Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. And today, I hope you're ready to do some detective work,

because I'm going to share why I believe a good discovery process, one that I'll teach you today,

is the key to incredible success at work. Welcome to 2022. What's your take on the New Year,

new me approach to kicking off a new year?

Personally, I'm not really a fan. I was pretty fond of the old me, so I'm more of a new year,

new ideas kind of person. It's admittedly a less compelling bumper sticker, but I think the focus

on renewed creativity over renewed humanity is

the way to go. If you're on the hunt for a fresh take to approaching your work this year,

then I would love to share a beloved secret weapon with you. And that's using a discovery process

to define and drive your best work. Discovery is a key phase in any consulting engagement, and yet I think it's

one of the most underused and undervalued levers you can poll as an organizational insider.

So let's talk today about what discovery is, what makes it so critical, and how you can make it work

for you. What is discovery? Albert Einstein is quoted as saying,

if I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and

five minutes thinking about solutions. In the workplace, we are so enamored of solutions. We love

doing, implementing and delivering. In fact, we love our solutions so much

that we often miss out on the magic that Einstein is pointing to. Having clarity around what

problem we're actually trying to solve enables us to be much better solvers of problems and deliverers

of solutions. The act of getting to this clarity, of spending those

55 minutes of your hour defining the problem, this is what consultants call discovery. It's the

phase of an engagement during which our magic is in asking, listening, and probing. Its goals are

simply alignment and clarity. So what makes discovery so essential?

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