Wednesday morning, sixth floor, a conference room with somebody else's funnel still drawn on the whiteboard. Nine people. Two boxes of pastries nobody touched. The brief said the problem was awareness among younger consumers, and by the fourth slide I could tell that at least six of the nine knew it was not.
You learn to spot the tell. The VP of marketing says awareness. The sales director looks at the table. Somebody from product says, carefully, that there have been a few questions about the roadmap this year, and lets the sentence end there. A junior analyst starts to speak and does not.
Nothing happened. Again.
The brief is not a description of the problem, it is a description of the problem the organization has agreed it is allowed to have.
This is not dishonesty. It is politics in the ordinary sense. The real problem almost always has a name attached to it, and saying that name in a room of nine people with an outside vendor present costs somebody something real. Awareness is safe because awareness belongs to nobody. No one gets fired over a soft awareness number. Someone absolutely gets fired over a product that shipped late twice and a price nobody wanted to defend.
So the work of the first two weeks is not research. It is translation. Three things I do now, in order.
One, I ask for the last three quarters of whatever number the client actually reports upward, and I read it before I ask a single person a question. Two, I talk to people one at a time, off site if I can manage it, because the same VP who said awareness in the room will say something completely different at a coffee shop with no deck open between us. Three, I ask everybody the same closing question: if this project works perfectly, what stops being true? The answers are never the same, and the spread between them is the actual brief.
What separated the useful engagements from the wasted ones, across five years of doing this, was never the quality of the research. It was whether the real problem got said out loud by somebody with the standing to say it, early enough for the answer to change. Everything after that is craft. Nothing before it matters.
Awareness is safe because awareness belongs to nobody.
There is a karaoke bar in Southeast where the host calls everyone baby and puts you on stage whether or not you feel ready. I sang Total Eclipse of the Heart there in June and it was not good, but I got through it, because the woman running the room told me exactly what was about to happen and then made it happen on schedule. Most kickoff meetings could use her.