The brief that fell apart
The brief was audacious. The budget was for a folder structure. I found this out live, on the call, in front of everyone.
Let me walk through it, because it’s a failure I’ve since seen coming a mile off, and I’d rather you saw it coming too.
The setup
A recent engagement wanted an AI transformation. The original ask, the one that came down from leadership, was enormous: a company-wide second brain, wired into every tool, that would make the whole organisation ship faster and think better. Beautiful vision. The kind of thing that sounds incredible in a leadership offsite.
By the time it reached us it had been negotiated down to a couple of hours of workshop. Nobody had said out loud that the vision and the budget no longer matched. Everyone was still holding the picture from the offsite in their heads.
So I showed up ready to teach people how to work with these tools, and found that almost nobody in the room had the software installed. Not the execs. Not most of the team. One developer, out of everyone. The people who’d commissioned an org-wide transformation hadn’t taken the first step of opening the door.
What actually went wrong
It’d be easy to blame the client, and in a private moment I did. But the real failure was upstream of anyone in that room.
There was a mismatch between expectation and bandwidth, and nobody had named it. Leadership imagined AI as a thing you buy and install, like a new coffee machine, that then makes everyone better. What it actually is is a new way of working that people have to learn, adopt and practise. Those are two different purchases. One’s a product. The other’s a change in behaviour across an organisation, and it costs real time and attention that this engagement hadn’t been willing to spend.
The audacious brief and the folder-structure budget were both honest. They just belonged to two different projects, and the distance between them had been quietly papered over by everyone hoping it’d work out.
The lesson I took
I now ask one question before any of this work, and I ask it of the most senior person in the room. What are you actually prepared to change about how your people work?
If the honest answer is “nothing, we just want the tool switched on,” then no workshop is going to help them, and taking their money does them a disservice. The tool is the easy part, and it’s almost free. The expensive part is human adoption, and if an organisation won’t fund that, they’re buying a coffee machine and expecting a barista.
The engagements that work are the ones where leadership understands they’re commissioning a change in behaviour, not a piece of software. The ones that fall apart are the ones where somebody fell in love with the vision at an offsite and forgot to resource the boring middle.
What I do differently now
I surface the mismatch before I take the work, not live on the call. I make leadership say the sentence out loud: here’s what we want, here’s what we’re prepared to put in. When those two things don’t match, that’s the real conversation, and having it early is worth more than any workshop.
The brief that fell apart wasn’t a disaster. It was the most useful engagement I’ve had, because it gave me the diagnosis I now lead with: the tool is never the thing. Whether you’re willing to change how you work is the thing.