Designing for what matters: Creating processes that support meaningful facilitation

A department head I had been working with for several months contacted me in early autumn. Her team of thirty was facing a significant structural change: two functions were being merged, reporting lines were shifting and the work itself was being redesigned. She asked for a full-day workshop to explore future ways of working. The brief was clear, the date was set and the number of participants confirmed.

When I met with her and two colleagues to prepare the design, I began where I usually begin: not with the agenda but with what was happening. Within twenty minutes a very different picture emerged. The team was carrying six months of uncertainty following an earlier consultation process that had produced little visible change. Several people had been promised conversations that had not happened. Trust in the leadership’s intentions was fragile. And the most senior figure who needed to be in the room for any real commitment to be made had not confirmed attendance.

The one-day workshop that had been requested was designed for a team ready to imagine and commit. The team in front of me needed something different first: a chance to name what had happened, to feel heard about what the change meant for them, and to understand what authority they genuinely had in shaping the future. If I had built the design around the stated request without surfacing this, we would have spent a day generating ideas and outputs that no one believed in and that would not have survived the return to the organisation.

We rebuilt the design together. We replaced the single workshop with a two-session sequence. The first session was explicitly about listening: hearing what the team was carrying, naming what had and had not been resolved, and clarifying what the restructure actually meant for each person’s role. The second session, held three weeks later, moved into imagining the future from a foundation that now felt honest. The outputs of the second session had a quality and an ownership that the original single workshop could never have produced.

That experience sits at the heart of what IAF Core Competency A2, Design and Customise Applications to Meet Client Needs, is actually asking of facilitators. It is not asking us to be skilled at designing agendas. It is asking us to be skilled at understanding what a group genuinely needs and creating a process that serves that need rather than the one initially described. Design is not a technical exercise. It is an act of disciplined inquiry into what will best serve the purpose and the people in front of us.

The four strands of effective design

In practice, this competency rests on four reinforcing strands:

• Analysing the organisational environment
• Diagnosing the client need
• Creating appropriate designs to achieve intended outcomes
• Predefining a quality product and outcomes with the client

These are not steps to be completed in sequence. They are threads woven through the engagement from the first conversation to the closing debrief. Each depends on the others: understanding the organisational environment without diagnosing the real need offers context but little direction; diagnosing the need without a thoughtful design creates clarity that never finds expression; a well-crafted design not anchored in shared outcomes risks producing activity without meaning; and clear outcomes without an understanding of the organisational reality may look compelling on paper but fail to land with the people who must bring them to life.

Analysing the organisational environment

Every facilitation design is shaped by the climate it enters. Culture, power, history, current pressures and the quality of relationships between key people all determine what the design must hold and what it is likely to encounter. A structure that supports honest dialogue in one setting may feel unsafe or infantilising in another. Understanding the environment is not about diagnosing faults. It is about recognising what the design must be capable of carrying before it is asked to carry it.

Diagnosing the client need

Requests arrive in the language of tasks. Needs live beneath them. A client may ask for a workshop, but the real need may be alignment, renewed trust, a shared decision that has been postponed, or a conversation that has not yet been safe enough to have. This strand involves exploring what the client hopes will be genuinely different afterwards and what conditions are required for that shift to occur. Naming these early prevents designing for the wrong problem. When this conversation happens with real openness, the design becomes anchored in purpose rather than preference.

Creating appropriate designs to achieve intended outcomes

This strand turns purpose into experience. A design is not a collection of techniques; it is a sequence of moments chosen to help people think well together. It involves decisions about pacing, group size, the structure of conversations, and the questions that will guide reflection. Good design feels as though it belongs to the group even before they walk into the room. It is less about creativity and more about fit: fit with the purpose, the people and the organisational environment.

Predefining a quality product and outcomes with the client

Here the focus turns to shared clarity. Facilitator and client agree on what the work will produce and what success will look like. Sometimes the outcome is tangible: a plan, themes, a set of principles, a decision. Sometimes it is relational: renewed confidence, clearer expectations, a sense of shared ownership that was not there before. When both sides hold the same picture of done, the work feels aligned and progress becomes visible. Without this clarity, even thoughtful designs can leave clients uncertain about what has actually been achieved.

Reflections on analysing the organisational environment

The organisational environment is among the most important and most frequently underestimated influences on facilitation design. Facilitators sometimes approach design as if it were primarily a technical question: which activities, in which sequence, for how long. But the activities that produce insight and movement in one organisation can produce defensiveness, confusion or flatness in another, not because the methods were wrong but because the environment was not understood well enough to design for it.

Culture is the most pervasive environmental factor, and it operates at multiple levels simultaneously. Charles Handy’s framework of four cultural types, developed through research on organisational life and popularised in Understanding Organisations, offers one of the most practically useful lenses for reading organisational culture from a facilitation perspective. The four types are not prescriptions or judgements. They are patterns that shape how authority moves, how people relate to each other, and what feels safe or unsafe to say in a group setting.

In a power culture, influence is concentrated in a small number of individuals and decisions flow from that centre quickly. Groups in this environment often look to a senior figure before committing to anything. Facilitation design here needs to create conditions for quieter voices to surface without undermining the authority structures people rely on, and it needs the explicit endorsement of those with authority if honest contribution is to feel safe. In a role culture, structure and predictability are highly valued. People know their responsibilities and appreciate clear process. Design for this environment benefits from explicit instruction, steady pacing, and a clear rationale for each phase of the work. In a task culture, teams form around problems and dissolve when work is done. Flexibility and expertise are central, and groups tend to respond well to creative challenge and co-creation. In a person culture, individual autonomy is paramount and influence derives from knowledge rather than hierarchy. Facilitation here benefits from designs that respect independence while creating enough shared purpose for collective action to feel worthwhile.

Beyond Handy’s cultural types, the specific history of a group matters enormously. A team that has been through a difficult change process, a restructure that was promised as collaborative and experienced as directive, or a series of strategy sessions that produced no visible change, carries that history into every new facilitation. The design must be capable of holding that history honestly, not pretending it did not happen and not allowing it to dominate the present either. Understanding what has gone before is as important as understanding what the group is being asked to do next.

Power dynamics within the group also require specific attention. Research on group dynamics, including work by Henri Tajfel and John Turner on social identity theory, shows consistently that people’s willingness to contribute honestly in a group is shaped significantly by their sense of how their identity and status are positioned relative to others in the room. A junior member in a room full of senior people will self-censor even when the facilitator explicitly invites contribution, unless the design actively creates conditions that reduce the social cost of speaking. Hierarchy suppresses participation not through overt threat but through the invisible calculation of interpersonal risk that every participant makes continuously throughout a session.

Reading the organisational environment well requires conversations, not just observation. Pre-session interviews or informal conversations with a range of participants, not only the sponsor, give access to the lived experience of the organisation that a brief will never capture. They also build the relational groundwork that helps participants feel the facilitator understands their context before the session begins, which is itself a contribution to trust and safety.

Seven practices that help me analyse the organisational environment

1. I have pre-session conversations with more than one person. The sponsor’s view of the organisation is always partial. Conversations with people at different levels and in different functions give me a more accurate and more honest picture of what the design must hold.
2. I ask about history, not only about the current request. What has this group tried before? What produced movement and what did not? What has been promised and not delivered? History shapes what the design must navigate before it can do anything else.
3. I read the cultural type before I choose a method. I ask myself which of Handy’s patterns seems most present and what that means for pacing, structure, the use of small groups, and the role of authority in the room. I use this as a lens for design choices rather than a fixed diagnosis.
4. I pay attention to what people do not say as well as what they do. In pre-session conversations, hesitation, qualification and topic avoidance are data. They tell me where the sensitive ground is and what the design will need to create conditions for approaching.
5. I assess the power distribution in the room before I design for it. Who will be present, what their positional relationships are, and what effect those relationships might have on participation all shape choices about small group composition, anonymity, rounds and other structural tools for distributing voice.
6. I check my assumptions about the environment explicitly. Before finalising a design, I share my reading of the situation with the client and invite correction. My analysis is always partial, and the client’s correction of it is as valuable as the original analysis.
7. I factor in emotional readiness as a design constraint. If the group is carrying significant strain, grief, frustration or uncertainty, the design needs to create space for that before it asks people to generate, decide or commit. Emotional readiness is as real a design factor as time or logistics.

Reflections on diagnosing the client need

The presenting problem is the version of an issue that feels acceptable to name and practical to address. It is what clients put in the brief: a request for better communication, a session to clarify priorities, a workshop to strengthen collaboration. These requests are genuine. But they are almost always only the visible surface of a larger landscape.

Beneath the presenting problem sits the underlying need: the part people feel but may not yet be ready to express. It may involve unspoken tensions between leaders, decisions that have been postponed because they are politically costly, expectations that have quietly drifted apart, or a change that has unsettled relationships in ways that have not been acknowledged. The presenting problem describes what is happening. The underlying need explains why it matters and what would actually need to shift for things to be different. Until both are understood, design remains at risk of addressing the symptoms rather than the work itself.

Chris Argyris’s distinction between espoused theory and theory-in-use is relevant here. Argyris observed that individuals and organisations consistently describe their values and intentions in ways that diverge significantly from their actual behaviour. When clients describe a workshop they want, they are typically describing their espoused theory of the situation: what they believe should be addressed, what they would like to be true about the readiness of the group, what kind of outcome would be publicly presentable. The theory-in-use, the actual dynamics driving behaviour, is usually more complex and often more uncomfortable. Diagnosis involves finding a way into that gap with enough safety that both client and facilitator can see it honestly.

This does not require probing or analysis. It requires curiosity, spaciousness and questions that invite reflection rather than justification. Asking what prompted the request at this particular moment, what has made the issue more difficult or urgent recently, or what would feel genuinely different if the work were successful often brings the deeper context into view without the client feeling interrogated. The facilitator’s stance in these conversations is important: not a clinician diagnosing pathology but a thinking partner exploring terrain.

The distinction between wants and needs, developed by Peter Block in the contracting framework of Flawless Consulting, is directly applicable to this diagnostic process. Wants are the outputs: a plan, a decision, a set of priorities. Needs are the conditions that would make those outputs meaningful: honest conversation that has not yet happened, clarity about authority that has been left ambiguous, trust that has been damaged and not repaired. When the facilitation design is built on the wants without the needs being surfaced, it can produce impressive outputs that the organisation is not ready to use.

Seven practices that help me diagnose the client need

1. I treat the initial request as a starting point, not the brief. I explore what prompted the request now, what has changed recently, and what makes this the moment the client is choosing to act. The timing of a request usually reveals more than its content.
2. I ask what would feel genuinely different if the work were successful. This question moves clients from describing the activity they want to describing the shift they are hoping for, which is where the real design brief lives.
3. I listen for what people hesitate to say. The pause before an answer, the subject that is approached and then redirected, the concern that is described as “probably not relevant” are often the most important data in the conversation.
4. I distinguish presenting problem from underlying need explicitly with the client. Once I have a sense of both, I name the distinction and check my reading. “It sounds like the stated need is X, but I am also hearing something about Y. Does that feel accurate?” This builds shared understanding and tests whether the client is ready to design for the real need.
5. I ask who is not in the room and what that means. The absence of a particular person, function or perspective from the conversation is always significant. Understanding why certain voices are not present helps me understand what the design is working within and what it might be working around.
6. I resist the temptation to design before I understand. The urge to begin designing is strong, particularly when the client is time-pressured. I hold this urge and stay in inquiry until I feel confident that I am designing for the real situation rather than the presented one.
7. I share my diagnosis and invite correction before I build the design. The diagnostic reading I bring is always partial and always interpretive. Sharing it with the client and asking whether it feels accurate both tests the analysis and deepens the partnership.

Reflections on creating appropriate designs to achieve intended outcomes

Once the environment is understood and the real need is clear, design becomes the act of creating a sequence of experiences that helps people think well together and move from their current position toward the intended outcome. This is where the craft of facilitation becomes most visible, and also where the temptation to default to familiar methods is strongest.

The literature on learning and experience, particularly the work of John Dewey, who argued that experience alone does not produce learning but that reflection on experience does, provides a useful frame for thinking about what facilitation design is actually trying to create. A well-designed facilitation sequence is not a series of activities. It is a series of structured experiences, each of which creates the conditions for the next, building toward a quality of understanding or commitment that would not have been reachable by any shorter route. This is why the sequence matters as much as the individual activities within it, and why designing from a template, however well-tested, is always a less accurate response than designing from a diagnosis.

Five categories of intervention offer a practical organising framework for design decisions. Framing interventions establish why the group is together and what they are working toward, creating the shared orientation from which everything else can proceed. Design interventions shape the structure of the work: the rhythm of the session, the movement between large and small groups, the balance between reflection and action. Process interventions respond to what is actually happening in the room as the work unfolds: the moment when a difficult dynamic needs to be named, the point when a quieter voice needs to be drawn in, the shift when the group’s energy calls for a different approach. Meaning-making interventions help the group integrate what it is discovering: inviting participants to name patterns, surface connections and articulate what they are understanding differently. Decision and commitment interventions help the group move from understanding to action: clarifying what they are willing to commit to, naming what requires further conversation, and distinguishing decisions that can be made in the room from those that need to travel further.

Good design uses all five categories, though not equally in every session. The art lies in knowing which type of intervention the group needs at each moment of the work, and sequencing them so that each stage creates the conditions for the next. A group that is asked to commit before it has made meaning of what it has heard will produce fragile commitments. A group that is invited into meaning-making before the facts are shared will produce interpretations built on incomplete ground. The sequence is the design.

The cross-departmental leadership group I worked with illustrates this in practice. Their stated request was for a planning workshop, but early conversations revealed fatigue, frustration and a history of decisions that had not held. The design needed to hold all of this. We began with a framing intervention that named the purpose honestly: not to produce a plan, but to surface the pressures that were shaping priorities and to find the two or three commitments the group could genuinely sustain. Design interventions created a rhythm that respected the group’s depleted energy: short reflective rounds in small groups before any plenary, longer pauses than usual, no expectation of outputs before understanding had formed. Process interventions responded to what surfaced: at one point two participants began relitigating a past decision and the energy in the room changed visibly. I paused the discussion and asked the group what they needed in order to continue, which opened a brief but honest recalibration that the rest of the session depended on. Meaning-making interventions helped the group see the patterns across their small-group conversations and name what was driving their difficulty. And decision and commitment interventions at the close produced three specific priorities and one personal commitment from each member, modest enough to be real and specific enough to be tracked.

Seven practices that help me create appropriate designs

1. I let purpose guide every structural choice. When a design decision feels complicated, I return to the purpose and ask what the group needs to experience or understand in order to reach the intended outcome. Purpose simplifies. It cuts through the temptation to add activities out of habit or anxiety.
2. I design for the people rather than the agenda. Before finalising any structure, I consider the energy, history and relational dynamics of the specific group. A design that fits the people will support them. One that ignores them will ask them to move in ways that do not feel natural or safe.
3. I sequence interventions to build on each other. I ask whether each phase of the design creates the conditions that the next phase requires. A commitment phase that arrives before understanding has formed will produce outputs the group does not own. I work backward from the intended outcome to design the sequence that can reach it honestly.
4. I build in moments of slowing down. Reflection is the first thing compressed when time feels tight, yet it is where understanding forms and where fragile ideas become robust ones. I protect time for it deliberately rather than treating it as optional.
5. I use small groups generously and intentionally. People speak more freely in smaller settings, and small groups distribute ownership and surface quieter voices before the plenary can be dominated by the most vocal. I treat small group work as a structural tool for equity as much as for exploration.
6. I avoid adding complexity that the design does not need. Facilitators sometimes reach for elaborate techniques when a well-placed question would do more. I hold the design to a standard of necessary sufficiency: the minimum structure that will actually produce the intended quality of thinking and outcome.
7. I hold the design lightly on the day. No design survives contact with the room exactly as written. Groups have their own pace, questions and responses. I stay faithful to the purpose while responding to what the group is showing me, treating real-time adjustment as part of the craft rather than a departure from the plan.

Reflections on predefining a quality product and outcomes with the client

The conversation about what the work will produce is one of the most consequential conversations in any facilitation engagement, and one of the most frequently abbreviated. Clients often describe the output in terms of the process, “we need a workshop”, rather than in terms of the actual result, “we need a decision that the whole leadership team genuinely stands behind.” Facilitators sometimes accept this framing without exploration, either because the client seems clear or because pushing for more precision feels like slowing down the progress toward design.

The cost of this abbreviation is rarely visible at the contracting stage. It becomes visible at the moment of delivery, when the facilitator and client realise they have been measuring success by different standards. Research in service quality, including the foundational work of Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry on service gaps, identifies the gap between expected and delivered service as the primary driver of client dissatisfaction regardless of the objective quality of what was provided. In facilitation, this gap almost always traces back to an insufficiently shared picture of what the work was for and what a good outcome would look like.

Predefining a quality product is not about producing a rigid specification. It is about creating a shared and testable account of what success will look and feel like. Sometimes the outcome is tangible: a prioritised set of strategic options, a decision recorded with clear rationale, a set of agreed principles that will guide future choices. Sometimes it is relational: a team that has spoken honestly about a difficulty and knows how to continue that conversation, a group that has renewed its sense of shared purpose, an organisation that has moved from private frustration to public acknowledgement of a challenge. Both are legitimate outcomes. What matters is that both facilitator and client can describe the same outcome in their own words, without prompting, before the design work begins in earnest.

This conversation also clarifies what a successful design will need to produce at each stage of the work, not only at its close. If the outcome of a two-day strategy process is a set of agreed priorities with senior ownership, the design needs to create the conditions for that ownership to develop during the process, not simply to be announced at the end. Working backward from the quality outcome to the design decisions that will make it possible is one of the most useful design disciplines available.

Seven practices that help me predefine quality products and outcomes

1. I ask the client to describe success in concrete terms before I begin designing. What will they be able to say happened? What will participants walk away with? What will have changed in the organisation in three months’ time that would not have changed without this work? Concrete language surfaces assumptions that abstract language conceals.
2. I test whether both parties are describing the same outcome. If the client and I can each describe the intended outcome without prompting and our descriptions match, we have genuine shared clarity. If they diverge, the conversation needs to continue before design begins.
3. I distinguish tangible from relational outcomes and design for both. A document produced at the end of a session is not the same as ownership of the thinking that produced it. I name both dimensions and check that the design creates conditions for the relational outcome, not only the tangible one.
4. I work backward from the outcome to the design. Once I know what a quality outcome looks and feels like, I ask what the group will need to have experienced, understood and committed to in order to reach it. This backward mapping is how I identify the sequence of interventions the design requires.
5. I name what is not in scope. Clarity about what the work will not produce is as important as clarity about what it will. This prevents the scope from expanding in ways neither party intended and helps the client manage expectations with their own stakeholders.
6. I revisit the quality outcome during the engagement, not only at the close. When circumstances shift, I return to the agreed outcome and check with the client whether it still holds and whether the current design is still capable of reaching it. Quiet adjustments made mid-engagement are less costly than discoveries made at the debrief.
7. I connect the outcome to consequences beyond the room. An outcome that will not survive the return to the organisation is not a quality product. I ask explicitly how the outputs will be used, who needs to receive them and what support the client will need to implement what the group has agreed.

The payoff

When design is grounded in genuine understanding of the environment, honest diagnosis of the real need, purposeful creation of the process and shared clarity about what success looks like, the facilitation that follows has access to something no amount of in-session skill can substitute for: a structure that fits the people and the situation it is designed to serve.

Participants sense this fit even when they cannot name it. The session feels purposeful rather than procedural. The conversations reach the questions that actually matter rather than staying at the level of what is comfortable to address. The outputs feel owned because the process that produced them honoured the thinking of the people in the room. And the commitments made at the close are more likely to survive the return to the organisation because they were reached honestly rather than performed under the pressure of a well-designed but misaligned process.

The lasting payoff is the capability that develops in the client relationship. A client who has experienced a design process that genuinely listened to their situation, that adjusted when the diagnosis deepened, and that produced an outcome they could honestly stand behind, learns what good facilitation partnership can make possible. They bring that understanding into future commissions and into how they lead their own teams. The design becomes not only a foundation for a single session but a model for the kind of thinking-together that the facilitation was designed to make more possible in the organisation.

Frequently asked questions about IAF Core Competency A2: Design and customise applications to meet client needs

What is the core purpose of design and customise applications?
A2 is about turning an honest understanding of the client’s situation into a process that actually serves it. It involves reading the organisational environment carefully, exploring what sits beneath the presenting problem, creating a design that fits the purpose and the people, and agreeing with the client on what a quality outcome looks like before the work begins. At its heart, A2 is an act of disciplined inquiry followed by purposeful craft. It is less about tools and more about judgement, attention and the quality of partnership that makes honest design possible.

How do I know if I am designing for the real need rather than the stated one?
Listen for what prompts the request at this particular moment, what has made the issue urgent now, and what would feel genuinely different if the work were successful. Real needs tend to sound like shifts: greater clarity, renewed trust, shared direction, honesty about a difficulty that has not yet been named. When both you and the client can describe what will be different after the work in concrete terms, and when those descriptions match, you are designing for something real. When the description stays at the level of the activity requested, the diagnosis is not yet complete.

What makes a design fit an organisation’s culture?
A design fits the culture when people feel able to participate without working against their own norms. In a power culture, explicit endorsement from senior figures and careful protection of quieter voices matters more. In a role culture, clear structure and a rationale for each phase matters more. In a task culture, creative challenge and movement matters more. In a person culture, genuine invitation and time for individual reflection matters more. Fit does not mean reinforcing limiting patterns. It means understanding the culture well enough to design a process that people can enter honestly rather than one that triggers defensiveness before the work has begun.

How much structure should a design include?
The right amount of structure is the least that the group needs to think and work well together. Too much structure makes the session feel controlled and removes the group’s sense of agency. Too little leaves participants uncertain how to contribute and prone to the patterns of interaction they default to in unstructured settings. The starting point is the group’s history, energy and confidence level. Groups carrying strain or uncertainty usually benefit from more structure, which offers reassurance. Groups with high energy and experience often benefit from lighter structure, which gives them room to move.

What is the most common design error facilitators make?
Designing for the presenting problem rather than the underlying need, and moving into design before the diagnosis is complete. The urge to begin designing is strong, particularly when the client is time-pressured and the brief seems clear. But a design built on an incomplete understanding of what is actually happening in the organisation will consistently produce work that is technically accomplished and practically limited. The investment in genuine diagnosis almost always produces a better outcome than the time saved by skipping it.

How should I adapt the design when conditions change during an engagement?
Return first to the agreed purpose and quality outcome. Check whether these still hold. If they do, the design can be adjusted while the direction remains steady. If the purpose itself has shifted, that is a conversation to have explicitly with the client before proceeding. Adaptation is most straightforward when the design is built around intention rather than activities, because a clear purpose usually has more than one route toward it. When conditions change, the question is not how to preserve the original plan but how to reach the intended outcome from the new position.

What are the five categories of intervention in facilitation design?
Framing interventions establish why the group is together and what they are working toward. Design interventions shape the structure and rhythm of the work. Process interventions respond to what is actually happening in the room as the session unfolds. Meaning-making interventions help the group integrate and interpret what it is discovering. Decision and commitment interventions help the group move from understanding to action. Good facilitation design uses all five, sequenced so that each creates the conditions the next requires.

How do I predefine a quality product without being too prescriptive?
Focus on the outcome, not the format. Rather than specifying what the deliverable will look like, explore with the client what participants will be able to do, say or decide as a result of the work. A quality product is defined by its usefulness to the people who will live with it, not by how well it matches a template. The most valuable predefining conversation is the one that allows both facilitator and client to describe success in their own words and discover whether those descriptions match.

How does A2 connect to A1?
A2 depends entirely on the quality of the working partnership established through A1. Without trust, the diagnostic conversations that A2 requires will produce managed rather than honest accounts of the situation. Without mutual commitment, the design process will be shaped by what the client is willing to say in formal settings rather than what they are actually experiencing. The working partnership is the foundation in which honest diagnosis becomes possible, and honest diagnosis is what makes genuine design possible. The two competencies are sequential in the framework and genuinely interdependent in practice.

What is a good resource for deepening design thinking in facilitation?
Sam Kaner’s Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making offers one of the most practical and theoretically grounded accounts of the design principles that underpin effective facilitation. Kaner’s diverge-converge framework, and his detailed attention to the “groan zone” in which groups struggle with the complexity of multiple perspectives before genuine integration becomes possible, provides a conceptual map that is directly applicable to design decisions about sequencing, pacing and the kinds of intervention each phase of a session requires.

What has helped you move from understanding the client’s situation to building a design that genuinely serves it?

How do you create space in the contracting conversation to explore the underlying need when the client is pressing to move quickly to logistics?

What has surprised you about the gap between a presenting problem and the real work that needed to happen?

Thanks for reading!

Explore IAF Core Competency A: Create collaborative client relationships

This article is part of a three-part series on building strong client foundations.

• A1: Develop working partnerships
• A2: Design and customise processes to meet client needs (You are here)
• A3: Manage multi-session events effectively