Strategic communication

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Synchronizing and aligning efforts: briefing partners

Avoiding mismatching expectations

Briefing your partners is important. You inform them about:

  • The background of your project
  • Your Big Goal and your doable sub goal for the project
  • Your objectives
  • Their assignment: results, tasks, responsibilities and timing
  • The working rules and conditions: how are tasks of partners coordinated, how do partners report progress & results

You also brief in the Designing phase. Briefings are not only for partners but also for consultants and agencies hired to work on assignments: all people who play a role in preparing and executing your project.

Your briefing makes or breaks your project

Bad briefing

When your briefing is bad, your partners will have different views on the desired results and tasks. They will not work in harmony; their tasks will not strengthen each other.

Improvised solutions for unexpected problems will not contribute to your sub goal. Instead, your partners will drift apart. They will work in different directions.

Bad briefings often result in failing projects!

Good briefing

When you briefing is good, your partners will understand your project’s mission. They will work in harmony to accomplish it. Presuming you did a good job organizing & planning.

Understanding your project’s mission provides a foundation and flexibility for workarounds. You and your partners need workarounds for unexpected situations. They always occur.

Because you and your partners know where you want to go, you won’t work in different directions -or even worse: opposing directions- when you have to improvise along the way.

OUR CASE OF SIMONA: Exploring the issue and developing solutions in joint effort is the best foundation for a good briefing

Round table to design solutions

Round table to design solutions

Simona first talked and listened in kitchens, offices and the pub. Then she brainstormed about solutions during round tables. So her potential partners provided input for the selection of the sub goal. And they helped creating solutions. Obviously, when Simona briefed them, they understood easily the desired results, tasks and timing. Synchronizing activities of the partners was also easy because they already established working relationships developing the solutions. So a joint effort from start, results in a smooth briefing. The briefing is a natural step in the process. Well done, Simona!

Using Frogleaps’s change strategy model stimulates good briefings

Why does using Frogleaps’s change strategy model help you to produces good briefings?

  • Because Frogleaps encourages you to spent much effort in understanding your goal, the stakeholders & target audiences and the role of communication. This results in valuable input for your briefing.
  • Because when you use our model, you develop the solutions together with your partners during the Understanding phase and Designing phase. So by the time you brief these partners, they will already understand your mission and sub goal. They even helped define it!