Follow the Money Patterns

Patterns / 2. Diagnosis

Pattern 2.1

Secure the Sponsor

Before starting a diagnosis of how money shapes the organization, find someone with the authority to give it time and attention, and confirm that they want a diagnosis rather than a validation.

Secure the Sponsor
Secure the Sponsor

In This Context

A diagnosis takes a lot of time in meetings and discussions, and much of it is the time of senior people from across the business. Without someone who tells the wider group that the work matters, people send apologies, turn up distracted, or give the official account of how things work. The diagnosis will also probably find things that implicate the people who commissioned it, including the sponsor. A sponsor who wanted confirmation of a view they already held may reject the findings, or bury them.

  • Participants give the analysis only as much time as somebody senior tells them it deserves.
  • Sponsors rarely lie about their goals, but they may not say all of them.
  • Findings that trace back to a sponsor’s own decisions are the hardest ones for that sponsor to hear.

Therefore

Name the sponsor (or sponsors) before anything is scheduled, and ask them to tell the group why the work matters and that it should be done in good faith.

  • Ask the sponsor directly what they want the analysis to achieve.
  • Make clear at the start that the findings may implicate the sponsor’s own role, and agree that this will be treated as a problem to address.
  • Plan to take the report to the sponsor first, and walk them through it rather than just sending it.

Consequently

  • People make time for the workshops and the one-on-ones, and contribute more candidly.
  • Recommendations have somewhere to go when the diagnosis is done.
  • The diagnosis is now tied to one person’s interests. If the findings cut across something they want to be true, they can bury the report, and that is a finding too.

Seen In

Chapter 10, “Secure the Sponsor”. Also: Chapter 10 “Define the Goal” and “Delineate the Boundaries” (a sponsor who wants only validation); the buried report in Chapter 14, sidebar “War Story: The Report That Was Buried” (a sponsor who buried the findings); Chapter 14 “Synthesis and Diagnosis” (take the report to the sponsor first).