“Every problem has a who. Find the who first.” — Steven Bartlett
When most people encounter a challenge, their instinct is to ask “How do I solve this?” This seems like the obvious question. It is often the wrong one.
The “how” question places the entire burden of solution on the individual asking it. It assumes you are the best person to solve this problem and that the path forward requires developing or applying your own capabilities. This assumption is wrong most of the time.
Steven Bartlett opens the Team pillar with the most fundamental shift in thinking that separates individual achievers from builders of great organisations: the move from “how” to “who.”
“Who already has the knowledge, skill, or capability to solve this problem faster, better, and more completely than I can?” is almost always a more productive question than “how do I solve this?”
When you solve a problem yourself, you generate a 1x return on your effort — you solve one problem. When you find the right who, you access their lifetime of accumulated expertise, their network, their track record, and their capacity to solve not just this problem but the category of problems it belongs to. The leverage ratio is not 1:1 — it can be 10:1, 100:1, or more.
There are several reasons why capable people resist the “who” mindset:
The competence trap: Highly capable people often feel that asking for help implies inadequacy. In reality, finding and accessing the right people is itself a critical competence — arguably the most important one in organisational leadership.
The control illusion: “How” keeps you in direct control of the solution. “Who” requires trust, delegation, and acceptance that someone else may solve it differently than you would. This loss of control feels uncomfortable.
The time paradox: “I’ll just do it myself — it’s faster.” This is true in the short term and usually false in the long term. The self-sufficient leader creates a bottleneck — themselves — that everything must pass through.
Before asking "how do I solve this?" ask "who has already solved this or could solve it better than me?" Finding and accessing the right who multiplies your impact in ways that doing it yourself never can.
People with the skill: Hire, contract, or partner with people who have developed the specific expertise the problem requires.
People with the experience: Find people who have solved exactly this category of problem in their own journey — advisors, mentors, operators who have been where you need to go.
People with the network: Find people who know people — whose connections can surface the other two categories faster than you could search for them yourself.
Take the three challenges currently most limiting your growth. For each one:
For leaders, the “who” mindset is ultimately a delegation philosophy. The leader’s job is not to be the best at everything — it is to identify, attract, and mobilise people who are best at each of the things the organisation needs.
The leader who spends their time solving problems that others could solve is stealing from the work only the leader can do: vision, strategy, culture, and the decisions that genuinely require their unique perspective and authority.