Research filed against your objectives, not against our methods.
Everyone can tell you where you are. Nobody can tell you what to do first, because nobody wrote down where you said you were going. This starts where you start, and ends back there.
The catalog asks you to diagnose yourself.
A real question — should we reposition, where is the growth, what do we stop spending on — does not map to one method. The catalog chops it into four purchases, bought separately, delivered months apart, often by different vendors. Nobody reassembles them, so you become the integrator, holding four decks that do not speak to each other.
Nobody would accept that from a doctor.
84% report high strategic dysfunction — confusion arising from objectives that are unclear, too numerous, or in conflict with each other. 94% say translating enterprise directives into marketing plans is a challenge.
Organisations high in that dysfunction are 36% less likely to report strong business and marketing performance.
How it runs
Every brief opens with the objective it serves. Every finding is filed against the objective it bears on. Those are the only two rules, and together they produce one thing.
What you get is a grid: your objectives down the side, everything you have ever commissioned across the top, and every cell marked supports, contradicts, or nothing yet.
An objective with nothing behind it is a plan nobody has checked.
The empty rows are next year’s research agenda, and they arrive without anyone having to argue for them.
Most organisations cannot build that grid today. Not because their research is bad — it is usually good, and expensive. Because nobody ever filed it against what the business said it was trying to do.
And the contradicts cell is the one most organisations quietly drop. It is usually the most valuable thing on the page.
Why the one-bucket question fails
Organisations ask which single core objective an initiative maps to. It is a reasonable-sounding question and it destroys information, because real objectives overlap — and the initiatives that serve several at once are the strongest ones you have. One-bucket mapping hides exactly those.
Map each initiative to every objective it serves, weighted, and lead with the biggest. You lose nothing by doing it, and the weighting is the part that tells you where to spend.
Barbara Minto, who coined MECE, applied it to organising groups of ideas. It organises the argument. It does not organise the market.
Why the plan rarely arrives where the work happens
This is not a new observation, and it is not a complaint about anyone’s competence. It is a structural property of how plans travel, and it is measurable.
One in five US employees strongly trust their organisation’s leadership.
Sull and Homkes set out the mechanism in Harvard Business Review in 2015, surveying senior managers on whether they could name their own firm’s top priorities. The more recent work has not overturned it.
Every figure on this site carries its source so that you can go and check it. Where we have not established something, the evidence page says so plainly.
Bring the objective nobody has checked.
Tell us what the business said it was trying to do. The first conversation runs on public information only, so there is nothing to arrange on your side.