Landscaping: How to Ensure Your Project Has Focus

Landscaping is key for the right focus, and action from your project.

by Colin Buckingham
CEO of Rainmakers and at Senior Director of Rainmakers

So, what exactly is landscaping? Landscaping is the stage of your insights program where you evaluate what you already know. You may hear the term described in different ways by different firms – mapping, scoping, a knowledge squeeze, or an audit, for example. It can also be referred to as a data synthesis – defining a problem by looking at your existing data and working out how they connect together. These are all relevant steps, but we think it is important to take it a stage further and take a wide view. What we mean by this is not only looking at what you know but also identifying what you don’t know and hypothesize where you could go. Here at Rainmakers, we call this step landscaping.

So, after honing your brief, and deciding on your suite of deliverables, you next need to focus on landscaping.

Spend time gathering your information

Casting the net as wide as possible when gathering information is crucial. This proved invaluable to us a few years ago when we were working with a fast-growing division of a client’s business on strategy development. They knew which category would be a good pillar for future growth, but wanted to understand which of their products fit best with it – and what was the potential gain if they did it right. They provided us with their background information which we reviewed and digested before embarking on a research project. When we were about two-thirds through the study, we learnt that the client had actually tested some of the products as part of a previous workstream. Despite the earlier research having a different context, it still gave us valuable insight into what consumers’ preconceptions were when they came to that part of the category. It fundamentally changed our view of priorities and growth potential.