Advice
Haste makes waste.
Many of you know this familiar adage, and, many of us ignore it at our peril – especially in our hurry hurry world.
Over the past week I have been engaged in a client situation where exactly this problem is at play. The client has received a request from a department within their organization, and the request has been positioned as very time-sensitive. In their desire to be responsive to their colleagues, our client has rushed forward, engaging us and two other external vendors in a series of dialogues about how we might meet the request.
There is only one problem:
the internal client's core goal is not well defined.
Thus far we have been, at least in part, caught in their tornado. So, one of the primary focuses of our dialogue with them till now has been to slow them down and help them clarify their own focus. We have asked big-picture questions about the core objective and the trade-offs involved in time vs. quality. We have broadened the discussion beyond a few narrow options to a broader range. And, most of all, by our questions, they have realized that they do not have nearly enough information and therefore have returned to their internal stakeholder to clarify the goal.
Our next step will be to go one step further. It will be to put on our observation on the table with our key contacts at the client. We will "name the game" as it were. Essentially we will say that we feel the project is running too far too fast, and in the process chewing up many cycles of processing time and energy – a large proportion of which are premature. We will encourage them to slow down and look at the big picture more robustly with their internal colleagues, and then return to us with the next steps.
This problem is certainly not unique to this specific client. It is a universal problem, and one we often describe when working with clients. In our solution-focused modern business climate, we too often rush to "the answer" without sufficiently understanding "the question". Said in our language, we rush to the options (solutions) without sufficiently understanding the interests and concerns we are trying to satisfy.
So, go slow (at the start) in order to go fast (and in the right direction) the rest of the way.
