Every Brief is a Business Brief

We state the obvious as it’s worth ALL-CAPPING upfront. An organization might sense it has a product alignment problem, or an audience acquisition and retention challenge, or a growing competitive threat or a brand wear-and-tear issue. But if we’re honest, we all know there is nothing that keeps us up at night that isn’t at core a business problem, whether you’re a Fortune 500, an insurgent start-up or a struggling non-profit.

So, the first step in our concentrated and intense journey together is to articulate this existential angst into a short business brief. Really short, as in twenty words. A sentence. This is harder than it sounds.

A Different Story

The next step is tough too, in a different way, as it fights again the most powerful force on the planet – habit. But it’s a key requisite for generating anything close to new thinking and doing. It’s the difficult act of silencing the recursive story we’re telling ourselves about what’s happening and why.

We’re humans and whether it’s across the boardroom table, at the community board throw-down, over dinner with our SOs or on the parentally partisan soccer sidelines, we suffer from a very human trait – we feed, listen to and behave within the narrow confines of a self-enforced and self-fulfilling narrative about – well … everything.

Our first job together is to help you and your key team members and partners shut-down that inner storytelling long enough to prepare a place for, just maybe, a different sort of story to unfold.

Insighting is Hard

We’ll be honest, surfacing and articulating fresh insight in the service of actually doing something different is hard. A lot of very talented thinkers and doers before us have done it with great success. But many organizations and leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to solve for 21st century problems with 20th century thinking.

One of the more popular models for generating insight – practiced still by many of our competitors (from which, btw, we came…) – is some form of design thinking process. We don’t subscribe to this inherently riskless approach to value creation for many reasons, much of them better articulated than we ever could have here by NYU professor Natasha Iskander. Professor Iskander’s name for her suggested alternative to the top-down design thinking model resonates deeply with our approach – “radically open“.

The short take is getting at fresh insight is one of the most difficult of business feats.  Witness how rare they are and how difficult it is to train people to do it. Also, it’s impossible to fake. Our service model was specifically designed to leverage our team’s ability to mine and articulate the fresh insights which can ignite a different kind of value creation for your organization.

Value Imagination Model

What follows is a topline view into our strategic engagement model. It represents a guided but elastic-by-design framework for working together, based on a formula which expresses itself as fresh insight + provocation = uniquely imaginative value outcomes.

Interrogation

• The Kickoff
  • Our engagement starts with a kickoff session with two objectives –
    • Validate and distill your business brief, and
    • Initiate the process of interrogation we’re about to embark upon together
  • The interrogation framework is guided by five key questions we will ask and explore during the session, and become our lens for evidence gathering and insight mining during discovery. The questions are:
    1. What’s missing
    2. What don’t we know we know
    3. Where does it hurt the most
    4. What matters the most
    5. What are we willing to risk

Domaining as Discovery

Every one of our Free Radicals was invited to join the team because of their deep strategic chops in a selected domain. We call our unique approach to discovery domaining, as it more specifically describes how our specialists survey, analyze and profile the current and desired state of affairs across the domains critical to solving the business brief.

The research processes leveraged could include – applied listening, ethnographic, 1st party qual/quant, desk and alt-stakeholder explorations.

Depending on the brief and the pointed guidance of our five questions, domains analyzed and profiled often include –

• Business problem vs. situation analysis
• Category and competitive diagnostic
• Consumer profiling
• Current state audit e.g. product, programs, creative, technical, cultural, brand/marketing

The findings are expressed in the form of drafted tools, evidence samples and early insights which serve as inputs to our Provocation phase working groups.

Provocation

There’s no better point of differentiation of our model and design thinking’s than our Provocation phase. In three collaborative working sessions we take the strategic gloves off, with united purpose and intentionally provocative shared resolved.

We consider these working group sessions the critical incubator of imaginative value creation. If fresh insighting is hard, figuring out what do to with them is a regenerative process of shared ardour and, ultimately, thrilling imaginative leaps.

Epiphanies are what we’re after and here’s a typical framework for the working sessions leading to final strategic outputs –

• Working Session 1 – The Playground
  • Gathered evidence, findings and analysis shared and interrogated
  • Early insights articulation
  • Tension provocation debate
  • Managed landings –
    • Aligned and
    • Discordant
• Working Session 2 – The Crucible
  • Aligned strategies explored and formed
  • Discordant strategies explored and epiphanized
  • Actionable insights and strategies distilled and articulated

Production

Our strategists spend several weeks to a month processing and synthesizing the work session deliberations and insight outputs from our Provocation sessions. The product of these efforts is the answer to the business brief, framed in the form of a ‘working presentation’ to serve as input to a final workshop.

• Working Session 3 – The Imagination
  • Summary of fresh, actionable insights
  • Strategic recommendations and implementation road-map
  • Formal output (tbd by agreement) –
    • Business / brand pivot plan, program blueprint, technical specification, product prototype, campaign strategy, go-to-market plan etc.
  • Pressure-testing the output towards collaborative alignment and ratification by the business owners

The entire process from business brief development to formal strategic output is designed to take no more than three to four months depending on the complexity of the solve.

Cycling Towards Value

With the collaborative inputs from our working session 3, we make the appropriate adjustments to our formal outputs and bundle with a recommended implementation road-map as our project deliverable.

Importantly, we specifically craft our strategic outputs to be deployed, measured, assessed and optimized across no more than two business cycles. That’s how fast things move and change and our intention is to craft our strategic recommendations and products to achieve measurable near-term results, against your business brief.

We are also eager and available to schedule quarterly or even monthly check-ins as part of an extended strategic engagement model and would scope our tailored services engagement with cost-efficiencies for your organization accordingly.

If you’d like us to develop a proposal and plan for working together, please contact us here briefing@freeradicals.marketing

For some illustrative examples of the kinds of insights our process produces and the strategic outputs they ignite, please visit our Outcomes page here.