The first question most founders skip
The first thing I do when starting with a new client is ask them to describe the problem they want to solve. Not the solution they have in mind. The problem.
Most of them pause.
That pause is not confusion. It is recognition. They realise, in that moment, that they have been thinking about solutions for weeks and have not properly defined what they are solving. The direction of travel has been set by what seems possible, not by what is actually needed.
This is the Clarify step of the Lion Ethos, and it is the one most people skip under pressure.
The pressure to act is real, particularly for founders and operators. Markets move. Competitors deploy. The inbox fills. Sitting with a problem long enough to define it properly can feel like delay. It is not. It is the only way to avoid building the wrong thing well.
I learned this specifically when moving operations to Frøya. The coastal environment here is not abstract. Supply chains, weather windows, local contractors, broadband that drops when it should not - the operational context is specific, and building systems without understanding that context produces systems that do not survive contact with reality.
Clarifying a problem means getting concrete about three things: what is actually happening now, what the gap costs in time or money, and what the right outcome looks like in measurable terms. That is it. Not vision statements. Not strategy documents. Three concrete answers.
The reason this matters for AI specifically is that AI systems are very good at solving the problem you give them. If you give them a vague problem, they solve it vaguely, and you end up with an implementation that runs fine in demos and fails quietly in production.
When someone tells me they want to use AI to "improve customer communications," I ask them to show me the last five customer communications that caused a problem. Every single time, the actual problem is narrower and more specific than the stated one. A specific type of message, from a specific type of client, at a specific point in the process. That is solvable. "Improving communications" is not.
The gap between what a business thinks it needs and what it actually needs is where most projects fail and most budget disappears. The tools are rarely the problem. The definition is.
The Clarify step takes thirty minutes done properly. A conversation, a whiteboard, and a willingness to say "I do not know yet" when you do not know yet. That honesty is not a weakness in a founder. It is the condition for building something that works.
Norwegian SMEs are, in my experience, honest operators. The instinct to understand before acting is already there. The gap is usually methodological - no one has framed the clarification as a step with a defined output, so it gets rushed or skipped in favour of moving to something that feels more like progress.
Progress built on an unclear problem is not progress. It is activity.
Murphy Alex builds operational AI systems for Norwegian SMEs from Frøya, Trøndelag. IPRESTANDA is at iprestanda.com.