Never Assume
I thought I had something useful so I offered a workforce development team some pro bono work — I needed to pressure-test some tools and ideas to empower learners in navigating the opportunity market.
Instead, their leader said something refreshingly honest:
“I'm not sure which program we'd even pick. We're still figuring out what we're offering and why."
That wasn't a rejection. It was clarity.
The team was navigating new leadership with big goals and staffing changes. Commitment wasn't a problem; clarity was. My idea assumed they already had a defined set of programs and a shared way to decide where to focus. (Yes, dad, I was reminded what they say about assuming.)
The conversation shifted - instead of pro bono I got paid. Instead of market-facing, I focused on internal strategy. We started with a more foundational question: how do you objectively decide what offerings will help you reach your goals? So we scoped a project to build an evaluation framework. I could have built a scorecard, handed it over, and called it done. But a scorecard without shared ownership is just a spreadsheet with good intentions — eventually, a forgotten Sharepoint folder covered in digital cobwebs.
We co-created more than a measurement method. I enabled the team using it. Program coordinators became co-owners of the process, not just recipients of a report — working through what success and failure could mean for different programs, and what a process to make decisions with solid support should look like.
The best starting point isn't always the idea you arrived with. Sometimes the most useful thing is to listen long enough to hear the real question underneath the first one. For this team, that question wasn't "how do we create career success for learners?" It was "how do we decide which programs are worth investing in?"
Answering that meant building a framework — and something more durable: a shared language and enough confidence to keep the process running after the project was complete. Stay tuned for an unpacking of that, I think it’s a relevant process for anyone faced with strategic decisions.
Next: what does "objective" actually mean when evaluating something this sprawling? Workforce data has a real knack for looking official while dodging the question you asked.