Reframing the Clients’ Expectations in a Manner that is More Beneficial for Them

Prior to SIPA, I worked at the intersection of academic research and strategic planning and management for governments and philanthropies. This meant my work fairly resembled that of public sector consulting, just with an additional component which was heavy on primary research and stronger engagement with academia. Over the course of this role, I had a chance to lead several projects that required me work alongside public policy officials and donors, to solve or respond to development challenges facing India’s low income and marginalized communities. 

In all these projects, we started out with trying to figure out three main things: 

1. What does the client exactly (i.e. public policy officials from specific ministries/ government departments) need support with? 
2. Will the donor be willing to fund this work on behalf of or in conjunction with the client? 
3. What is the mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE) framework that we can use to break down the larger problem into smaller components/ workstreams and find a solid theory of change that is acceptable to both the client and the donor?

Hence, I had experience of scoping projects and managing stakeholder relationships before, but this experience was limited to the public sector. Prof. Flammer’s class gave me the opportunity to apply learnings from my past experience from a different field to the field of sustainable finance. I believe such opportunities are hard to come by, especially for career-changers, and play a pivotal role in enabling us to developing a foundation of starting out in a new industry/ sector. 

Apart from just allowing me to apply existing knowledge and experience, working with our client in scoping the project enabled me to figure out a missing piece of puzzle in the above-mentioned scoping process, that comes before trying to develop a framework to break-down the problem. The missing questions that we should ask ourselves are:

1. Do directly scalable solutions for this problem already exist out there? 
2. What exactly would me the team’s value addition, not just to the client alone, but to the industry at large? 
3. Are we well placed enough to offer something novel? If not, how can we identify a problem, where the team can actually contribute?

This learning translated to our project, where instead of directly starting with developing a framework based on the project TOR, we as a team asked ourselves if these questions have already been answered by someone, somewhere else before. After doing some preliminary readings, we realized that some of the questions in TOR have already been answered by academic researchers before, and that it just hasn’t reached the industry (given the academia-industry gap). As a result of these realization, we ended up proposing two main deliverables to our client:

1. An in-depth and accessible review of academic literature and industry reports that provides a holistic overview of these already-answered questions in the TOR
2. Some primary research on a new question that still fit within the realm of what the client would be interested in

I learnt that consulting does not always involve doing exactly that the client expects. Sometimes, it involves helping them to reframe their expectations in a manner that would be more beneficial for them and in the process develop something novel.