Seven steps to do a better discovery

[rondejong]

To generate a stronger Value Proposition and boost the changes that your get the right initiatives started is increased by doing a proper discovery. This article will help in planning and executing a discovery.

I have led over 200 discovery session over the past decade at more than 100 companies in industries ranging from IT to manufacturing, banking and communications. This experience has helped me develop a practical approach that captures the essence without wasting people’s time. The trick is to prepare and leverage the way people like to interact. Discoveries generally proceed after having done an initial strategic assessment also called outside-in study and definition of hypothesis. With this you have some preliminary indications on challenges, strategic drivers and ultimately the improvement opportunities you wish to peruse.

1. Know the organization’s decision-making criteria

You conduct a discovery to diagnose, validate and refine challenges, strategic drivers and improvement opportunities. Ultimately, it’s an opportunity to align to what’s important for the customer or stakeholder. Gaining clarity about the objectives saves everyone’s time.  Who in the organization is directly impacted to achieve these objectives should be the ideal sponsor. Work with the sponsor to write down what is important to him/her and, just as importantly, what will gain the cooperation of the interviewees. Have the sponsor sign off on a written set of discovery objectives and a list of people to be interviewed.

Besides focusing on the organization itself you will want to talk to their customers. Some organizations carefully restrict who communicates with their customers. Work with your sponsor to identify which customers you will interview. By explaining that without customer feedback, the most that can be discovered is the internal view.

2. Meet the right stakeholders

The rule here is simple: pick people who can answer the questions you’re asking. As obvious as this sounds, it often happens, that participants are chosen with less regard for their specific knowledge than for their prominence on the org chart or availability. Instead, choose participants with firsthand, knowledge.

Agree upfront that the key stakeholders to be included without too many sessions. Be aware that most people will be extremely busy. As a rule of thumb, you should be able to get most information within maximum of two days, this of course depends on the scope and the size of the organization. Optional you could start with a few interviews and elaborate if you sense there are key inputs missing

The person you are interviewing needs to hear from his/her management why she/he is being interviewed, who will perform the interview, and what actions management expects from him/her. Have the sponsor send an email to all the people being interviewed.

3. Ask the right questions

Research has shown that traditional, loosely structured techniques (“Go for quantity—the greater the number of questions, the greater the likelihood of getting the information!”) are inferior to approaches that provide more structure. It's however not about a prescribed list of questions firing one after the other. The best way I have found is to use questions as the platform for stimulating a discussion.

It is about a structured meeting, with intention to discover, diagnose and confirm. There are multiple techniques to ask questions and here is one I believe works well,

To understand the current state, you could use a number of open questions  

• What’s working (something you want to keep)
• What’s not working (the aim is to remove)
• What do you need in addition (will create new value)
• What does “good” look like? (what would be best in class)

These sessions are designed to identify problems and develop potential solutions based on the agreed objectives. The focus of the questions should therefore aim to be relevant and specific to these objectives.

This works very well for me and there are many others, use the one you feel comfortable with.

Based on the response to your question you use a technique like “The Five Whys”[i] to deepen your understanding of their issue and its underlying cause. In addition, you can use closed questions to confirm your understanding, like: “would it be possible to reduce operational cost by improving the self-service capabilities in your organization?”. From this question, you can lead into asking questions about percentage reductions. This would be the basis of a quantifiable metric. Remember, it’s not an interrogation!

 If you are interested to read more on this topic I recommend reading about the GROW model by Sir John Whitmore in his book, “Coaching for Performance”[ii]

  In addition to questions on the topic of interest, effective interviewers equip themselves with meta-questions to gather feedback on the discovery itself. Meta-questions open new possibilities about what to do next. For instance, you may discover that the person you are interviewing has a different role than you thought and the role isn’t relevant to the discovery. Rather than continue the interview and waste his time and yours, you now have the option of ending the session. Meta-questions I have found useful in this and other situations:

• Do you have any questions for me?
• Do my questions seem relevant?
• Are you the right person to answer these questions?
• Is there anything else I should be asking you?

4. Interview or Workshop

When you have identified your stakeholders, how do you structure the session, doing interviews or running workshops. Besides your preference it depends on the group of participants you are working with, there focus, and hierarchical or competing interests. As a guideline, you should not have the service provider and service consumer participating in the same session. When you have done this initial structuring and you end up doing a discovery with a larger group (>5) in practice, this means you need to use a workshop. You will then structure the workshop around a series of “right questions” that your participants will explore, possibly even in break-out groups.  The trick is to identify the “right questions” by evaluating two characteristics.

 First, they should force your participants to take a new and unfamiliar perspective. Why? Because whenever you look for new ways to attack an old problem—whether it’s lowering your company’s operating costs or creating a new service, you naturally gravitate toward thinking patterns and ideas that worked in the past.

 The second characteristic of a right question is that it limits the conceptual space the group will explore, without being so restrictive that it forces particular answers or outcomes. Example, an organization looking to cut costs might ask, “What complexity do we have in our daily operations that, if eliminated, would change the way we operate?” and “In which areas is the efficiency of a given department restricted by outdated process, organizations, tools or partners?”. Choose the questions carefully, as they will form the heart of your workshops. Techniques that may help in workshops are given below. 

Brain-Writing

There are many varieties, but the general process is that all ideas are recorded by the individual who thought of them. There are three general phases based on a specific problem statement,

 Idea Generation - Each person, using Post-it notes, writes down ideas, and places them on a wall. Everyone is free to extend one or more of these ideas with their own inspiration

1. Idea Grouping - Collectively the Post-it notes are grouped by idea similarity. The higher the number of Post-it’s the stronger support the idea has
2. Idea Review – Ranking the ideas by letting each participant vote or agree a consensus on the top ideas

 Hot Air Balloon

1. Current State: Elements holding us back from our goals
2. Desired State: Elements to reach our goals
3. Anchors (issues) and Tail Winds (enablers)

 There are more. Use the one you believe is appropriate and you feel comfortable with.

5. On your mark, get set, go!

After the people arrive, orient them so that your expectations about what they will—and won’t—accomplish are clear. Resist the temptation to go into prescriptive mode and preach the outcome you already have in mind. A discovery phase, is about gathering information. The going can feel slow at first, so whenever possible, share “examples” - real outcomes that previous organizations achieved, along with success stories, so as to motivate participants.

Remember, your team should be prepared for talking to these stakeholders, have the capabilities to drive the flow of ideas and potentially drill down into details. Utilize Value Prompters you have created for the different stakeholders and share them with your team in advance.  Invest some time before a discovery to learn about the latest company news, have they just released earnings and if so where they good or bad. Was there a significant change to the leadership team.

6. Wrap it up

Finally, a typical discovery has covered 5-15 sessions/workshops and you probably can summarize perhaps five interesting initiatives for further exploration. What now? One thing not to do is have a full group discussion right away. In my experience, attendees won’t always have an executive-level understanding of the criteria and considerations that must go into prioritizing initiatives.

Rather, close the session, describe to them exactly what next steps will be taken and how they will be informed about the outcome. Instead, have a private session narrowing the list to a top few and then share all the leading initiatives with the full group to motivate and inspire participants.

7. Play back

Review and validation should be quick and thorough. Of course, I am not suggesting that uninformed or insufficiently researched conclusions should be reached. But the odds that intention and momentum will result from a discovery exercise tend to decline quickly as time passes. To close the loop with participants, the champion needs to make sure to communicate the results of the outcomes quickly to everyone involved. While it might seem demoralizing to share bad news with a team, I find that doing so actually has the opposite effect. Participants are often desperate for feedback and eager for indications that they have at least been heard.

 Traditional a discovery is fast, confrontational, and ultimately a shallow exercise. By applying these techniques for a more focused, question-based approach, you can consistently retrieve better output from the sessions. Finally this becomes easier by using it, and practice makes perfect.

Ron de Jong is an Business Value Executive in Inspire based in Switzerland.

[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

[ii] Coaching For Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose Paperback, 12 Mar 2002, Sir John Whitmore, Nicholas Brealey Publishing