and a fixed way of looking.”

What you need instead, Ananth said, “is enough clarity to take the next intelligent step… which is where I think good leaders distinguish between uncertainty and paralysis.” In practice, that means you “acknowledge uncertainty and still move forward. Don’t wait for every single element to be clear before you move to the next step.”

Step 4: Slow Down to Understand, Then Speed Up to Execute

The pause Ananth recommends is short and has one purpose. “I’ve had to learn to slow down at the beginning of some very important decisions,” he told me. “Not to slow the decision down, but to make sure that you understand the problem correctly.”

Once the problem statement is clear, the pace changes. “Once you have clarity, actually begin moving in quite decisively and quite quickly,” he said. “So slow down to understand, speed up to execute.”

When the pressure is high, Ananth separates the emotion from the decision with a few plain questions: “What are the facts? What is within our control?… What decision has to be made now… what is urgent and critical? What is nice to have?” Breaking a tense situation down this way, he said, makes it “significantly more manageable.”

He pairs this with a line he has repeated to his leadership teams for years: fail fast to succeed sooner. A failure that surfaces late “delays your process of success.” He also sets clear limits on how much can go wrong, so his teams know where the freedom to fail starts and stops.

The Evidence: What Changes When the Problem Comes First

The first change is practical. When you fix the true problem, Ananth explained, the bigger problem it was feeding gets fixed too. The wider change is in how a leadership team treats uncertainty. “Ambiguity isn’t always the absence of opportunity,” he said. “Sometimes or most of the time, ambiguity itself is the opportunity.” Deanna Angello found the same when she took on commercial leadership roles that nobody else wanted. The uncertain situations others avoided became the ones that moved her career forward.

Ananth has taken the same view of ambiguity into roles with almost no structure at all. When he moved his family from India to the US to run a business, he arrived as “employee number one”, building a team and a customer base at the same time. “It can’t get more ambiguous than that,” he said.

He traces the habit back to his scientific training, which gave him “respect for facts and for understanding an underlying problem.” When it is done well, a leadership team can state its problem in one sentence, admit what it does not yet know and then move quickly once it does.

Your Next Move

I came away from our conversation planning to start my own big decisions with the problem statement. Before your next major call, whether it is a site investment, a portfolio cut or a senior hire, ask yourself:

1        Can I write the problem in one sentence that my leadership team would sign up to? If not, that is the first job.

2       Which part of this looks familiar from my last role, and what would have to be true for it to be a different problem this time?

3       Where am I waiting for certainty I will never get, and what is the next intelligent step I could take this week?

4      When did someone last tell me the real problem sits somewhere else? If the answer is never, am I asking the right people?