I was talking with a coworker the other day and this person made an interesting observation. They pointed out that almost every strategic business problem that we come across is talked about in academia or in some business book somewhere, including tactics and approaches to address them. Essentially, how many truly unique and novel problems do we see when you abstract them?

Now, I’m not saying that’s the magic solution to all our problems. Just because some person wrote something down in some book one time doesn’t mean that it’s correct or the right way to solve the problem. But it is interesting that almost all our issues or challenges can be abstracted into these root cause problems that have been seen before. And some of these books are pretty old, we’re talking decades or more.

So that got me thinking about, is there a taxonomy here? Can you abstract things up to a point to where the same strategic problems all fall into one of a specific category? I know I do the same thing for root cause analysis for problems. In my head I believe almost every problem root cause falls back into one of three things.

One, did we put the right person on this task with the right skills, training, experience, and soft skills? Did we equip this person to succeed with that task?

Two, is the organization is structured in the right way? I’m a big believer in Conway’s Law, that states how organizational structure has a significant impact on an organization’s ability to execute. This is because your organizational structure impacts your speed of communication, and thus the maturity of your organization. So is your organization structured in a way that you have the right roles and responsibilities, the right RACI matrices, and are people doing the right things and not conflicting with each other? Is everybody working together and moving in the same direction?

Three, is there a solid strategic vision? Sometimes I jokingly call the the “existential question”, but sometimes it is surprising that this cannot be answered clearly. What is your core business? What are your core competencies? What things do you do internally versus outsourcing, and what things should you be working on in terms of prioritization? Are you even working on the right thing? Is this something you should even be doing?

So now I wonder if this idea of core root causes also applies to strategic problems. Is there a set of top level strategic problems that basically apply to everything? Again, this doesn’t mean that there’s a magical solution. But maybe it does mean that there’s tried and true techniques for how to address each of those strategic problems.