There is a man at my karaoke bar in Southeast Portland who puts in four slips before anyone else has taken off their coat. He is not good. He is not bad. He is simply always next, and by ten o'clock the room has quietly reorganized itself around his taste in classic rock. The host, who calls everyone baby, keeps trying to slide other people into the rotation. It rarely works.
Nobody in that bar voted for a Journey night. It happened because one person was comfortable talking and everyone else was comfortable waiting.
Brand workshops run exactly like this.
Most positioning gets decided by whoever is most comfortable speaking in a room, which is a sampling method no research team would ever accept.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms for years. You book the day, you build the exercises, you put twelve people around a table, and within forty minutes the sticky notes have converged on the vocabulary of the two loudest participants. The head of sales says premium. The founder says approachable. By lunch the whole positioning is a negotiation between premium and approachable, and the four people who actually talk to customers every day have said eleven words combined.
Volume is not conviction. It is usually just tenure, or a personality, or a person who has already had this argument three times and is tired of losing it.
Three things fix most of it, and none of them are complicated. One, write before you talk. Ask the question, then six minutes of silence with pens down at the end. The introvert with the best answer gets it onto paper before the room can steer. Two, name the roles out loud at the start. Say who is deciding, who is advising, and who is here to be informed, because half the loudness in a workshop is people bidding for authority nobody clarified. Three, bring customer language into the room as evidence. Not a summary deck. Actual verbatims on the wall, in the customer's own words, so that when the founder says approachable somebody can point at a quote and say that is not the word they used.
Volume is not conviction. It is usually just tenure, or a personality, or a person who has already had this argument three times and is tired of losing it.
The uncomfortable version of this is that as the facilitator you are also in the sample, and your job is to be the least interesting person at the table. Every strong opinion you contribute is one you will later mistake for consensus.
I got the microphone twice on Tuesday. I sang badly and with total commitment, and the man went back up right after me. Truffles and Barnaby were unimpressed when I got home, which is roughly the amount of deference any of us deserve.