Outcomes, even over deliverables
Clients consistently tell us working with The Moment is different. Different from the large consultancy that hands over an impressive framework without the Human-Centered depth or the implementation muscle to make it real. Different from the boutique design shop that produces beautiful concepts without the organizational change capability to carry them through. The work, they've said, lands differently and stays.
We're proud of that. We're also clearer than ever that our success depends on creating conditions we must insist upon at the start. When clients hire us as deliverable producers rather than outcome partners, our good work doesn't carry as far. Change that should compound instead erodes.
Most transformation work in mission-driven institutions is scoped around deliverables: a strategy, a roadmap, an insights report, a journey map, a framework. While deliverables are easy to specify, price and evaluate, they are a poor proxy for the change the institution actually needs.
The deliverable trap
We've seen many well -intended strategies quietly drain away. The work was competent, the recommendations were sound and the slide deck looked impressive. But the people implementing the change had no hand in its making, and the design didn't survive contact with institutional reality.
This is a contract problem, not a quality-of-work problem. Scoping an engagement to "produce X deliverables by Y date," everything aligns to deliverable production, compressing participation and deferring implementation reality. Creating conditions for lasting change is often treated as someone else's job, usually no one's.
The cost of the deliverable trap is rarely visible at the moment the deliverable lands. It shows up later, when the rollout meets the operational reality the design didn't account for. By then the budget is gone, the timeline is committed, and the institution may have to start the work over.
Outcomes, even over deliverables
The reframe is simple to say and hard to hold: deliverables matter, but outcomes matter more. The shift at the scoping table is from "what will you deliver" to "what change will the people we serve actually see and feel, and what conditions make that change reachable?"
Deliverables don't disappear. A strategy still gets written. A roadmap still gets built. The work still needs evidence, structure, and form. But these become instruments of the outcome rather than ends in themselves. When the question is what change will hold, the deliverables shape themselves around it instead of the other way around.
The math has changed
We've held this orientation for as long as we've existed. What's new is that the economics of holding it have shifted.
For a long time, doing the work this way carried real costs. Participation slowed the design clock, and the analytical work around it (the synthesis, the pattern detection, the translation of many voices into usable form) was substantial. Most consultancies resolved the tension by cutting participation. We often resolved it by investing ahead of what the client had bought, doing what the engagement actually needed even when the contract didn't cover it. We were selective where we could be. We also wanted to win work, and with buyers focused on speed and deliverables we didn't always make the conditions of success clear and part of the contract.
That trade is loosening. AI is collapsing the analytical work that surrounds participation: the secondary research, the cross-source synthesis, the translation of patterns into something a team can actually use. The participation itself stays human. What gets faster is the scaffolding around it.
A recent engagement made the shift concrete. We worked with a Canadian foundation's grantmaking initiative on the operational framework that would let its team scale over threefold over five years. The work required deep best-practices synthesis across more than 20 peer foundations in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: Mellon, McConnell, Hewlett, Nesta, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and others. In a previous era, that synthesis would have meant weeks of manual research or the cost of hiring multiple subject matter experts across grantmaking, governance, evaluation, and strategy. Either path would have forced a trade-off: less participation with the staff, advisory council, and grantees who had to live the new model, or a longer engagement than most clients could sustain.
AI changed the trade. The analytical layer moved at a fraction of the time it once required. The participatory layer didn't. We still ran 11 ecosystem partner interviews, the three strategy workshops, and the eight operational stakeholder interviews. My colleague Christine Martin authored the operational playbook, translating cross-foundation patterns into contextually specific tools the growing team would actually use. The interviews stayed human. The synthesis around them got faster.
The result was the one that matters: the design clock got shorter while the participation went deeper, not the other way around. Go fast on the work that turns information into form: secondary research, synthesis, drafting, prototyping, coordination. Go slow on the work that takes time and presence: immersing in the client's context, listening at depth, building the trust that lets people say what they actually think. The trade-off that defined consulting economics for a generation is loosening.
What outcomes-orientation actually requires
Taking outcomes seriously where people are part of the change means approaching the work with four enabling conditions.
The first is the end in mind. Planning a design process from implemented reality backward changes the process and the deliverables. When the team holds the question "what will it take for this to land?" from the start, the approach is shaped by the constraints it will eventually meet. Operational realities, capacity gaps, governance frictions, and technology limits become design inputs rather than handoff problems. The alternative is the design optimized for the slide deck that discovers the floor at handoff. We've seen that design before. We don't do it anymore.
The second is joined-up teams. Real participation isn't a steering committee that approves milestones or a stakeholder consultation that informs a draft. It's a working team that holds internal staff, the people affected, and practitioners with the right craft together throughout the design. Not in sequence. In the same room, working the same problem. The discipline this requires is real: internal teams have day jobs, and practitioners have to surrender the consultant's distance. But the team that designs together is the only team whose design will hold together, because the people who must live the change have already lived it once in its making.
The third is co-creation at depth. The term gets used as shorthand for any session that includes non-staff. We mean something more specific: lived experience treated as a primary design input, with the time and care it takes to surface tacit knowledge that won't appear in a survey or a 60-minute interview. This is where participatory work goes slow on purpose. People don't share the same things in the first session and the fifth. The formal answers come early. The workarounds, the real reasons something doesn't work in practice, and the things people have stopped naming because no one acted on them surface later. The people who have been consulted before, only to watch a strategy proceed regardless, recognize the difference quickly.
The fourth is carrying the work. The handoff model treats the design as the deliverable; once it's transmitted, the consultancy's role is done. Outcomes don't work that way. Translating a future state north star into lived reality is itself a design problem, and often the hardest one. We stay with our clients through the early implementation period for this reason, not as project managers or auditors but as design partners helping the work survive contact with the institution. This is the test of whether the design was right in the first place. It's also the moment most consultancies have already moved on.
The decision is at the scoping table
Most transformation budgets in mission-driven institutions get spent twice. Once on the change as designed. Again on the change as redone after the first version didn't hold.
The decision that determines which pattern an institution gets is usually made at the scoping table, before any work begins, in the choice of what the engagement is for. Scope against deliverables, and deliverables are what arrive. Scope against outcomes, and the conditions for change have at least a chance to take hold.
We're clearer than ever about what those conditions are and why they matter. Naming them at the scoping table is the work that comes before the work, and it's ours to do, not just our clients.
For clients taking on ambitious change projects who don’t know where to start, we offer a short Pathway Discovery engagement. Pathway Discovery helps clients step into the unknown to define a solid plan for ambitious change that is anchored in their unique context, their blue sky ambition and with specific approaches, tools and tactics for how they can de-risk their project by creating those enabling conditions at the start.
Mark Kuznicki
Mark is the kind of person you want around when things feel messy. He has a knack for bringing clarity to complexity, helping teams, leaders, and organizations navigate change in a way that makes them more sustainable and ready for the future.