Discovery Sessions
Where do you want to go?
All the best companies I know have built their reputations and successes simply with the way they go about their business. How teams work internally is just as important as how your marketing projects externally. ‘It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.’ All the cliches about successes being driven by successful teams are absolutely true. Great products can fail because of poor service, and strong brands can fail because of weak culture.
No matter how you want your company, practice or team to develop, it’s essential that everyone involved understands their roles, and has the structure and motivation to help make it happen. Everyone needs to understand the mission and what they can do to play their part. There can be a big gap between the expectations of management and employees, and it’s not unusual for there to be a disconnect between those being paid and their paymasters. What’s in it for them? How do they share in the success?
The question ‘where do you want to go?’ doesn’t often have one clear answer.
Every client usually knows that they want to grow their company in some way - sales, culture, reputation - but more often than not, the specifics of why, how and with whom are not always clear. You might be building a brand towards a future sale, or to build something radical that will help change your particular part of the world, but everyone needs a target to aim for and a clear and effective map of how to get there.
The secondary questions are always around ‘who’ you need to help - from colleagues and partners, to customers and experts - growth is always driven by and for people. Understanding what motivates them, why they should or might care, and how we communicate with them is the foundation on which every good plan is built.
With every client, and for every project I work on, therefore, starts with a discovery session. The aim is to ensure that everyone is clear about what we are trying to achieve together; what is realistic to expect; how long it will take, how much it will cost and who needs to be involved.
What can we do? What do we need help with? What are the things standing in our way? What needs to change? Who needs to change? How can we help them?
How the session is formatted depends entirely on what the company is trying to achieve, but is always the best part of a day, asking questions of everyone involved. It’s not quite a SWOT analysis, but the results are similar.
The objective of the discovery day is the formulation of a simple, concise, but well-thought plan that everyone understands and can follow. It’s rarely more than two sheets of A4 to keep it as a truly useful and useable tool. A plan is not just essential for looking forwards, but often more importantly, for looking backwards. Seeing how far you’ve come and acknowledging successes and progress - no matter how seemingly insignificant - are essential for maintaining momentum, morale and motivation.
With a lot of growth and development campaigns and especially with the building of an organisation’s culture, improvements can be small, incremental and quite often intangible. A strong plan, allows you to measure (and sense) growth beyond sales data or balance sheets.
The output of a Discovery Session is a report and a draft plan. The report is an overview of the opportunities and positives, as well as the challenges to be overcome, and the suggestions of the tools, timing and budget required. Most importantly it will give you a highly personal report into the human strengths and weaknesses, and suggestions of how your people can best thrive.
The draft plan is also a suggestion of a route and the key aims, objectives and actions needed to grow your company. If we work together in the future, it'll be the basis of our regular sessions, but if not, it’ll be a valuable piece of practical and applied insight that you can use alone.