I have to get to the root cause. That's the whole method, and most of what follows is what happens when you take it seriously.
When something is broken, the first explanation is almost never the real one. It's the one that's easiest to say out loud. So I ask why. Then I ask why again. Then I ask how it got that way. I keep going until the answers stop changing, because that's where the actual problem is. It usually sits two or three layers under the thing everyone is complaining about, and it usually has nothing to do with whoever got blamed first.
The reason I do this is that bandaids work. That's what makes them dangerous. A bandaid fixes today, and the thing it was covering keeps growing underneath it. Six months later you have a bigger problem that's harder to see because somebody already "fixed" it. A workaround becomes a process. The process becomes a department. Nobody remembers it was a workaround.
So the question I keep asking is not "is this good for today?" It's "is this good next week? Next year? A hundred years from now?" Most decisions don't need the hundred-year test. But the ones that shape a system do, and you can't tell which ones those are unless you ask.
The other half of this is being honest about what sounds good versus what works. A lot of answers feel right in the moment. They're satisfying to say, they make everyone in the room feel better, and they don't survive contact with the actual problem. I've learned to be suspicious of the fix that everyone agrees on immediately. It usually means nobody has looked underneath it yet.
I believe free people, left to work on things they care about, get to real fixes. They try things, they're allowed to be wrong, they adjust, and the answers that survive are the ones that work. Large institutions tend to produce the answer that sounds good, because that's what they're rewarded for. People close to the problem produce the answer that works, because they have to live with it. Most of what I believe about building things follows from that.
Three subjects keep showing up in how I think, and I'll name them because they explain a lot of my positions.
Economics. I believe it has the greatest impact on whether people flourish. Not the stock market, the actual study of incentives and tradeoffs and what happens when you change the price of something. Almost every problem I've ever worked on turned out to be an incentive problem wearing a process costume.
Psychology. How people think, what their personalities push them toward, why two people with the same facts reach opposite conclusions. You can't fix a system without understanding the people running it, and most systems are designed as if the people inside them were interchangeable. They aren't.
Neurodivergence. My son is autistic, and watching how he approaches the world next to how a neurotypical person does has changed how I think about problem solving in general. There is more than one correct way to process a situation, and the one that looks inefficient from the outside is sometimes the one that catches what everyone else missed.
Put those together and you get how I work: find the real cause, ask what the fix does downstream, trust what works over what sounds good, and remember that the people inside a system are rarely the problem with it. That's where I come down.