Discovery

I’m hearing one very loud and clear theme from my clients and partners over the past year: Territory does discovery like none other. As compared to other creative agencies or consulting groups, we stand out. I’ve been asking myself, “why?”

To set the stage, I need to come clean on something: I kinda enjoyed the COVID lockdown office culture. The physical isolation provided me so much valuable focus time. Plus, I was immediately confronted with one of my favorite things in life: solving difficult puzzles. How could we bring a sense of normalcy to remote meetings and re-train our clients to understand that, yes, they could be creative during a video call?

Solving this was a natural fit for our remote-first org. We went to work brushing up our cloud whiteboard skills, wrote a series of articles and how-tos, and even started a hybrid office movement.

Remote meetings were a pretty comfy place for a couple of years! But as we’ve been slowly emerging into hybrid and in-person gatherings, I’m reminded the past few years were so successful for us because we were simply adapting our expertise in discovery to fit the crisis of the day.

We start differently

We don’t start work from a brief or contract. We bake a mandatory discovery phase into the beginning of every problem-solving endeavor. This not-so-secret ingredient requires us to fully immerse in the proper context to create stand-out solutions for our clients.

Discovery is the best time to pour over client-provided materials and soak up the knowledge within. Discovery is also the prime time to initiate research, send surveys, and conduct interviews. These items consistently provide critical context and insight. But from my view, they’re only the start.

Motivations vs. Objectives

In addition to learning what clients and their audiences know, discovery is the best time to dig deep into the experiences of the people involved. To put this into a creative context, designing a solution to hit business KPIs is like painting a portrait using a checklist. You might include all of the correct elements but the outcome will probably be soulless. Our discovery phase is specifically geared to uncover the human motivations within by asking confronting “why” questions.

Causes vs. Drivers

Many organizations start their initiatives with an acute focus on drivers and solutioning. We work with our clients to gain a more holistic view during discovery, revealing deeper causes that might be influencing or hindering performance. Consideration of such causes is critical to designing effective and actionable solutions.

Shared experiences

Most importantly, discovery is a shared experience. Working closely with the people involved allows us to better understand by walking their path. This close collaboration enables the power of two by allowing them to take on our fresh perspectives. Creating this shared experience is why so many of our clients approach us to help them understand and define the problems they’re facing and then to help overcome them.

When you’re in the business of partnership and trust, there’s simply no alternative to the efficiency and efficacy of working shoulder-to-shoulder in the same room. We’ve proven it can be done remotely, but it takes more time and attention to get it done well. Remote sessions have numerous challenges to manage, including screen fatigue, waning attention spans, and technical woes. A single 1-day session may take a series of three to five 4-hour remote sessions to replicate, and the stopping and restarting required can be costly in lost momentum, waning motivation, and shifting priorities.

Curiosity + imagination + visualization

Over the past few years, I’ve strived to become an active student of creativity. I’ve sought to better understand my personal relationship with creativity in the hopes of learning how to help others improve their own creative lives. Some of this thinking has seeped into the culture of our workplace and helped to evolve our approach to discovery. Because of our infatuation with creativity, Territory has become less dependent on rigid discovery scripts and instead trust our creative instincts.

I’ve loosely followed a commonly known approach to discovery for decades. The Open/Explore/Close methodology is a wonderful turnkey framework to adopt when facing any type of challenge. Anyone can use it as the seed to cultivate their own way, as I have. Here are a few principles we follow.

Adopt an open mindset

Rather than cramming, I take a need-to-know approach to preparation. Even if I think I already know the problem clearly, I force possible solutions out of my head. Doing so helps prevent clouding over any rays of inspiration during my experience. My long-time collaborator, Jeremy Varo-Haub, calls his version of this, zero-gravity thinking, which he employs to avoid prejudgement.

Practice patience

For many, creativity can take a manic form. When struck with an idea, it can be difficult to keep it in. Be mindful of everyone else’s creative experience — blurting out your “hero ideas” might be disruptive and cause others to lose their train of thought. Capture those thoughts on paper before you lose them! This will allow you to assess their value and relevance later. When you “wait to solve” you create space for the ideas of others to emerge.

Turn the abstract concrete

Probably the most obvious differentiator in our discovery process is rampant visualization. We’re constantly seeking to convert mushy conversations into specific imagery, but this is no simple task. Reforming the nuance of spoken language into pictures is delicate work. We work to decipher critical content and then render it as a human experience. If a picture is worth a thousand words, consider the value of an entire room’s worth of imagery.

In a nutshell

At the heart of discovery live highly interactive and often fast-paced facilitated group workshops. These sessions contain activities and conversations that foster direct interaction, require loads of empathy, and spark the kind of collaborative creativity that leave teams both reflective and energized.

Crafting workshops is indeed one of the things we’re best known for, and we’re dang good at it. Creative, collaborative discovery is truly a fine art and science — done well, it delivers better, and more creative and inspired results.