Pain points are pure gold. For entrepreneurs, CEOs, content creators, and anyone seeking to sell a widget: Find the pain. Develop a plan to stop the pain. Then full speed ahead to rapid-prototyping your way to a minimum viable product.

Because that’s the ticket. The solution. To the problem.

Which is fine for infomercials. Fine for problems that are isolated to a specific time and place. Those kinds of problems are everywhere, so more power to you.

But that’s a horrible way to approach problem solving for organizations.

Organizations are, by nature, highly integrated things. Nothing about them exists in isolation. The pain you experience in one department has connections to problems (or solutions) that exist in another department, another team, or a person.

If we find one problem and focus all our attention there, we don’t solve anything. In fact, our “solution” will only create more pain for someone else. Exhibit A: The holy grail IT upgrade that breaks the accounting department. Yikes!

In an organizational context, a single pain point functions like a synapse in a neural network. It’s just a smaller, integrated piece of a much larger series of events. Niching down too quickly blinds us to the context that the problem stems from.

Instead of looking for the pain, follow it. Follow that pain wherever it takes you. Discover all the things it’s connected to. All the people, the processes, and policies. Discover all the solutions that have already been tried. Map it out. Invite others to look at that map with you.

Instead of regarding pain as the pathway to specificity, use pain as a pathway to a broader perspective.

Focus on perspective. Explore the edges and all the meaningful connections. Do it in conversation with others.