Assumption Audit

After losing a large deal, the default reaction is speed involving more discovery meetings, faster prototyping, visible activity. My friend M is pushing in the opposite direction in her organization. She was concerned that the team was to scale assumptions that were never made explicit. Instead of compressing thinking into meetings, she's expanding discovery: asking all members of the cross-functional team to fully articulate their win-back plan in writing and answer a structured set of questions derived from their own proposal. She does not think their plan is going to work but wants to them to be responsible and accountable for it and not pass the blame on to the team that act on their directiont. She hopes there will be some truths uncovered in the process without it wasting a ton of her team's time.

Tools powered by AI have made it trivial to generate prototypes, content, and workflows in hours. The bottleneck is clarity and this team has none from M's vantage point. Many organizations are accelerating the wrong layer, producing high-quality artifacts built on poorly understood problems. The cost of being wrong is faster, more convincing failure. She had predicted the last loss and is confident this time will not be any different. 

I thought this was an interesting way to navigate politics in a large organization. M proposed to use the discovery responses to score against the RFP that they had previously lost and give the team a chance to course correct. If they refuse, we will use their discovery response to stand up a product prototype using AI and see what the the customer with the actual buying authority has to say so. So far M has never seen or heard from this indivual and has to rely on the intelligence and understanding of the team that failed to win in the first place. Given the cards that she's been dealt, this seems like a reasonable plan.