Strat House Co-Founder, Melanie Welsh, outlines our positive approach to client briefs and how to move on to fixing things.

In The House

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What’s your problem?

You’ll find a lot of strategy and creative planning articles out there that talk of investigating the brief and getting to the ‘real’ problem – of tearing things up and starting again. At Strat House we are not in the habit of  automatically assuming the brief will be wrong. Why would we think that of the brief-writer (and why are we working with them in that case)?

Maybe it’s a nuance, but we prefer to go into it with a more positive attitude. Because the risk is that otherwise you become a bit ‘hammer looking for a nail’ (apologies Mr Maslow). If you assume it’s wrong, all you will see is the ‘wrongness’.

Instead we seek the ‘right’,  check  that we’ve identified all the factors, and that everyone has been heard before we collectively agree on the objective.

For us it’s about analysing the evidence to define and refine the context and challenge, and to set the right objective, with two very important clarifications:

• The task is not to analyse evidence for its own sake (as fun as that can be)
• The task is not necessarily to set (or re-set) the objective (but instead to confirm we have precisely the right objective).

In our experience, the problem has nearly always been identified. Usually, by the time a project gets to us, lots of very intelligent and capable people have been thinking about it for a while and they know what the issues are.

…the only issue with that being:

• There’s lots of people – so they’ve come up with a number of factors each, usually from different perspectives
• They’re all intelligent and capable – so they’ve started thinking about solutions
• They’ve been thinking about it for a while – and it’s usually worrying them (because it’s a problem) so they also think about what might have caused this situation and what the side-effects are.

This can make for a lot of information and emotions on the subject. People may have fallen in love with a solution they’ve thought of. They may be very preoccupied by a side-effect or symptom (usually because they’re bearing the brunt of it). So we often find that whilst people are aware of the problem, their heads may also be filled with a lot of other factors.

In these situations, as a Strategy practice (rather than agency), we triage the problem using the Problem Statement approach to map and categorise all of the causes, symptoms, side-effects, (potential) solutions – in order to then isolate the thing we need to focus our time and energy on …the problem. It’s a good way of making sure we:

• Haven’t overlooked anything
• Are not getting distracted by things that are a worry but won’t necessarily solve the issue
• Have listened to everyone (and made sure they feel listened to)

…because that’s how we can all then move on to fixing things.

We took the problem statement approach from Six Sigma – a set of tools and techniques created for process improvement. It was originally designed to stop people using gut instinct and intuition to solve a problem. But what I love about this way of tackling things is that it is also an important way of guiding constructive evaluation of the situation, creating a shared language and gaining consensus.

Here’s a run through of our approach:

The hard work of getting to a problem statement is really in the analysis of all that information. To be honest, the framework we use to categorise things is no more than a table with sections for; causes, symptoms, side-effects, solutions …and the problem. The hard yards come in sifting through everything to assess what goes where and gain agreement on that with the team.

Then it’s time to write the actual problem statement itself. Here are our guardrails:

Importantly, it’s only after identifying the problem statement that we can consider solutions and articulate the objective (ideally as a ‘job to be done’).

And that’s it. Usually, we explain this approach by sharing a case study or tackling a live issue.