There's a quote you've probably seen.

"The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem."

It's on mugs. Posters. LinkedIn posts with sunset backgrounds. It's been translated, shared, printed, and framed in offices across multiple continents. It is attributed — universally, confidently — to Captain Jack Sparrow.

He never said it.

The line does not appear in any Pirates of the Caribbean script. Not one. The origin of the meme is unknown. It emerged somewhere on the internet, attached itself to a recognisable fictional character, and spread — not because anyone verified it, but because the framing felt right and the source seemed plausible.

Nobody checked.

What actually happened

This is worth slowing down for, because what happened here isn't a quirky internet footnote. It's a precise, documented example of how assumption failure works in practice.

The quote arrived with a credible enough wrapper — a well-known character, a film franchise, the vague authority of something you've seen before. The content resonated. The message felt wise. And so, without friction, it moved.

Nobody asked: did he actually say this? The question felt unnecessary. The answer seemed obvious. The room — in this case, the entire internet — went straight to sharing.

That's not stupidity. That's what happens when a premise goes unchallenged. When the framing does enough work that interrogating it feels like pedantry. When moving feels more productive than pausing.

The result: a quote explicitly about questioning your assumptions was shared, at scale, by people who didn't question theirs.

Why this matters beyond the joke

I'm not making a clever point at the internet's expense. I'm pointing at a pattern I see in strategy conversations every week.

A leadership team arrives with a problem. It's been discussed internally, shaped into a brief, presented with conviction. The room starts working. Resources are allocated. A solution begins to form.

The problem definition itself is never interrogated.

Not because the people in the room are careless. Because the premise arrived with enough authority and internal coherence that questioning it felt like obstruction. Like slowing things down for no reason. Like asking whether Jack Sparrow actually said that.

The work proceeds. The solution is delivered. And somewhere downstream, it becomes clear that the solved problem wasn't the real one.

This is not a rare failure mode. It is the default failure mode.

The question nobody asks

Strategic Opposition is built on a single, uncomfortable premise: the problem you've been handed is usually a symptom, not a cause. The real problem is upstream — in the assumptions that shaped how the situation was framed in the first place.

Which means the most valuable intervention isn't a better solution. It's a better question. Specifically: is this actually the problem?

That question is almost never asked, for the same reason nobody checked the Jack Sparrow quote. The framing feels settled. The source feels credible. Asking feels like it slows things down.

It does slow things down. That's precisely the point.

Solving the wrong problem faster is not progress.

Before the next decision

The quote, as it turns out, contains a grain of something true — just not what its sharers intended. The real lesson isn't about attitude. It's about the willingness to stop before the work starts and ask the question that feels too obvious to ask.

Is the premise correct? Is this the right problem? Who decided, and on what basis?

Those questions are uncomfortable. They imply that the work already done might need to be reconsidered. They require someone in the room to say something that sounds, briefly, like obstruction.

That someone is the most valuable person in the room.

My slogan is: the problem is rarely the problem.

A fictional pirate who never existed apparently agrees. He just never actually said so.

If your organisation is moving fast on a problem that hasn't been properly defined, that's worth a conversation. [Get in touch.](/contact)