Discover is the stage clients most often ask to compress. It produces no visible artefact, and it sits between signing the contract and seeing anything. The instinct to shorten it is entirely understandable.
We hold the line on it, because every project that has gone wrong for us went wrong here.
What it is not
It is not a questionnaire, and it is not a competitor audit in a slide deck. Both of those can be completed without learning anything.
The questions that do the work
Most of the value comes from a small number of questions, asked of enough different people that the disagreements surface.
- What has to be true in three years for this to have been worth doing?
- Who is the customer you would rather not serve any more, and why are you still serving them?
- What do you believe about this market that your competitors do not?
- When you lose, who do you lose to, and what do they say that you do not?
- What has been tried before and failed? What was the actual reason?
The last question is the one people answer carefully. Most briefs are shaped by a failure nobody wants to discuss.
Why we talk to people outside the room
Leadership describes the business as intended. Customers describe it as experienced. Frontline staff describe it as operated. Those three accounts are never identical, and the gaps between them are usually where the real assignment sits.
We would rather find that gap in week two than in month four, with an identity system already built on the wrong assumption.
What it produces
One document, usually short. The evidence, the disagreements we found, and the specific decisions the business now needs to make.
Clients often describe it as the first time somebody wrote down what they had all half-known separately. That is the point. Everything after it is easier, faster and considerably less likely to be wrong.
