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Be clear about your approach

In our daily consulting business management has to make a lot of project related decisions with the help of … you guessed it: You. Irrespective of the topic you will have a certain approach to what you are working on. In order for you, your colleagues and customers to reach your common goals, it is essential for everybody to know and understand the approach to the challenge. It does not matter if you are facing a one day workshop or a five year IT project. The way you want to do it - including the tools, techniques as well as the modus operandi have to be clear to everybody involved. In order to steer and enable management in an effective way your clarity on how you are doing things is vital. This might sound a bit abstract, but I will try to illustrate it with a few examples. Let’s look at the importance of being precise about your approach from a chronological point of view:


In the beginning: Pick your approach and validate it.


One of the first things you should work on is a clear picture of the approach for the solution of the problem your are working on (literally and figuratively). If you are hired to improve the quality of the management reporting in a company for example, it only makes sense to define how you want to do it. To make it simple, let’s assume that you and your team have decided to reassess the key performance indicators currently used for steering. You have come up with the following three step approach to tackling this task:

  1. Identification of status quo of existing key performance indicators in the company

  2. Comparison with industry standards and good practices

  3. Identification and definition of relevant key performance indicators through Workshops with management

Basis for making good decisions within the process of improving the management reporting is that everybody needs to know how you plan on getting there. In order to ensure exactly that, you should inform all relevant stakeholder about your approach (e.g. the three steps above). In the beginning of a project you should start your meetings with these information. Your project approach should be easy to understand and visualization can help you get it across.

It is surprising how few people have a clear and presentable picture about their approach at the start. But why is it important to you to be precise about your approach right from the beginning? Because at this early stage it is a lot easier to adjust. Actively seek feedback on your approach. Ask the stakeholders if you forgot something or if they see a problem in your approach in their business field. That way you avoid fundamental logical pitfalls that will cost you a lot of headache in the end. Looking at our example your project sponsor might tell you: “Step two will not serve our cause here, since our products differ highly from the industry standard and our competitors have a completely different operating model”. In this case you can adjust the approach or discuss if it is worth looking into industry standards anyways. You yourself might even have some thoughts on how to improve our exemplary approach here, and that’s exactly the point. By involving the relevant stakeholders from the beginning your decisions will improve in terms of stakeholder commitment. You are creating solid, common ground where there is usually just thin air.

At the beginning it is a good idea to define an approach rather quickly - you can switch if the need arises, but don’t get paralyzed by the decision on an approach. In the beginning it is all about challenging your first approach.


During the execution: Explain your approach and stick to it.


Once you have decided on an approach, you should stay committed to it. During execution it is all about keeping everyone informed about how you are tackling the challenge at hand. Explain your approach to every new team member and keep the picture of it in everyone's head. People will keep challenging your course of action, but here is the good news: 90% of comments and objections are crap (If you think that last statement was a bit too much, you should consider looking into “surgeon's law”). In a more difficult scenario your approach is challenged and it turns out that it is not suitable. Regroup and start over. Your common goal is to make good decisions. Since you conscientiously validated your idea of the modus operandi in the beginning and -as learned above - only roughly 10% of all objections are actually relevant to your approach at all, the odds are high that you do not have to completely start from scratch. First and foremost your mission during execution is to keep communicating a clear picture of your approach in order to enable good decision making.

Let’s look at the following example which shows the importance of explaining the approach and sticking to it: Management tries to improve their sales personnel’s business life. A design thinking approach is chosen which includes working with personas and their pain points. A representative, fictive sales character is created and everybody is now trying to imagine that persona’s main struggles in order to then think about how to best address them in a new organizational setup. After an hour into the workshop a senior HR-Manager says: “I think we should also include what our company is already doing good. I feel like we are focusing on the negative!”

At this point the approach needs to be explained and also why you chose it. It needs to be made clear that it has nothing to do with judging the organization but with creating a common understanding of how the sales organization should be in order to tackle the main pain points. If you would now start to also gather information about what’s already good you will not meet your goal until the end of the workshop. In other words: Stick to your guns if you want to be productive. If you do not stick to your approach, things will get pretty chaotic pretty soon.

Let me add a purely subjective observation at this point: Senior management sometimes tends to think that their input should be in the form of objections. Particularly when they have not really contributed any relevant input up until a certain point of a project or workshop they will try to be “productive” by tackling the junior consultant’s approach in an unjustified manner. The solution: Explain your approach and stick to it.


At the end of your task or project: Communicate the approach when presenting the results.


Give everybody the chance to judge the task or project success based on the approach you chose.

If you arrive at a mountaintop and someone up there asks you how long it took you to get there it is pretty pointless to tell him that it took you eight hours unless you tell him how you got there. It makes quite a difference if you hiked, took the ropeway or a helicopter.

If you have altered your approach during your project everybody is losing the ability to judge whether you hit your goal or not. Decision Making becomes a lot harder when constantly changing the basis of judgement. That’s why it is crucial to be clear about your course of action at all times.

To be more specific: When delivering your final results (in form of a document or a verbal presentation) make sure to not only explain where everything started and where you are now. Concisely lay down your approach. As management has a lot on their plates they might simply not remember how you tackled the problem, even though they were involved in picking and validating the approach.


To sum it up:

By being precise about your approach throughout a project you enable management and other stakeholders to make good decisions, pass informed judgement and thereby improve your project results.

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