FACILITATING
A fresh, objective perspective is often the quickest and surest means toward progress. If you’re like most of us, you will tend to your core business or enterprise first – servicing clients, making the sale, doing whatever you are structured to do in the first place – long before you give much thought or attention to your own interests. Most of us are so deeply engaged in dealing with the myriad of trees that comprise our daily routines that we are thoroughly unable to see the forest.
That’s where an outside set of eyes and ears is most helpful, someone who has no stake in the outcome of your decisions whatsoever, but whose sole motivation is to help you make some meaningful decisions, ones you will implement and can live with; decisions that will enable you to pursue your mission most effectively and efficiently.
Livingston Consulting specializes in enabling such processes. We can facilitate meetings and conferences, internal planning processes, deliberations between potential partners – or potential adversaries. We function as a Professional Neutral, whose role in the process of corporate introspection is most expressly not to pass judgment. It is not to intercede between differing factions, at least not right away. It is simply to:
1. Serve as a conduit for unbiased observations, criticism and feedback; provide a buffer between the messenger and the emperor
2. Help recognize reality; to cut through differing viewpoints to determine consensus or to identify underlying truths
Your consultant shouldn’t care whether you are Robin Hood or robbin’ the ‘hood. He should care only that you recognize where you stand on that particular continuum.
FEATURE WRITING
When was the last time you wrote something for publication? Even copy used in newsletters or websites should be subject to standards similar to those which would be used to evaluate an article that is widely disseminated in consumer media, because, after all, the people who visit your website or read your newsletters are also reading magazines, books and newspapers. And that includes websites and newsletters that are well crafted and engaging.
Are you as appalled as we are when you encounter typos on websites? How about poor syntax or, worse, simply bad writing? Some people overlook such transgressions, of course, but you need to address all your outward-facing communications to the most demanding individual whom you might want to be looking at it, don’t you?
Just because you own a paintbrush doesn’t mean you’re a Picasso. And, let’s face it, just owning a computer doesn’t make you a writer. Let us help.
FOCUS GROUPS
Focus groups are among the purest forms of research. The technology is qualitative rather than the more familiar quantitative and is open-ended. Panelists are encouraged to discuss whatever is on their minds rather than adhere to a script or rigorous questionnaire which is, by necessity, predicated on some pre-conceptions made by those undertaking the research.
A trained moderator, working from a general agenda of topics relevant to the sponsor's mission, guides the panelists into meaningful conversation. Most importantly, after the group session concludes, the moderator prepares an analytical summary report that interprets the significance of the information collected.
Rich Livingston is a veteran of more than 1,000 focus group sessions conducted throughout the U.S. and Canada.