Work Backwards

In my career in working with numerous clients (and internal teams) I find a recurring pattern when it comes to getting lofty goals clarified, let alone, grounded. The pattern is this: there's too often a broad notion of what "I want", but an absent sense of "what I must accomplish." Playfully here, the necessary answer to "what does success look like?" is one that creates deafening silence when you pose this to a conference room full of stakeholders during a workshop. It's borderline comical as to how quickly folks stop talking.

My go-to trick with this? I keep coming back to three words: achieve, avoid, or fix. These three words get you to realize what the rock-bottom results looks like. If you're coming up with initially fluffy goal statements, it's helpful to consider what you want to achieve ... avoid ... fix. Each of these three words can be accompanied with metrics and measured outcomes. I use these prompts in customer discovery sessions or internal planning meetings. They work well to get the chatter in the conference room going.

Here are some examples I've encountered in the past. As an analyst early in my career, I would get request for a report or even a small dataset. I'd ask, "what do you want to answer?" only to hear, "I don't know - I'll know it when I see it." This is problematic for the poor souls pulling data/reports repeatedly when the fishing expedition is unclear. We had a case where purchase rates for luxury sedans was unknown. Fine. Measure the purchase rates all you want, but I was trying to understand their role in the quest. It turns out, the client eventually wanted to know how they can avoid missing their sales targets that depended on target marketing investments. So instead of saying, "I want to see recent purchase rates of luxury sedans", your partner in crime can better brainstorm with you if you ask, "I want to avoid missing my sales targets - got any ideas?" OR "I want to achieve my +7% growth targets with the available budget we have - what can we do?" It could change what metrics, data or reports are really relevant.

Here's another example: I had a friend who worked for a tire OEM and the pending recalls were going to be a bit of an issue. She shared with me that they had to do an analysis of the recall volumes likely to hit them so they were scrambling to prepare for risk mitigation options. As we sat on an outdoor patio, I asked her, "what do you want from this recall?" She was tight in her response: "To avoid being sued and to keep our brand reputation in tact." Nothing else mattered. In crises, you are avoiding. In pursuits, you are achieving. In other less-than-crisis modes, I find you are fixing stuff. Each one can come with a dollar or behavioral value tied to the phrase.

For me, this lesson was first taught when we were responding to RFPs (a bloody miserable process being a bidder for an RFP - necessary in some cases - but often not ideal). Our position of strength was derived by knowing what the decision-maker at our client really wanted. In fact, we wondered out loud, what their annual performance goals looked like (a healthy exercise, if you're a seller). We internally workshopped ideas to appeal to the buyer's end-state should they hire us. We had an outside coach drop these three words on us: "what do you think the buyer (i.e., the specific warm body/role) wants to ... avoid, achieve or fix?" It was like magic. Our positioning became clearer and crisp. We wrote TO the persona as if we were their life coach. It drove our executive summary and cover letter. It drove our stand-up presentation. We did get the contract (not solely because of this reason, but I will attest we were consistent in the promised value we offered).

I encourage you to keep these three words in your arsenal. They are foundational probes when unearthing needs or galvanizing vague goals. Have you found other methods to get similar results? Drop me a comment.