March 2023 – James Osborn

Know your Audience

Great British Menu is a long running TV cookery programme. Chefs compete to impress a group of judges with dishes that will be served at a banquet hosted at the end of the season.

Each year has a theme (Animation and Illustration in 2023), and the chefs need to connect their dishes to the theme.

The judges are the audience in this experience, and the chefs that perform the best as those that have considered the needs of the audience and adapted to them.

Excellent cookery is a baseline requirement. The banquet element plays a big part, the food should be exciting as well as taste great. The theme is also key. Cook a good dish and link it poorly to the theme, and you won’t be well rewarded.

The long running nature of the programme is also interesting. Certain types of dishes do well, others less so. The main course is the focal point, and shared dishes that are big and impressive often do especially well.

However, dishes that are essentially a ‘picnic’ can fare less well, as they can end up being considered a group of things rather than a coherent whole. There are levels to understanding what the audience wants!

A chef can cook the most technically accomplished dish, and lose out to someone who takes more account of the brief and spends the time to understand what the judges have loved in the past and what they might like in the future.

You can bring this back to your own situation. Think about the audience of your work. What can you find out about them? What do they like? What are they less keen on? What gets a safe 7, vs when might you take a risk to get a 10?

Doing the technically best thing out of context often fails. Don’t make that mistake.

Hearing Concerns

Not every decision you make will be universally popular. If you aren’t careful then you might focusing on the people who are onboard, it’s often easiest to spend time with those who liked the outcome.

If you fall prey to this temptation, then you’ll miss out on opportunities to make your decisions better in the future, and you’ll also risk only ever hearing the good stuff. Feels good for a while, but bad news tends to get worse if you ignore it.

Hearing concerns is a key technique to balance this risk. You’ve got a decision made, and you spend some time hearing from the people who didn’t feel like they got a good outcome.

Listen to those concerns. Are they merely repeating the expected outcomes? If so, you might push towards “disagree and commit”. It’s usually better to make a good decision and get moving than it is to never make the perfect choice.

You might choose to add something to your decision. Maybe the concern is linked to a secondary metric or an unintended consequence. In this case you can add some extra measurement, or add a review process to ensure the concerning outcomes are well managed.

Rarely, you might choose to change the decision somewhat. Something significant has been raised, a new stakeholder group identified or there’s a wider change in the environment. If you find it’s not rare, then you need to look at how you are gathering information and recommendations to make decisions. Consult with these new stakeholders earlier, or add sources to the input of your decisions.

No matter the choice you make or the outcome off the back of it, by taking the time to hear the concerns of people who are less onboard, you fix some of risks of just pushing on blindly.

We aren’t endlessly opening the door to revisit the decision, so put your efforts on explaining what is going to happen and why that choice has been made. Make sure to reference the concerns that have been raised, so that you can show they’ve been heard, and outline how they are being addressed.

Decisions are worth nothing without implementation, so hearing from those who are holding concerns can help you be more likely to be successful now, and in the future.