Discovery & Visioning
Get to the heart of what’s going on, create a compelling vision to move forward, and build trust with team members in the process
Driver
Are you encountering challenges within or across teams that seem mysterious? Or perhaps you want to rethink how you address customer needs in a certain area, but you don’t think all of the opportunities and pain points have been surfaced yet?
A purposeful discovery effort can be quite helpful in the face of fuzzy challenges, undercurrents of something going on but you can’t quite tell what, or needing some fresh thinking to solve a stale problem.
Outcome
You’ll gain substantial perspective from a discovery exercise. Understanding perceptions across the team or organization, as well as getting deep on understanding why people feel as they do, can connect dots and uncover insights that simply weren’t apparent previously.
You’ll also gain an organized, thematic understanding of our findings. We’ll pull out representative quotes (with the level of confidentiality we’ve agreed on and shared with participants), key areas of tension, and resounding themes.
We also see this as an important trust-building opportunity. We’ll work to gain trust quickly with participants through active listening, sharing back what we’ve heard, and careful documentation. When you use the information gathered to take action, participants will feel heard, understood, and cared for.
Approach
We’ll start by assembling a small cross-functional team that leads and represents the stakeholder groups we’re seeking to understand. This team will guide the discovery and visioning effort, and they’ll be the tip of the spear in taking action based on what we learn.
With the steering team, we’ll design and plan the discovery effort. We’ll map out stakeholders, determine optimal information gathering techniques (interviews, potentially enhanced with surveys if we have dozens or hundreds of people involved), determine confidentiality/sharing expectations, and create a high-level questionnaire.
Next we’ll conduct discovery sessions, working with each steering team individual to request feedback from participant in their functional area. We’ll wear at least two hats in discovery sessions: the interested outsider, able to ask questions that may go overlooked by those with more understanding of how things are around here. We’ll also wear an advocate hat, able to tell discovery participants that we will represent their points of view, challenges, and requests compellingly to leadership. We take care to address any feelings of “I’ve told other people this” with compassion, reminding them that the fact that we’re here means that leadership wants to hear from you and act on what they hear.
We’ll compile findings, identify key themes, call out surprises and areas of tension, include representative quotes that get to the heart of what was shared. We’ll discuss findings with the steering team and potentially conduct additional discovery interviews to investigate surprises and/or tensions further.
We’ll present a vision for moving forward based on what we’ve learned. We’ll work with the steering team to right-size this for the team or organization, prioritizing and sequencing opportunities.
Aligned on next steps, the steering team will share with discovery participants what was heard and what they’re doing in response. This is a crucial handoff: we’ll make sure you have what you need to understand findings and own the vision and next steps going forward.
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Interested in learning more?
