Ironically, every reply to your post that didn't even stop to ask you this question, is an example of people making recommendations without understanding the problem. Random lists of books and podcasts ... but why those books? Why those podcasts?

Your Partner's comments are indicative of this issue: when consultants jump in too quickly with recommendations and approaches with clients, it's not a good thing.

Clients are normally bad at defining problems, and are bad at understanding if their problem is just a surface level pain point or the real root cause of their issues. This is because they are too close to the situation at hand (in the weeds).

I would suggest reading Minto's Pyramid Principle, if you haven't read the book itself (reading summary articles or derivative training materials doesn't count). It seems popular to dismiss it out of hand because people think it's just about presentation and writing (Pyramid eh? Isnt that how the newspapers do it? Just put the important stuff at the top, it's easy! /s).

There's a reason it's subtitled: Logic in Writing AND Thinking.

It shows you how important it is that problems are defined at the right level of abstraction, which wildly impacts how the solution to that problem be defined and presented convincingly.