This case study is inspired by conversations with enterprise sales leaders and SVPs of Sales across the tech, finance and manufacturing companies.

The Challenge

Over the last number of months as sales cycles have become longer with increased competition and higher market volatility and as a result, there has been a noticeable decrease in the number of sales deals closed.

In those instances, sales leaders needed to deliver on committed deals, not just advance them. What has become evident is that the lift to close deals now requires a different game plan. It is no longer sufficient for sales leaders to assume that a committed champion with a strong product fit will secure multi-year and multi-stakeholder agreements.  In a market shaped by restructuring, constrained resources and AI disruption, the path to a signed deal has become harder to achieve.

From the-field observations revealed that while all the technical groundwork had been laid out and objections answered the deal failed to advance and remained in the forecast column.  There was no obvious blocker and that was the problem. All the stakeholders appeared to be on board, but the deal was still not signed two quarters on.

The Resilience Factor Difference

Embedding with senior operators in the field, it was time to reframe the problem to uncover the solution. There was a need to dig deeper and ask more nuanced questions while thoroughly understanding who were the actual influencers and their motivations.  RF partnered to better understand who actually held the decision? What were they actually solving for? Who had final signing authority and what where their incentives? Were the different stakeholders solving for the same outcome?

Resilience Factor worked from a ‘leverage point’ that most deal strategies ignored. This is the difference between who holds authority on the organizational chart and who carries the risk of the decision in practice. Contextualized conversations later revealed that the named economic buyer was not the constraint.

The blocker was an operations leader, who had inherited a failed implementation and was unwilling to be accountable for a second one. That was the implicit motivation stalling the deal. This particular stakeholder was working behind the scenes to manage the exposure to his function and did not view the deal favourably.

The reframe was not focused on introducing a new incentive. This reframe included a focused conversation with the operations leader. This delivered on a phased approach that featured structured accountability checkpoints that positioned proceeding as the lower risk option and continued delay became the exposure.

This case study is inspired by conversations with UX design managers and product designers across a number of leading and global technology companies.

The Challenge

It cannot be denied that AI initiatives across companies have introduced added layers of complexity to be managed and contextualized. The initial efforts to improve adoption were focused on increased token use. However, with time, it became clear that this approach failed to deliver on the exponential value promised.

It is against this backdrop, that the Head of Design at an early stage tech firm was tasked with leading the efforts to increase product adoption and successful commercialization and in close partnership with their other global teams using the tools of AI as an accelerant. The company had managed to deliver on workable prototypes over the years and needed to build on its success to scale. The stakes were high and the pressure was on to deliver on net new client partnerships.  

An immersive dive into the tools of agentic AI, to gain a competitive advantage revealed that the workflow needed to evolve to become adaptive, cross functional and fast enough to keep up with a market and runway that were not waiting for consensus.

At the time, Design, Engineering and Product were initially aligned around the same roadmap. In practice, the prototype to production gap was not closing, but actually widening.

Over time, it became clear, that there were varying rates of AI adoption and fluency across the different teams. As such, needed handovers between Design and Engineering were stalling and that directly impacted the rate of commercialization.

It also highlighted, that across fast moving tech firms, process, culture and tooling were built for human-only handoffs, not for teams working inside Al-accelerated systems.

The goal was to ship and the org chart implied someone owned that. Six months later, it was still not clear who owned what and product was not getting shipped on time to the clients.

The Resilience Factor Difference  

Embedding with the Lead on the ground, it was time to start cross functional conversations around the how and what of this handoff and what needed to change for that process to become more effective.  This highly contextualized and iterative discovery stage ‘leverage point’ was not a diagnostic from the outside.  It was the Head of Design’s own hands-on time inside the organization’s agent tools.  RF partnered closely with the Lead to socialize and and clarify the commercial objectives while directly linking those to the updated reporting structure.

 She saw firsthand how much of the traditional design-engineering handoff was collapsing, that was the work that used to move sequentially, ownership, by ownership, now happening in parallel, sometimes inside the same tools. It became clear that existing reporting lines were not working.

Design reporting into engineering had been a structure built for sequential work, the work itself was no longer sequential. It became clear that structural change was needed to more accurately reflect the current work reality.

The reframe: the Head of Design realized that agent tools had already collapsed the old boundary between and engineering and that she needed to play differently inside a structure that had not caught up yet. Once leadership saw the same collapse, moving design to run parallel to engineering became the obvious next step.

his case study is inspired by conversations with Directors of Innovation across construction, architecture and design companies.

The Challenge

The construction industry is known for its tried and tested building practices that enable established architecture firms to build trust with clients over time. The business model favours consistency and stability and companies that are able to deliver projects on time and below budget, while keeping quality in focus, are able to take advantage of lucrative margins that build with every new project.

It is also, not a secret that building costs keep rising with the increase in the price of lumber and steel and other raw materials. It is these increases, over time, that are eating away at margins and nudging architecture firms to look for ways to improve profitability and leverage existing client builds.

It is against this backdrop that an architect and Director of Innovation was building out this function to gain a market advantage. The company had set up ‘Shark Tank” like competitions to crowd source innovative ideas from the field. These events occurred at a regular cadence and the winning ideas and their originators were rewarded and acknowledged. However, the compiling of a database of great ideas that were never adopted by the construction teams is limited in its benefit to support commercial outcomes and help deliver a unique differentiating advantage in a crowded space.

The Resilience Factor Difference  

Embedding with Director of Innovation revealed an established organizational structure that favoured a siloed and tested approach that created differentiated lines of reporting between the innovation and construction functions.

The construction team rewarded consistency and leaning into established and tested practices that guaranteed certain quality levels. The Innovation function was solving for the introduction of new tools such as the use of pre-fabrication and lasers to help bring down delivery times. Both teams were being rewarded for different outcomes one for consistency and the other for innovation and the implementation of new ideas to drive commercial outcomes.

 RF worked closely with the Director of Innovation to approach key regional leads with P&L responsibilities to pinpoint their main points of friction and to help identify possible patterns. Additional conversations with key decision makers pointed to pockets of resistance inside the construction teams and their assumption that new tools would undermine the quality of the finished products.

Additional contextualized negotiations. revealed an opportunity for the Director to spend time with the construction teams to run a pilot to better address the realities on the ground. Working with regional directors was the ‘unlock’ needed to create a role and that permanently embedded the innovation function within the construction team. That allowed both teams to create feedback loops that ensured that new innovations could be put into motion to support the commercial objectives of the company while maintaining quality standards.

The reframe: the reframe focused on ensuring that any innovation proposals were not abstracted and would actually be used by the construction teams and without compromising on the quality of work they were used to, while at the same delivering  on budget and ahead of schedule.