Recently, while I was between flights on my way to Athens, one of my department leads brought me into a problem that needed to be worked through.

I was in transit. There were other things competing for my attention. It would have been easy to experience the conversation as an interruption.

Instead, I felt energized.

I wanted to understand what was happening. I wanted to help facilitate the discussion, ask the questions that might clarify the issue, and help the team find a way forward.

That reaction stayed with me because I have been running Kassy Health for 20 years. By now, I know that business problems do not eventually stop once you figure things out. They simply change shape.

And after all this time, I still love solving them.

The false promise of a problem-free business

When I was starting out, I probably imagined that business would become more settled over time. Solve the major problems, build the right systems, and eventually the operation would run smoothly.

Experience has taught me something different.

Business is not a smooth operation occasionally interrupted by problems. Problems are part of the operation.

Solve a cash-flow problem, and a hiring problem may appear. Solve the hiring problem, and you may uncover a process problem. Improve the process, and you may find that the business has outgrown its customer experience or capacity.

The problem does not disappear. It evolves.

That can be discouraging if we treat every new challenge as evidence that something is wrong. We can spend an entire career feeling as though the business is always falling apart, even when it is actually growing and becoming more complex.

The tension is that growth often looks like more problems before it feels like more progress.

Business is not a smooth operation occasionally interrupted by problems. Problems are part of the operation.

From crisis to puzzle

The Athens conversation reminded me of a distinction I have come to rely on: the Puzzle Shift.

A problem can be approached as a crisis, or it can be approached as a puzzle. The circumstances may be exactly the same. The difference is the quality of attention we bring to them.

The Puzzle Shift has three parts.

First, get curious before getting reactive. Ask what the problem is actually showing you. The first description of a problem is not always the real problem.

Second, look for the system behind the situation. Ask what assumption, process, communication gap, or changing condition may have produced the result. This moves the conversation away from blame and toward understanding.

Third, find the next useful move. You do not need to solve everything at once. You need to identify what can be clarified, changed, tested, or discussed next.

Curiosity does not make difficult problems easy. It makes them workable.

It gives people enough distance to think. It turns frustration into questions and questions into action.

Why the work still matters to me

Running a business still has heavy days. There are decisions that keep you up at night, situations you cannot control, and problems that demand more patience than you expected to have.

I do not enjoy every problem. I do not always approach them perfectly. Sometimes I am tired, impatient, or too close to the situation to see it clearly.

But I still recognize the energy that arrives when a complicated issue begins to make sense.

I enjoy the conversation that uncovers the real need. I enjoy finding a practical solution when the obvious answer will not work. I enjoy helping a team move from “This is impossible” to “Let’s see how we can make it work.”

That is what I felt between flights to Athens: not an obligation pulling me away from my day, but a reminder of why this work has held my attention for two decades.

The people who last in business are not necessarily the people who avoid problems. They are the people who learn to become curious about them.

The problems never end. They evolve.

And after 20 years of running Kassy Health, solving them is still one of my favorite things.