On Tuesday a client sent me a discovery deck with sixty-one slides in it. Fifty-two of those slides were verbatim quotes from twenty stakeholder interviews, color coded by department, arranged in a grid. The last slide said Themes. The themes were: consistency, authenticity, and clarity. Everyone in the room nodded. Nothing had been decided.
I have made that deck. More than once, at the agency, usually the week before a positioning presentation I was not ready for.
This summer it is happening everywhere. Budgets are tightening, which means more approvers, which means a discovery phase that quietly expands until every person with an opinion has been recorded holding it. Interviews feel productive. They are also the safest possible way to spend six weeks not committing to anything.
Because here is what twenty interviews actually produce. Twenty defensible, sincere, mutually incompatible descriptions of the same company. Sales wants to be the fast one. Engineering wants to be the rigorous one. The founder wants to be the rebellious one and also the trusted one. Put all twenty on a slide and you have documentation. You do not have a position.
Research tells you what the people inside the building believe. Strategy is deciding which of those beliefs the company is going to stop acting on.
That second part is the job. It is the whole job. It is also the part that gets negotiated away first, because saying no to the VP of Sales in a readout is uncomfortable and pasting his quote into a grid is not.
What I have started doing instead is finishing every synthesis with two lists on one page. The first is what we are choosing. The second is what we are giving up to choose it, with names attached, so the person losing the argument sees that I noticed they lost it. Nine times out of ten they would rather be visibly overruled than quietly ignored inside a color coded grid.
Liquid Death did not arrive at a can of water that looks like beer by averaging stakeholder input. Oatly did not put a whole essay on a carton because everyone agreed. Somebody decided, and somebody else in that room got told no.
Twenty interviews is a fine number. It is a fine number for input. It is a catastrophic number for consensus, and if you are still adding names to the list in week five, you are not gathering evidence. You are shopping for permission.
Research tells you what the people inside the building believe. Strategy is deciding which of those beliefs the company is going to stop acting on.
Barnaby sat on the printed synthesis Thursday morning, all of it, all sixty-one pages, and would not move. Truffles ignored the whole thing from the windowsill. Two stakeholders, two positions, no overlap. I made a call and reprinted it.