But what if the information we collect only tells part of the story, or worse, the wrong story? And how do we ensure that we gather the best possible information for consideration?
That information gathering phase is referred to as the 'discovery process'. Historically, this is where traditional consulting companies send a small army of consultants out to spend weeks on interviewing client stakeholders and providing status updates for project sponsors. The large firms loves this approach since it funds on-the-job training for associates and racks up billable hours for account managers. But for clients, it is slow, expensive, and often ineffective.
To remedy this disconnect, Aspirant set out to create its own consulting model. One solely focused on creative value for clients - not for ourselves. This is when we realized the need to innovate the discovery process, and Digital Discovery® was born.
Digital Discovery® is a proprietary AI tool that expedites and bolsters our consultants' efforts to discover and process an entire organization’s worth of information.
Do you have 10,000 sales associates? What about people spread across the continent? By leveraging advances in both natural language processing and machine learning, Aspirant consultants can perform virtual interviews with all stakeholders involved without the huge investment a consulting firm typically would require. This results in a better understanding overall and guides us to uncover deeper insights that would otherwise go unnoticed by the typical churn of one-on-one stakeholder interviews.
The process and benefits for Digital Discovery are as follows:
But why put in all this extra effort to get everyone involved? Consultants have managed well enough up until this point, so retaining the status quo means everyone’s happy, right? We thought so too, until we understood the benefits of getting additional perspectives.
The usual suspects are the employees who are generally in management roles, known well to the leadership, or are located conveniently to participate in an interview. This results in them interviewed repeatedly for insight into business challenges or when planning a new strategy. While they do provide valuable insights, there is also a tremendous amount of knowledge available from overlooked stakeholders that ends up being missed. These diverse points of view often uncover valuable information that leads to better solutions for our clients.
By asking a variety of people to participate in the initiative, there is far more buy-in for the solution than when they are excluded. It is common for objections to be raised during an implementation of an initiative when a person, department, or location was not asked for their insight into the business challenge or to participate in crafting the solution.
These interviews can be used in advance of workshops or longer, face-to-face interviews to uncover topics that can then be explored deeper. This process quickly highlights the most common themes and general sentiment as well as enabling outlier topics to present themselves. These topics, which may never have surfaced during a workshop or interview, can be discussed in more detail with other stakeholders, if appropriate, and lead to richer solutions than otherwise possible.
With Digital Discovery, we can collect and mine data on a large scale for deeper understanding of the client’s situation. This ultimately gets us to better, more informed solutions faster. Because, in today’s business environment, an idea, behavior, or style can spread like wildfire within a culture. Knowing the whole story can be the difference between Sir Francis Bacon and “France is Bacon."
We are disrupting the traditional consulting model with one that generates better results and stronger value for clients. Use the form below to request a no-strings-attached discussion about how Aspirant can help revolutionize your business.
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