How we run a Find workshop

Every PLAYBOOK project starts with Find: the first step of our method, where we discover what matters before anyone designs anything. The heart of Find is a three-hour workshop with the people who know the business best. Here's how we run it, and why it works.

Before the room

The workshop is never the first thing we do. In the week before, we read everything we can: the website, sales decks, reviews, competitor sites, recent press, and the brief itself. We speak to a handful of customers if we can. We arrive with a wall's worth of material already printed.

We also ask for the right people. That usually means the founder or MD, someone who sells, someone who delivers, and someone who joined recently. The newest person often sees the business most clearly.

The three hours

Time	Session	What happens
0:00 – 0:30	The wall	We pin up what we found: customer quotes, competitor headlines, the client's own words. Everyone walks the wall and marks what surprises them.
0:30 – 1:15	Truths	Each person writes what they believe is true about the business, the customer and the market. One idea per note. We cluster them.
1:15 – 1:30	Break	Coffee, and the first chance to see the clusters from a distance.
1:30 – 2:15	Tensions	We look for where the notes disagree. What leadership believes versus what customers say. What the business does versus what the website claims.
2:15 – 2:45	The question	We ask: what does the customer actually believe about you, and what do they need to believe instead?
2:45 – 3:00	The close	We agree the three things that matter most, and the one question we still can't answer.

Why tensions matter most

Agreement is comfortable and rarely useful. The interesting material is in the gaps. When the founder says "we're premium" and three customer reviews say "good value", that's not a contradiction to smooth over. It's the brief.

We spend the longest on tensions because that's where the real problem usually lives. Most of the strategic ideas we've ever had started as an argument on a wall.

The question nobody asked

Almost every workshop surfaces a question that wasn't in the brief. Why do customers who find us through referrals stay twice as long? Why does nobody internally describe what we do the same way? Who are we actually competing with?

That question often becomes the most valuable part of the project. We write it down, give it a name, and make it the starting point for Shape.

What you get

Within a week of the workshop, you receive a short Find summary: what we heard, what we saw, the tensions, and the three things that matter. It's usually under ten pages, and it's written to be read, not filed.