1. {The Third Proclamation} - We Will Diagnose Before We Prescribe

We Will Diagnose Before We Prescribe

We will take seriously our professional obligation to begin at the beginning, and we will never put our clients or ourselves in the position where we are prescribing solutions without first fully diagnosing the client’s challenge.

There are four phases in our client engagements:

• Diagnose the problem/opportunity

• Prescribe a therapy

• Apply the therapy

• Reapply the therapy as necessary

While it is common practice in the creative professions to prescribe solutions without fully and accurately diagnosing the problem, in almost every other profession such a sequence would render the professional liable for malpractice.

Too often we are guilty of this flawed process and our clients are guilty of trying to impose such a process on us through the pitch.

We owe it to ourselves and our clients to stand firm on this most basic of professional practices and to never agree to begin working on a creative solution to a problem that we have not fully explored.

In a process that pits multiple firms against each other and asks each to present solutions, the client does not have the time to invest in meaningful diagnostics with them all.

So he abbreviates the diagnostic phase;

He dictates the process, marginalizes it and proclaims that his self-diagnosis is valid enough for us to proceed.

But how many times have we proceeded based on the client’s self-diagnosis only to discover that it was wrong?

How many times has the client come to us stating, “I need X,” only for us to discover that he needed Y?

It is more likely that the client’s perspective will be wrong, or at least incomplete, than it is that it will be whole and accurate. We know this.

The customer is not always right. More correctly, he usually has strong ideas and a strong sense that he is right, but is locked into a narrow view and weighed down by constraints that seem to him to be more immutable than they really are.

When the client comes to us self-diagnosed, our mindset must be the same as the doctor hearing his patient tell him what type of surgery he wants performed before any discussion of symptoms or diagnoses.

Our reaction must be, “You may be correct, but let’s find out for sure.”

The Practitioner’s Perspective

One of the advantages the outside expert brings is perspective. And one of the hallmarks of creativity is the ability to see problems differently, and thus find solutions others cannot see.

To bring our perspective and problem-solving skills to bear we must be allowed time and freedom to diagnose the client’s challenges in our own manner.

Design is not the solution – it is the process.

We cannot be effective, responsible designers if we allow the client to impose his process, or truncate or otherwise marginalize ours.

But let us not place all the blame on the client. Doctors face self-diagnosed patients as often as we do, but we are far more likely to proceed with such a flawed approach than any medical practitioner.

We let the client dictate and drive the diagnostic process, usually because we have not bothered to understand, formalize and explain our own.

We have not taken control on this issue. We have not correlated our likelihood of high-quality outcomes to working from a defined and meaningful diagnostic process.

We have not made this case in our own minds and we have not made it to the client. So the client intervenes and fills the void in our own working process by deciding how much information and access we will be allowed in the pitch.

Lacking our own process, we have little means to push back and argue for a better way.

To reverse the trend and live up to our professional obligation to diagnose first, we must map out and formalize our own diagnostic process.

Then, when we are next in a situation where the prospective client is dictating to us, we must make the case that the consistency of our outcomes is rooted in the strength of our process, therefore we must be allowed to employ it.

The Nature of Successful Clients

Clients are stinging scorpions that cannot be trusted.

The lesson is that the most successful clients, whether owners or executives, have achieved their success in part because of their ability to take control – their ability to rise above and orchestrate others.

This is their strength; and even though it is not always in their best interest, it is in their nature.

We are liable. Like the frog, we are the guilty party when we let the client control the engagement and dictate to us how we will go about understanding his problem.

Just because it is in the client’s nature to lead, does not mean he should be allowed to do so at all times.

It only means that, like the scorpion, he will attempt to do what it is in his nature to do.

Learning From Other Professionals

Other professionals do not suffer nearly as much as us in being dragged into engagements where the client or patient has been allowed to dictate the diagnostic process.

Interestingly, many of us have discovered that these other professionals make the worst clients.

The reason they avoid the problem we do not, and then create problems for us when they become our clients is the same: they take control.

Other professionals are taught to drive the diagnostic process or risk their professional credentials.

When they become the client in the practitioner-client relationship they do what they always do: they attempt to take control. And we let them. The result is usually an engagement gone awry.

The Root of Bad Engagements

When we think back now on our worst client experiences we can see that most of them were rooted in this mistake of letting a dominant client direct the engagement, beginning with a self-diagnosis that we took at face value.

Thinking we are in the same business as retail clerks, somehow convinced that there is truth, or even nobility, in the line, “The customer is always right,” we took the money and did as we were asked.

When these engagements go wrong we cannot understand how the client can possibly blame us.

“We only did as we were told,” we rationalize.

We see him as demanding and difficult. He sees us as irresponsible order-takers not worth the money he is paying. He responds with more angry demands and again we comply, giving him what he wants.

The spiral continues until finally we part, each blaming the other.

If design truly is a process, then we will define and guard that process and we will walk away from those clients and situations, like the pitch, where the process is dictated to us, or where we are otherwise asked to propose solutions without a proper diagnosis.

The Polite Battle for Control

The control that we need in order to do our best work includes the imperative to bring our own methodology to the engagement.

Throughout the buying cycle we are constantly gauging whether or not the client recognizes and values our expertise to the extent that he is willing to grant us this control.

Does he see us as the expert who merits the reins of the engagement, or does he see us as the order-taker supplier that needs to be directed?

Possessing our own formalized diagnostic methods, whether they are proprietary to us or not, goes a long way to our positioning in this matter. Like any other competent professional, it is reasonable to expect that if we address similar problems on a regular basis then we would have a formalized way of beginning the engagement.

It follows that we would demand to be allowed to follow our own process and not readily agree to use one developed by the client or his procurement people.

It also follows that when a client comes to us self-diagnosed, we would feel the same sense of obligation to validate that self-diagnosis as any other professional would.

A good client will begin to relinquish control once he has the confidence that the expert practitioner knows more than he does, or has the tools to learn more. Formalized diagnostic processes are such tools.

From here forward we will view the act of prescription without diagnosis for what it is: malpractice.

We will assert the professional’s obligation to begin at the beginning and walk away from those that would have us proceed based on guesses or unvalidated self-diagnoses.