A committee I belong to struggled with a work request assigned to us. We could not find a way to solve the underlying problem using the resources available to us. Finally, after 5 years of effort we realized that the task was assigned to the wrong committee. We have now passed our research over to the other committee and we are going to close this task.
Were we trying to do something that someone else should have done?
Were we so intent on finding a solution to a problem that we forgot to ask whether or not this was our problem?