When The Brief Might Not Be The Brief

Last week I wrote about the five values we operate by at UtopiaX, and about walking the talk. Value five is this one: Ideation without execution is hallucination; we design it with you, uniquely for you. I have had several conversations with clients this week (yes, already) where this has come to the fore. Clients come hoping we have the answers. And most likely we do. The crucial piece of the jigsaw puzzle here is, “Are we asking the right question to ascertain the outcomes you want to achieve?” With emphasis, we often end up with a different question from the one the client started with.

Here's a tactic every organisation, large or small, can use. Bring in fresh eyes. Paid or people in your circle. For a 30-minute coffee or a one-hour consultation. Or ask your latest employees. Bring in those fresh eyes.

When the pain point you are looking to soothe isn't diagnosed correctly, ideation cannot find execution. That's when the whole exercise could simply lead to hallucination.

Every single one of our programs, whether it's a Failure Strategy, an Innovation Strategy, a Business Strategy session, or a Moonshot Workshop, is created, curated and facilitated according to the outcomes the client expresses. That sounds obvious. It isn't. Those who are familiar with my work and my writing know the emphasis I place on the fact that there is no playbook that suits any two organisations, let alone one that suits all.

Here's what actually happens. A client comes to us with an outcome in mind. Sometimes that's exactly the outcome we design for. More often than not, it takes several genuine conversations to work out what they actually want, beneath what they have presented to us. This is why the Discovery sessions are crucial to successful outcomes. And we take the time to formulate those that need to be on the Discovery list and the questions that we need to ask them. And sometimes, by the time we've had those conversations, the outcome has completely changed from what was first proposed.

The best results across every kind of Strategy session we run occur when this shift is allowed to happen. When it flows. When there is no pushback. When it isn't rushed or passed over altogether. The proposal to sign off or the program to sell isn't the outcome. That's the result of good work. That's flow.

This is where my PhD research comes in super handy. I doubted its validity because it didn't tell me anything I hadn't suspected or found to be true after years of working in Creativity and Innovation. Until, that is, a professor colleague told me that is exactly what research is for. Derrr…sounds so obvious. My thinking at the time was, “Why write 65,000 words on outcomes that I expected, that weren't earth-shattering?” If I wasn't discovering anything new, what was the point?

The title of the research was, “How do we create long-term success from participation in workshops/seminars/conferences?”

One of the clearest findings from the research was this: the more people you bring into an experience, the better the support for long-term outcomes. Not just more voices in the room for the sake of it. Voices that are genuinely included in shaping what the outcome should be, not just informed of it afterwards. The ones who leave the experience as excited as you.

A few years ago I created an Executive Program. One organisation sent five of their people, from various departments and at different levels of seniority, to the experience. A few years later they won an innovation award.

Sometimes the most useful voices in the room are not from inside your organisation at all. Bringing in stakeholders from outside of your organisation - customers, partners, community, the people affected by the decision but not employed to make it - changes what gets discovered. It changes what gets built. With one organisation, we invited the clients of their clients and their web developer. We didn't invite them 'just because'; we invited them because they were crucial cogs in this organisation's wheel.

I've seen this work across every industry we've worked in. Property Development. Health. Medical. Education. Different sectors, each experiencing different constraints. It's a different language for the same problem. And in every single one, the work that actually moves the needle starts in the same place: culture and mindset. That's why the workshop agenda almost always includes culture and mindset first. Because they are crucial to a strategy that won't just be that hallucination.

If you skip this part, if you take the first stated outcome at face value and build a program to it, you'll deliver exactly what was asked for. You just won't deliver what was needed. And the client will feel that gap, even if they can't name it. The long-term results won't be there.

So when I say we design it with you, uniquely for you, this is what I mean. It's several honest conversations, a willingness to let the brief change shape, and a room with enough of the right people in it, inside and outside your walls, to make the outcome stick. And to be honest, we have missed out on contracts because of this.

Some people aren't up for the discovery. They presented an issue to a manager or a board, and that's where the mindset sticks. That's OK. It really is.

Celebrating Success One Failure at a Time is now available as a book, an audiobook, and an online course. You can bring this conversation to your organisation as a keynote, workshop, or leadership programme.