Perspective and Your Clients

Hey, what's so interesting?

Wow! Now I see. It's beautiful.

These pictures make me think of perspective and how it influences our relationships with our clients. When we first start working with clients we are in what we, at Imagine, call the “golden phase” of the relationship. Other than knowing the key players, we don’t know the office politics, the dynamics, nor much about the corporate culture. This gives us the ability to bring new and unfiltered ideas to the table. We are essentially “on the outside looking in”, seeing them as the world does. We’re careful to understand what we see and to keep an inventory of our observations.

As time goes by we start to learn the inside scoop, so to speak. And this is necessary, because when we’re creating an e-learning course, a high-stakes presentation, or a video we need to become fully aware of the content, as well as the teaching styles of our clients. In fact, it’s so important to us, we learn the subject very well, enough to have Mike at ITI say that Susan could teach one of their courses. And in the process we learn how our clients see themselves. The trick is being able to learn the “inside scoop” well enough to teach it and still keep a clean perspective.

Obviously, our perspective can never be as unfiltered as it was in the beginning of the relationship, but we work at staying  “on the outside looking in” as much as possible. We refer back to the “inventory” of our initial observations so we can merge this with the knowledge we gain from the inside to help keep our clients on track. This is a beautiful thing and helps create a long-term relationship with our clients.