A psychological approach to anything you have to face: a goal, a project, a presentation, a relationship.
THE APPROACH
Just like natural evolution, our approach moves in phases, circling back to fuel growth.
1. Know what you're dealing with.
What's the actual goal, what's in the way, and what have you already got. From scratch every time, because the last situation isn't this one.
2. Cross to their side.
What do they need in order to receive this? Everyone talks about empathy. Almost nobody mentions that it needs a direction, and phase one is what tells you where to point it.
3. Explore.
Play with it, try angles, follow the thing that seems irrelevant. The first idea is rarely the one, and this part happens with you rather than at you.
4. Build.
Now you build it. Strategy, structure, refinement, all of it, with somewhere to go, because the thinking that usually gets skipped has already happened.
5. Find out.
How did it actually go? What people did with it, what they responded to, what they ignored. And what you noticed in yourself: where you hesitated, what made you steadier, what you'd do differently. That's the part that carries forward.
Why the order matters.
Most approaches run goal, strategy, build. The audience shows up somewhere near the end, if at all, usually as a question about tone.
Putting them at phase two changes everything downstream. The strategy gets derived from what they need rather than from what you want to say. So does the structure. So does every choice about what to include.
It's also why this works for a product launch, a difficult conversation, an article, or a keynote. None of those are presentation problems. They're all the same problem: something has to travel from you to someone else, intact.
What you’re actually left with.
Phase five closes the loop on the person, not the project.
Circumstances change, and so do the people, the industry, and the decade you're working in. What carries forward is a sharper read on what you're dealing with and a better instinct for where to aim. Do that enough times, and you stop needing anyone to help you do it.
That's the goal. Individuals who keep evolving, leaders who keep growing, teams that can do this without us.
And it applies here too. Every project we take on runs through the same five phases. It isn't a sales framework. It's how we move through things.
Where the thinking comes from.
Everyone in this field has read the same foundational books. That’s great. It also means that list isn’t a differentiator.
Underneath that is a lifetime of observing how people build meaning, how language develops, and how much culture is buried in words, attitudes, and even personalities. It's understanding what happens to an idea when it moves from one mind to another, and how much of it survives the trip.
The observation came first. The study came after, to explain what I'd been watching.
That's why I say people are meaning-making machines and mean something specific by it. I've watched the machinery run.
EXPERIENCE MATTERS
Built in the real world.
25+ years across industries, disciplines, cultures and countries.
Fashion design, and eighteen years of what sits behind getting a product to market. Culinary arts, and the food and hospitality industries. Design and production, from graphic and packaging to garment. Digital: web development, UX, and marketing built on customer journeys and buyer psychology. Language: translation and copywriting. Music. International business across Europe, Asia and the Americas, including work with consulates.
The list is longer than this, and the length isn't the point.
The point is phase one. Every industry has its own preoccupations, its own way of facing the world, its own idea of what counts as a good argument. Knowing what you're dealing with is much faster when you've been in the building before.
Give me the goal. We'll find the way there.
IN PRACTICE
What that looks like.
Years ago, I ran an Effective Communication workshop for ELITech. Partway through, it became clear that what they most needed help with wasn't in the brief at all: the instructional videos they made showing how their machinery worked. We watched one, said what wasn't working and why, and went through how to hold someone's attention for the length of it. A year later, they told us they'd applied it to every video since.
That's phase one doing its job. The brief said one thing. The room said another.
Who's involved.
One word, doing a lot of work.
You, the person. You, the person in front of you. You, the collective: the team, the room, the organization, society... Every one of them is where the work starts, and none of them can be understood without the others.
Tell me your goals. Let’s see what we can build.