The Real Work Framework - and how I think about growth (Part One)

Understanding the problem before solving it

Growth is often described through the language of momentum. We talk about pipelines and prospects, meetings and presentations, conversion rates and revenue forecasts, and all of the activity that surrounds the pursuit of new business. These measures matter because they give organizations discipline and visibility, but over the course of my career working across media, advertising, consulting and growth, I have become increasingly convinced that they describe the mechanics of growth more than its source. Activity can tell us how much we are doing, but it cannot tell us whether we are doing the right things, and the more I have worked with clients and organizations, the more I have come to believe that meaningful growth begins with understanding.

The idea behind The Real Work Framework is simple. Before we solve the problem, we have to understand the problem.

That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly difficult to practice.

Organizations rarely come to us with a perfectly defined problem. They come with symptoms, requests, assumptions and pressures. They tell us they need a campaign because awareness is declining. They tell us they need a new website because their digital experience is underperforming. They tell us they need a new brand because the organization has changed. They tell us they need media because they need more reach, or communications because their reputation needs to improve. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes the solution they have identified is exactly what they need. But sometimes the request is simply the most visible expression of something happening much deeper inside the organization.

The brief is therefore not the diagnosis.

It is the beginning of the diagnosis.

I have spent much of my professional life in rooms where ideas are evaluated: pitch rooms, boardrooms, strategy sessions, client meetings and RFP working sessions where teams gather around tables covered in presentations, research, half-formed ideas and competing opinions about what should happen next. In those rooms, I have seen how quickly organizations can move from a question to an answer. A brief arrives, people mobilize, strategies are developed, creative teams begin thinking, presentations take shape, and within a remarkably short period of time an organization can move from uncertainty to something that looks very much like a solution. That momentum can feel productive. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is simply motion.

The danger is that we can become exceptionally good at solving the problem we were given before we have determined whether it is the problem worth solving.

This is where I believe strategy and growth intersect. The most valuable contribution we can make at the beginning of a relationship is not necessarily an idea. It is interpretation. We need to understand what is happening inside the organization, what has created the current situation, who is affected by it, what pressures are shaping the decisions being made, and what the consequences are if nothing changes. Only then can we begin to understand what the organization actually needs from us.

There is an important distinction between being responsive and being useful. A responsive partner answers the question they have been asked. A useful partner asks whether the question itself is the right one.

That requires a certain amount of restraint.

It means resisting the instinct to demonstrate value too quickly. It means being comfortable saying that we do not yet know the answer. It means asking another question when everyone else in the room is ready to move on. It means understanding that expertise is not demonstrated by how quickly we can produce a recommendation, but by how confidently we can distinguish between what we know, what we believe and what we still need to understand.

This is also why I have become skeptical of the idea that clients primarily buy services or categories. They do not ultimately buy media, creative, communications, consulting or strategy. Those are mechanisms. They buy progress against something that matters to the organization.

A client does not wake up in the morning thinking, “We need an agency.” They wake up thinking, “We have a problem.”

Perhaps revenue is not growing. Perhaps customers are choosing competitors. Perhaps employees are leaving. Perhaps a product is not gaining adoption. Perhaps leadership cannot align around a direction. Perhaps an organization has lost relevance with an audience it once understood. Perhaps the market has changed faster than the organization has been able to respond.

The category of partner they hire is secondary to the problem they need solved.

This distinction changes the role of growth entirely.

If our responsibility is simply to sell what we make, then our job is to identify opportunities for our capabilities. If our responsibility is to help organizations solve meaningful problems, then our job begins much earlier. We have to understand the world our clients are operating in well enough to recognize where our expertise might actually matter.

That is why I think of growth as a credibility discipline.

Credibility does not come from telling people how good we are. It comes from demonstrating that we understand something they care about. It comes from the questions we ask, the assumptions we challenge, the connections we make and the clarity we bring to complexity.

There is a particular moment in a client conversation that I have come to value more than almost any other. Someone will pause and say something like, “That is exactly what we have been struggling to articulate internally.”

That moment is not persuasion. It is recognition.

The client has not necessarily been convinced to buy anything. Instead, they have recognized their own situation more clearly because someone outside the organization has helped them see it differently. That is where trust begins. And trust is what gives us permission to move deeper.

The work, then, is not simply to ask more questions. It is to ask questions that progressively change our understanding of the problem.

We begin with what the organization says is happening. We then look at what is actually happening. We explore why it is happening. We understand what the situation is costing the organization and why it matters. From there, we determine what needs to become true before we decide what we should make, build, recommend or change.

This progression matters because every step protects us from a different kind of mistake.

If we stop at the brief, we risk solving the symptom.

If we stop at the observable reality, we risk treating an effect as a cause.

If we identify a cause without understanding its business consequence, we risk solving something that is interesting but not important.

If we jump from the problem directly to a solution, we risk allowing our capabilities to determine the answer before the problem has determined it for us. The discipline is therefore not about making problems more complicated. It is about understanding complexity well enough to make the problem simpler.

The best strategists I know do not make organizations feel that they have discovered ten new problems. They make organizations feel that they have finally understood the one problem that matters.

This is why I believe the real work begins before the pitch.

The presentation is where the thinking becomes visible, but the thinking itself begins much earlier, in the conversations that happen before the presentation exists. It begins in the questions that reveal what has been assumed, the conversations that uncover competing priorities, the evidence that challenges an initial interpretation and the willingness to sit with uncertainty long enough to understand what is actually going on.

The same principle applies to prospecting a new client partner.

Prospecting should not be the exercise of finding a reason to contact someone. It should be the discipline of understanding enough about their world to know whether there is a reason to have a conversation.

It applies to RFPs.

An RFP can tell us what an organization believes it needs to buy, but it may not tell us why the organization needs it, what is preventing success or whether the requested solution is the most effective intervention.

It applies to existing clients.

Account growth should not begin with the question, “What else can we sell them?” It should begin with, “What else is happening in their business that we should understand?”

And it applies to strategy itself.

The objective is not to make the solution more sophisticated.

The objective is to make the thinking more precise.

I have come to believe that this is where meaningful growth begins: not with more activity, more persuasion or more elaborate solutions, but with the ability to understand a problem deeply enough to know what should happen next.

Because organizations do not necessarily need more people to tell them what they already know.

They need people who can help them see what they do not yet see.

That is the real work.

Before we solve the problem, we have to earn the right to define it.

— Sincerely, Boris