Neglecting preparation: save or sacrifice?

Sinh Vũ hears this question often: "Can we skip the preparation step to save time and costs and go straight to the working session?" The answer is yes, but you should know what you are trading off. The preparation cost does not disappear when you cut it; it shifts to a more expensive place.

The true cost of a meeting without a foundation.

The meeting gathers leadership, department heads, consultants, and sometimes partners. Each person in the room has their own time value. Without preparation, much of the early meeting time is spent figuring out what everyone is thinking, redefining the problem, and debating issues that should have been resolved beforehand. This is a real cost, measured in the hours of many people combined, just not reflected in the preparation invoice.

A double consequence occurs when a fragile decision is made due to a lack of foundational data. A few weeks later, the team has to meet again. At that point, costs double.

Risk according to each type of decision

Not every decision requires the same level of preparation. The way Sinh Vũ sees it is along two axes: magnitude and reversibility.

• Small, easily reversible decisions: adjusting wording, trying a new color palette, updating an internal document. Preparation can be streamlined, even skipped if the team already has enough data.
• Major decisions that are hard to reverse: brand positioning, naming new products, restructuring the portfolio. Skipping preparation here is high risk because mistakes can be costly and sometimes irreversible.
• Many conflicting parties: When there are individuals in the room who do not agree on the direction, lacking common foundational documents leads to discussions without anchor points, making it easy for the meeting to end without real commitment.

Skipping the input exploration phase does not make costs disappear but pushes them back, resulting in higher expenses when corrections are needed.

Patrick Iverson, Brand Discovery

Common error when preparing cuts.

• See that preparation fees are a cuttable expense, forgetting the time cost for the entire team on working days.
• Thinking that gathering enough people in a room will naturally lead to good decisions.
• On the first day, discovering a lack of background data, you must pause to search for it.
• Finalize quickly to get it done, then meet again a few weeks later because the decision lacks a solid foundation.

According to the IAF (International Association of Facilitators), preparing inputs including understanding objectives, interviewing stakeholders, drafting outcome templates, and designing agendas is foundational for achieving desired results in a session. Without that foundation, even a skilled facilitator can only scratch the surface.

When you can streamline, when not to cut

The viewpoint of Sinh Vũ

Sinh Vũ designs S5 (the name of Sinh Vũ's consulting process) with one week of interviews and one week of document preparation before the main working day, as practical experience shows that the quality of the session is often only as good as the effort put in beforehand. This is Sinh Vũ's design choice, not the only industry standard.

What Sinh Vũ optimizes is not to skip preparation but to adjust the scale appropriately: a one-on-one session should be concise, while a multi-party workshop should be in-depth. Clients who want to save can reuse existing data and audits to shorten this phase, rather than starting from scratch. This is a way to save without compromising quality.