Why we spend the first two weeks of every engagement questioning the brief, and what that saves in month three.
Every engagement we have ever run began with a brief that turned out to be partly wrong. Not deliberately, not carelessly. The client is smart, close to the business, and has thought about the problem for a long time. But a brief is written from inside the business, by people who have been living with the symptom for months. It is, by definition, a hypothesis about what is wrong.
We treat it that way. We write it down, we take it seriously, and we assume it is probably incomplete. That assumption is not a criticism of the client. It is a discipline.
The first two weeks of every engagement are a diagnostic. We interview 15 to 25 people across the business, including junior staff, recent hires, and ideally two or three customers. We read the last 12 months of financial data, not just the management presentation of it. We ask to see the things that have gone wrong, not just the things that have gone right. We pay particular attention to anyone who disagrees with the brief, because they are usually holding a piece of the real problem.
This work looks slow. It is deliberately slow. The cost of the first two weeks is almost nothing compared to the cost of solving the wrong problem for five months.
A good diagnosis will cost you two weeks. A bad one will cost you a quarter.
In our experience, the actual problem sits adjacent to the one in the brief, and it is almost always in one of two directions. Either it is one level up, which means the brief was about a symptom and the real issue is a strategy or positioning call the business has been avoiding. Or it is one level down, which means the brief was about strategy when the real issue is an operational or people issue that is quietly throttling everything above it.
We have had clients come to us for pricing help and leave with a team structure change. We have had clients come to us for an org redesign and leave with a pricing decision. In both cases, the presenting brief was real but not the thing that, once moved, moved everything else.
When we skip this step, which we have done twice in the last decade for reasons we now regret, two things happen. The first is that the engagement stays busy but does not move the needle, because we are solving something that was not actually the constraint. The second is that the client begins to suspect, correctly, that the firm is working hard but on the wrong problem, and the relationship becomes harder to repair than it would have been to get right the first time.
When we do this step well, the first real recommendation in week three almost always surprises the client. Sometimes they push back. That is fine. A recommendation that does not surprise anyone is usually one that could have been written without us in the room, which means we are not earning our fee.
Diagnosis first is not a methodology we are selling. It is the thing that makes everything else we do worth paying for.