Bad scope is rarely the result of bad intentions. It’s the result of unstated assumptions that the team has, the owner has, and that conflict — but nobody surfaced the conflict before signature. By the time the work begins, the conflict is locked in, and everyone wonders why the project feels wrong.
The Shape phase exists to surface those assumptions while there’s still cheap room to change the plan. Five questions do most of the work.
1. What does success look like — in one sentence we can both repeat from memory?
If the sponsor and MHA can’t both say the success criterion the same way without reading from a document, the criterion isn’t shared, it’s assumed shared. The sentence test is brutal and fast.
What we listen for:
- A measurable outcome, not an activity. “Renovate and sell within nine months” beats “deliver the renovation.”
- A unit. Dollars, days, occupancy rate, users, uptime. Numbers that have units force specificity.
- An owner. “We’ve succeeded when the owner signs off the final inspection” puts a name on the gate.
If the sentence has none of these, we work the room until it does. The work of writing the sentence often is the engagement’s first useful output.
2. What’s explicitly not in scope?
Most kickoff documents list what’s in. Almost none list what’s out. The unlisted middle is where scope creep lives.
We ask: name three things a reasonable person might assume are part of this engagement but that we’re not doing. Examples from recent engagements:
- “We are renovating the property and listing it. We are not managing the tenant relationship if the buyer chooses to rent it out.”
- “We are building the e-commerce site. We are not writing the product copy or sourcing the photography.”
- “We are running the migration. We are not training the receiving team beyond a handover session.”
The named exclusions become a section of the kickoff document. When scope creep starts (“oh, we also need…”), we point at the list. Either the work gets added with a change order, or it doesn’t get done.
3. Who has the authority to say yes?
Engagement decisions slow down or stall when authority is unclear. Three questions in one:
- Who can approve a scope change up to $X?
- Who can approve one above $X?
- If those two people disagree, who breaks the tie?
The answers go in writing into the kickoff document. If the answer to any of them is “we’ll figure it out,” scope is not yet shaped — it just looks like it is.
4. What’s the worst outcome we’d both still be glad about?
This is the question that surfaces hidden risk tolerance. Most projects have a public target outcome and a private acceptable outcome, and they’re rarely the same. Naming the floor is where you learn what risk the owner is actually willing to take.
Recent answer from a real estate engagement: “If we sell at break-even instead of a 30% margin, I’d still be glad we did the project because I learn the market.” That answer changed the plan. We sequenced the build cheaper, accepted a longer time on market, and de-risked the financing. If we’d planned for the target outcome only, we’d have over-leveraged the build.
The worst-still-glad outcome is the real success criterion. The target is a stretch goal.
5. What would have to be true in six months for us both to feel we made the right decision today?
This is the bet. It surfaces the theory of the case — the model of the world that justifies doing the project at all.
If the answer is “interest rates have to stay below X,” we now know to instrument that. If it’s “we have to find a buyer willing to pay above appraisal,” we now know what marketing strategy actually matters. If it’s “the existing team has to absorb the new tool without dropping their current workload,” we now know what change management to invest in.
The answer becomes part of the engagement’s monthly status check: is the bet still on? If the answer is no, we don’t keep grinding through the plan — we re-engage the brief. That’s the bet’s purpose.
Why these five and not others
There are many more good questions to ask in a Shape phase. The reason we restrict to these five is time and stamina. A Shape phase has limited attention from the owner. We can usually get clean answers to five well-chosen questions; trying to get clean answers to fifteen produces vague answers to all of them.
The discipline is to not move past one until the answer is clean. A vague answer to “what’s success” is worse than a confident answer to ten other questions. Better five well-shaped scopes than fifty well-decorated ones.