The Diagnostic Hierarchy

Almost every engagement begins with a request at level eight: a website, a campaign, a social media presence, a rebrand. The request is genuine and the frustration behind it is real. It is also, in the majority of cases, a description of where the pain is felt rather than where it originates.

This matters commercially rather than philosophically. An organisation that buys a website to solve a positioning problem has not bought a website. It has bought a delay, at full price, with the original problem intact and the budget spent.

The hierarchy runs from leadership and decision making at level one to measurement at level nine. The order is not a ranking of importance. It is a causal ordering: each level constrains the ones beneath it.

A fixed order has a second benefit. Because every consultant works the same list in the same sequence, findings from one engagement are comparable with findings from another, and an annual re-diagnostic can show movement rather than a change of opinion.

Working down the list before quoting is commercially uncomfortable. It lengthens the sales cycle, it sometimes ends in a smaller engagement than the client arrived expecting, and occasionally it ends the conversation entirely because the honest answer is that the problem is not one a communications firm should be paid to solve.

That cost is the point. A firm that never disqualifies a brief is not diagnosing. It is quoting.

The hierarchy is usable without a consultant. Take the request currently on your desk, then ask the level one and level two questions about it honestly. If the strategy cannot be described the same way by three people in your leadership team, the channel work will not fix it, and the money spent proving that is expensive tuition.