Having options is a good thing—–until it isn’t. Clients who try to keep their options open too long tend to end up with less compelling results. Sometimes, FOMO is to blame, but lack of internal alignment is more often the issue. When the team has competing perspectives, we often see clients hold things “open” longer in the hope that more data will make the best route so obvious that the decision is effectively made for them. That’s a misguided approach.

Even in the absence of conflicting viewpoints, certainty is typically elusive in innovation projects (if it’s a sure thing, chances are it's not that innovative!). The organizations that are most successful are those that can tolerate uncertainty and are clear-eyed enough to realize that the specific opportunity area they select is far less critical than getting to something tangible and testable before the end of our engagement.

Consider the case of a large health organization that hired Daylight to identify new business opportunities. Discussions with key user groups and stakeholders surfaced several compelling opportunities, but at a key moment of choice, the client decided to keep researching three options rather than selecting one to pursue. That additional exploration came at a cost. Because the timeline and budget were fixed, the prototyping and testing phases had to shrink. We ended with several promising directions, but all absent the magic of multiple rounds of iteration and refinement that would have made them fledged enough to leave the nest at the project’s conclusion.

Some of a consultant’s appeal is our ability to say the hard truths and help key stakeholders see the forest for the trees. But when challenging interpersonal and organizational dynamics and hidden agendas aren’t acknowledged, the engagement can be slowed by what we call the secret second project: getting and keeping stakeholders in alignment. Being clear with a consulting team about the project’s visible and invisible goals can go a long way.

One client who was particularly successful on this front shared their secret second project during the proposal process: Their department didn’t feel like it was perceived as a strategic entity within the larger organization and was seeking to change that. Understanding the full scope of what they were trying to accomplish allowed us to deliver on that. We dedicated extra time to bringing key skeptical stakeholders into the process and designed both our approach and our deliverables with an eye to dispelling misconceptions and showing the relevance of our client’s department to accomplishing the organization’s core work.

Openly conveying these internal dynamics at our earliest meetings may feel daunting, but it’s worth it, and we’re not judging. Having organizational friction and misalignment isn’t unusual—quite the opposite. It’s human, and those issues are almost always present to some degree. If it’s not something you feel comfortable discussing with your full project team present, schedule a one-on-one with the consultant project lead to share your hunches about the dynamics that may come into play. We’ll figure out together how best to handle any challenges; helping clients navigate complex dynamics is part of the bread and butter of our work.

Consultants bring a set of powerful skills that can supercharge and accelerate work in a way many organizations struggle to do with internal resources alone. But you are still the experts in your domain. Long-term success depends on having access to that expertise throughout the project and placing ownership of it in capable hands once the engagement is done.

When appointing the ideal project owner, you need to select someone who has sufficient bandwidth and is senior enough that they can lead the team on your side and corral people to make key decisions. How much time is sufficient time? Ask yourself: How much expert knowledge of my field and my company is needed for this project to be successful? For those projects that require a lot of domain expertise, the clients who have engaged with us most successfully are those who dedicate at least one senior member of their team to work on the project at least half-time for the duration.

In the case of one recent project, a senior client team member essentially embedded with our team for eight weeks. She met with us daily or more, attended every user testing session and debrief, and was ideating and designing alongside us in our Figma boards. When we handed off at the project’s completion, she was already going 1,000 miles an hour. That level of embedding is rare, but for this client, it was the right choice. Having that degree of engagement and ready access to a key decision maker meant we could get much farther much faster than we could have otherwise.