“We need a new intranet.”

I get this brief a lot. Sometimes it’s an app. Sometimes it’s “we need to reduce email volume” or “we need to do something about Teams.” Occasionally someone has already got as far as choosing the product and would now like some research to confirm they were right.

Unfortunately none of these things is actually a problem. They’re solutions somebody has already chosen, usually in a meeting I wasn’t in, and my job as briefed is to go away and build the thing.

Jon and I spent an hour with IABC members this afternoon making the case for not doing that. The session was billed as how to find out what’s actually wrong with your comms, which is a better title than we’d have come up with ourselves because it names the gap rather neatly. Most organisations know something isn’t working. Far fewer can tell you what. And the distance between those two states is Discovery.

The audit trap

When comms teams do decide to look before they leap, they nearly always reach for an audit. Catalogue the channels. Count the newsletters. Map the publishing calendar. Produce a spreadsheet with 400 rows in it and a slide saying WE HAVE 17 CHANNELS, as if the number itself is the diagnosis.

Audits aren’t useless. They’re just usually the wrong place to start. For one thing, an audit tells you what you’re serving, not what anyone wants to eat. It’s a stocktake of the fridge. You come away knowing you own a lot of yoghurt and no bread, but not whether anyone in the house is lactose intolerant.

Everything you learn is bounded by what already exists. Which means the thing that might actually help — the channel you don’t have, the moment in somebody’s day you’ve never designed for, the workaround everyone uses instead — is structurally invisible.

The second problem is slightly more awkward. If your team publishes the channels, your team is now auditing its own homework. You will discover that the newsletter is broadly fine and the intranet could do with a redesign, because those are conclusions everyone can live with. I’ve watched very capable people do this in complete good faith. It isn’t dishonesty; you just can’t see the water you’re swimming in.

Discovery starts at the other end. Not “what have we got?” but “what are people actually trying to do, and where does it go wrong?”

What Discovery actually is

The idea isn’t ours, and it isn’t new. It grew out of agile and user-centred design, after enough expensive digital projects had failed for people to notice a recurring feature: teams kept leaping enthusiastically towards solutions before they’d properly understood the problem. The UK Government Digital Service made Discovery standard practice, and the discipline has gradually seeped into adjacent fields ever since.

Internal comms has been slower to catch on, partly because we’ve never really thought of ourselves as builders of things. But we are. A channel is a product. Content is a service. And the failure modes are remarkably similar: eighteen months, a six-figure budget, a great deal of stakeholder excitement, then launch day arrives and everybody else carries on with their lives.

At its simplest, Discovery means swapping assumptions for evidence. It’s the shift from “what do we want to say?” to “what do people need, and what would have to be true for this to work for them?” That is more mindset than methodology, and it can be uncomfortable because it asks you to slow down at precisely the point everyone is desperate to demonstrate momentum.

One leader I worked with used to say “facts are friendly”, usually just before somebody put an extremely unfriendly number on a slide. It’s the right instinct. The point of Discovery isn’t to prove your gut right. It’s to find out, early and cheaply, which bits of your gut are wrong.

Why slowing down makes you faster

This is the bit that gets pushback, because Discovery looks like delay. Four to six weeks of research before anyone builds anything appears on a Gantt chart as four to six weeks in which nobody has changed the colour of the homepage and everyone’s still complaining about it. When budgets are tight and a sponsor wants a launch date, it’s therefore one of the first things to disappear.

But the cost of being wrong rises sharply the later you find out. Fixing a misconception on a whiteboard costs an afternoon. Fixing it during build costs a change request. Fixing it after launch costs the change request, the migration, the rework and some portion of the credibility you’ve just spent telling everyone the shiny new thing was going to make their working lives better.

Software engineering learned this decades ago, largely by making all these mistakes first. There are various neat rules of thumb suggesting defects become ten times more expensive at each stage. I’d treat the exact multiplier with suspicion; the underlying point is less controversial. Finding out early is cheaper than finding out late.

But there’s another failure mode that matters more than money. Look at why large internal projects go wrong and it’s rarely because somebody couldn’t make the technology function. It’s unclear requirements, unexamined assumptions, teams building competently and diligently towards a destination nobody properly agreed. You cannot engineer your way out of having solved the wrong problem, and no amount of change management will persuade people to adopt something that simply doesn’t fit their day.

Discovery is cheap insurance against building the wrong thing beautifully.

Start with what you already know

The first move isn’t research. It’s an inventory of belief.

Most organisations are sitting on years of potentially useful material: old comms surveys, engagement data, post-implementation reviews, research from the last intranet project, a strategy deck from three restructures ago. Some of it is gold. Some of it is actively misleading. Old research is like milk: check the date and give it a sniff before pouring it over anything important. A survey run before a major restructure tells you a great deal about an organisation that no longer exists.

Then write down what you think you know. Not vague impressions, but specific claims that can turn out to be wrong:

• Frontline workers don’t see HR updates because they don’t have email access.
• People ignore the intranet homepage because it’s cluttered and irrelevant.
• Managers are quietly rewriting key messages before they reach their teams.

Put them on a board with four columns: to test, partially validated, validated, disproven. Then move them as the evidence arrives. Trello, Planner, Notion, spreadsheet, sticky notes: it really doesn’t matter. What matters is committing your assumptions to writing before you start looking for evidence, so you can’t quietly retrofit the story later. Academics call this pre-registering your hypothesis. In comms, I prefer to think of it as making it harder to mark your own homework twice.

It does something else useful too: it stops Discovery sprawling. You’re not setting out to research absolutely everything anyone has ever thought about internal communication. You’re pulling on named threads. And when a stakeholder asks why you’re recommending something, you can show them the belief, the evidence and how your view changed, which is a significantly better answer than “trust me, I did some interviews.”

Means, motive and opportunity

The most useful frame I know for understanding user needs is borrowed from every moderately competent television detective.

Means: can people technically access the channel? Login, device, email address, permissions. This is where comms teams tend to stop, because it’s the bit we can see and the bit IT can report. But access is table stakes. It tells you what’s technically possible, not what anybody actually does.

Opportunity: when, in the real shape of someone’s working day, can they engage? Five quiet minutes at a desk? Thirty seconds on a phone between jobs? Nothing until they’ve clocked off and would rather be literally anywhere else?

And then motive: why would they bother? Does this help them do the job faster, better or with fewer headaches? If not, attention evaporates regardless of how lovingly somebody has written the CEO update.

We worked with an organisation employing hundreds of maintenance staff who spent their days out on the road. Adoption of the intranet was dismal. Leadership’s diagnosis was that the site needed to work better on tablets. On paper, means looked fine: everyone had a login.

Then we went and watched people work. There was one device per vehicle, not per person, so access meant sharing a tablet behind a clunky login. Opportunity was worse. They spent most of the working day driving, and unsurprisingly were not allowed to use a device at the wheel. Their main window for checking the intranet was therefore at the end of a shift, parked up, when its principal competitor for their attention was going home. And then motive: why wrestle with a slow site to read generic organisational news that had nothing whatsoever to do with the job in front of you?

A tablet-optimised intranet would have solved almost none of this. What helped was removing friction, designing properly for mobile and introducing audio content people could listen to hands-free while driving. None of that is especially clever. It is, in retrospect, painfully obvious — but things often become obvious once you’ve bothered to look.

Mix your methods, and skip the focus groups

Surveys and analytics tell you what is happening and, roughly, at what scale. Interviews, observation and diary studies help tell you why. Treating these as competing methodological tribes is a category error: you need both.

Analytics have one particularly important blind spot in internal comms: they can only show you the behaviour of people who are already using your channels. The employee who gave up six months ago leaves no trace. Neither does the colleague who never had access in the first place, nor the team who have quietly moved their entire working life into a WhatsApp group you know nothing about.

Those shadow channels are often the most revealing thing Discovery surfaces. They show you precisely what the official system is failing to do, because somebody has already gone to the trouble of building a workaround.

One method I’d generally avoid for diagnosis is the focus group. They’re seductive: one meeting, lots of voices, apparently faster than doing a load of individual interviews, and senior leaders love them. In practice, people are much less likely to admit in front of colleagues that they don’t understand something, dislike something or have abandoned the official process altogether. Add hierarchy to the room and it gets worse.

To run one properly you need two researchers anyway, which rather eats into the supposed efficiency. You also have to find a point when eight busy people are free at once, so good luck with that. Focus groups are useful for co-creation and testing ideas. They’re a fairly poor way to diagnose what’s actually going wrong.

Knowing when to stop

Research is not an endurance sport. When the same hypotheses keep getting reconfirmed and new interviews stop surprising you, you’ve hit saturation. Stop. More research at that point won’t make you more certain; it will mostly consume money you could be spending fixing the thing you now understand.

For most comms Discoveries, a part-time project over roughly eight weeks is a reasonable rule of thumb. Larger and more complicated organisations may need longer. Genuinely unexplored territory may need longer.

Then you synthesise: cluster the findings, name the themes, show the patterns and be explicit about what your evidence cannot tell you. Every research method has biases and gaps. The mistake isn’t using imperfect evidence — there is no other kind — but presenting it as complete.

And finally, triage. What’s a quick win? What’s structural? What needs a year? What would require an entirely different operating model? And, crucially, what isn’t yours to fix?

A good Discovery will surface things that look like communication problems but aren’t: a broken process, an unpopular policy, a manager who doesn’t manage, a workload problem, a system designed around a neat version of the organisation that has never existed outside PowerPoint. Being able to tell a leadership team “this is not a communication problem, and no new channel will fix it” is one of the more useful outputs of Discovery, even when it isn’t what they hired you to say.

Do this properly and you arrive at the business case with something surprisingly rare: a clear account of what is actually wrong, evidence that it is wrong, and a defensible view about what to tackle first.

Which seems a considerably better place to start than “we need a new intranet.”

Discovery is Chapter 1 of Digital Communications at Work, the book I wrote with Jonathan Phillips. It covers all eight steps in full, including stakeholder interviews, ethics and synthesis. The research methods toolkit that wouldn’t fit in the chapter is free to download. And if you’d rather not run one on your own, that’s what we do.