There's a techniuqe i like, I think it's a Lean technique, anyways it's called 5 Why's. When ever I get to act as a filter on requirements from the business, I bust it out to tease out the root cause issues driving the solution. It's really good.

Essentially it boils down to asking Why as much as possible until you get to the original problem. From there the problem can be put in the backlog to be solved by the devs rather than the precooked solution.