How we work: Context sessions

Welcome to “How we work”, a series of posts on our ways of working. 

Our ways of working are guided by a simple idea: Radical Collaboration. 

Radical means “from the root”. In chemistry, it’s used to talk about atoms working together as a unit. United, from the root upwards – that’s the idea. 

This is why everyone in a project team is involved from the beginning, coming together to develop an understanding of the project and the client.

Radical collaboration doesn’t stop with our teams. It involves our clients too, naturally. 

We aim to involve clients deeply, transparently and meaningfully at every stage of the process. Our clients love this. Wouldn’t you? 

Getting the best brief: Context sessions. 

At the very beginning of the project, we do a Context Session with our clients, ideally in the same room. 

The purpose of this initial stage is to get the best possible brief from the client. 

In our experience, there are three types of client briefs: 

• A verbal brief. This is the lowest form of brief, usually happening between a client and a new business team. It typically lacks substance and evolves as it spreads across the agency. This type of brief creates misalignments as people reach their own interpretations of what the client wants.

•  A written brief. This has the potential of being a great way to brief an agency. Experienced clients can write really good briefs, and also work with agencies to include every relevant detail before firming it up. However, clients are not always very experienced at briefing agencies and even when they are, they could struggle to convey all the relevant information in words. Or not have the time to do so. (clients are busy people). 

• A collaborative brief. Our approach is trying to get the best of both worlds: the casual and collaborative approach of the verbal brief, with the thorough discipline of a written brief. Boris Johnson would call it “cakeism”, (but this one does work) 

A collaborative approach to the client brief recognises two fundamental truths:

• Clients love to talk about their businesses and can do that for hours given the right questions.

• No written brief can give us the amount and quality of information we get from an immersive approach to discussing and exposing the brief together. 

To make this happen, we use Context Sessions. 

What are Context Sessions and how do they work?

Context sessions are simple: we get everyone in the same room (or Miro board) to discuss the brief through a series of elements. It’s scalable, can be done in an hour, or where the need is there, we can talk all day! They’re pretty high-energy, exciting things. 

During this session, we use the following checkpoints to make sure we cover as much as we can:

• Understanding the business: business status & company objectives, strategy, plans, audience segments, competitors, stakeholders, agencies and consultants. 

• Project requirements & rationale: the project’s purpose, scope, perceived needs, client wishlist, current issues and pain points. What do we want this project to achieve (is it more revenue, ROI, better customer satisfaction, or customer lifetime value?)

• Non-negotiables: what does the agency need to do, don’t do and watch out for (“always keep the product director involved”, specific ways of working together, or “don’t suggest things that will make us really busy”) 

• Technology: current technical approach, integrations and tech stack. 

• Risks & open issues – things that pose a risk to the project (usually things that we can’t control, so need to manage) and things we don’t know the answer to yet, but need to find out more about asap (whether we know how to, or not yet)

Every context session is a little different. It needs to be. We flex how we play each session to suit the number of clients in the room, their roles, how many people we have on our side and a lot of other factors – in other words, the art of facilitation. 

Essentially, we start firing questions to the client, going one element at a time. These questions are designed to encourage conversation and get the clients to think aloud with us. 

As this happens, people across the room take furious notes, ask more questions, clarify, repeat, interject, interrupt and get quiet all of a sudden. It’s beautiful. 

What are the benefits of this approach? 

The reason we’re big fans of Context Sessions and use them for every project is that they offer some important advantages to the more traditional approaches to moving the brief from the client into strategy and delivery.  

Making our clients comfortable 

It’s never entirely clear to clients how they should brief an agency. Besides the obvious complexities in the briefing process, there is the fact that every agency is different. Hence clients are never sure what’s relevant and what’s oversharing. 

Using Context Sessions relinquishes some of the pressures on the client to get a perfect brief. 

The beauty of this approach is that a comfortable client will share more and better information, particularly about all-important organisational politics.  

Giving us a chance to interrogate deeper 

Following a structured approach ensures we interrogate everything that could matter. 

Of course, agencies can interrogate briefs over email, or set up calls to discuss the brief and ask questions. 

But nothing beats being in the same space for a longer period of time. This gives us a chance to genuinely interrogate what are the client’s objectives and how to best translate them into measurable outcomes. 

Equally – everything is for discussion. The session gives us the flexibility to go deeper into an interesting subject and brush other off. 

Acting as “Client Therapy” and problem-solving

The client feels relaxed and at ease to comment about challenging internal politics that matter for the project. By doing that, we can offer some solutions and ideas on how to steer the project to help our clients overcome those issues 

This almost feels like “therapy”, clients tell us because we helped them think about how to work with the rest of their organisation. 

Getting a thorough and complete brief

The session is designed to capture everything from high-level business strategy to granular technical detail. 

Because we involve every department, teams often have the chance to break away from the wider group to put a microscope on certain topics. 

Energising everyone

Finally – they pump everyone up. 

Agency and client teams have a chance to get to know each other, explore interesting conversations, come up with ideas together and start shaping the project. 

That feels like an amazing way to start a project – because it is. 

The next day, the hard work starts – another story for another day