Exercises: Discovery and Vision

Difficulty guide: ⭐ Foundational (5–10 min) · ⭐⭐ Intermediate (10–20 min) · ⭐⭐⭐ Challenging (20–40 min) · ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Advanced (40+ min)

Part A: Conceptual Understanding ⭐

A.1. Explain the four-stage bridge — feeling → moment → specification → decision — and describe what goes wrong when a planner jumps from the first stage to the fourth.

A.2. Why is "what do you want?" the wrong opening question? Give the three answers you will get and explain why each is unusable.

A.3. Why does the vision interview begin with weddings the couple has attended, and why is the one they disliked the most valuable question in the segment?

A.4. Explain the "protect three" reframe. Why does it work where "which nine would you cut?" does not, given that they are the same operation?

A.5. A colleague says: "The inspiration board is unrealistic, I just tell clients that." Explain what is wrong with the word unrealistic here, and what the selection-effect framing does differently.

A.6. In your own words, distinguish stated from revealed preference. Give two signals of each.

A.7. Define without looking back: feeling-word, anchor image, the veto, board pricing, forced ranking.

A.8. Why does the chapter say a vision document that generates no pushback from a vendor has communicated nothing?

Part B: Applied Analysis ⭐⭐

B.1. Translate ten words. For each, produce three specifications from three different categories, plus the question you would ask to find out which the client means: timeless · playful · understated · abundant · grown-up · nostalgic · clean · joyful · quiet · ours

B.2. Vendor-split a feeling. Take "abundant" and produce the specification it implies for each of: caterer, florist, rental, bar, lighting, and photographer. Which two are most likely to be missed if you brief verbally?

B.3. Price a board. Find any public wedding inspiration board. Pick the five images that appear to be the most expensive. For each: identify what is driving the cost (volume / installation / scarcity / labor / venue), estimate the cost in your market with a range, and design the version that gets 70–80% of the effect for under a third of the price. Show the arithmetic on at least two.

B.4. The moment interview. Write out fifteen follow-up questions you could ask after a client says "I keep seeing the bit right after the ceremony." Rank them by how much usable specification each is likely to produce.

B.5. Rescue the divergence. A couple's rankings:

Is this mild or genuine divergence? Produce the merged ranking, explain your method, and say what you would ask each of them before merging.

B.6. Build the veto list. Write twelve plausible vetoes a couple might give, spanning ceremony, food, photography, music, family, and aesthetics. Mark which three would be most likely to be violated by a well-meaning vendor's suggestion.

B.7. Diagnose the ranking failure. A couple ranks flowers first and then, over four months, never once asks about flowers, does not want to meet the florist, and approves the first proposal without comment. What is happening, and what do you ask?

Part C: Real-World Application ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

C.1. Build your translation table. ⭐⭐⭐ Twenty-five feeling-words minimum, each with three specifications from different categories. This is a career asset — start it properly, in a format you can add a row to in thirty seconds.

C.2. Run a vision interview. ⭐⭐⭐⭐ On anyone planning anything — a party, a holiday, a house renovation. Ninety minutes, all six segments, adapted. Produce the vision document afterward and give it to them. Ask: does this describe what you meant? Record the answer verbatim.

C.3. Interrogate a board. ⭐⭐ Sit with someone who has any kind of inspiration board — for a wedding, a room, a wardrobe — and ask, image by image, "what's the bit of this you actually like?" Do at least ten images. Write 400 words on how often their answer surprised them.

C.4. Vendor reality check. ⭐⭐⭐ Show your translation table to a working florist or caterer. Ask: does this match what you'd do with these words? Where would you translate differently? Add their answers to your table with attribution.

C.5. Cost the light. ⭐⭐ Take one image whose main effect is lighting. Price the expensive version and the cheap version in your market — actual candle counts, actual rental rates. This is the demonstration you will use in every board-pricing conversation for years; get the numbers right once.

C.6. The negative interview. ⭐ Ask five people about a wedding or event they attended and disliked. Push for specifics until you have a specification, not an adjective. Note how much faster this produces usable material than asking what they liked.

Part D: Synthesis and Critical Thinking ⭐⭐⭐

D.1. Cross-chapter integration. Chapter 3 produced a decision-rights map. Chapter 4 produces a ranking. What happens when the person who must be pleased (Ch.3) would rank differently from the couple? Work it through with Rosa Reyes and the Mass, and produce a rule you could apply generally.

D.2. Critique the ranking. Forced ranking is presented as making trade-offs decidable. Construct the case that it is reductive — that weddings are not decomposable into twelve independent categories, that the categories interact, and that a ranking encourages cutting the wrong things. Then respond. Where does the technique genuinely mislead?

D.3. The honesty of the board conversation. The chapter's script attributes the board's cost to a "selection effect" rather than to the client's judgment. Argue that this is a kind and useful framing. Then argue that it is a flattering one that avoids telling a client their taste exceeds their means. Is there a version that is both kinder and more honest?

D.4. Transfer. Apply the translation table method to a domain where clients also speak in feelings: interior design, personal styling, brand identity, therapy goal-setting, or architecture. What survives translation? What does the events version do that the other domain does not, and vice versa?

D.5. Design the missing artifact. The vision document serves vendors. Design a second document, aimed at the couple, that they would actually reread during the planning year. What is in it? What is deliberately not? When would you send it, and would it change anything about how they behave in month nine?

Part M: Mixed Practice (Interleaved) ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐

M.1. (Ch.3 + Ch.4) At the vision interview, Alicia's mother arrives with her. What do you do — in the moment, out loud, without embarrassing anyone?

M.2. (Ch.1) A client's anchor image is a tented reception with a chandelier. They are at a raw site. Using Chapter 1's cost-reconstruction habit, list everything that image implies which is not visible in it.

M.3. (Ch.2) You sold partial planning. The scope excludes design. The couple sends you a board and asks what you think. What do you say?

M.4. (Looks like one thing, is another) A client says "we're really relaxed about the flowers." Give three completely different things this could mean and the question that distinguishes them.

M.5. (Ch.1 + Ch.3 + Ch.4) Compute: forced ranking takes 15 minutes in month two. Chapter 4 claims it saves 30–50 hours across the engagement. At a $5,200 fee over 194 hours, what does that do to your effective hourly rate? Then explain why a planner who sells this to a client on those grounds has made a mistake.

Part E: Research and Extension ⭐⭐⭐⭐

E.1. Collect twenty published wedding vendor briefs, style guides, or "how to work with us" documents. How many contain checkable specifications versus adjectives? Write 500 words on what the industry's briefing practice actually is.

E.2. Investigate how another design profession handles the brief. Architecture's programming phase, brand strategy's discovery, and UX research's requirements-gathering all solve this problem and all have literature. Pick one, read into it, and import two techniques into your vision interview. Rewrite the §4.2 script.

E.3. Examine the selection effect claim empirically. Take a hundred images from a single wedding inspiration source and classify them by what is driving cost. What proportion are expensive because of volume, installation, scarcity, labor, or venue? What proportion are expensive at all? Report honestly — including if the claim in §4.5 turns out to be weaker than stated.

Solutions

Selected solutions: appendices/answers-to-selected.md. Rubrics for open-ended items: instructor-guide/additional-assessments/all-assessments.md.