Feat Of Clay

Need To Know workshop attendees work in groups of two to seven people. Ward briefs them on what they'll be doing, then has them model a few nonbusiness objects. Next, he asks participants to mold representations of their business functions, such as marketing or finance, as well as their customers, markets and overall strategy. "It's always useful to model an image of a customer and an image of the competition's product," Ward says.

One rule is to work fast. Participants have only three minutes to make each figure. Another key: communication. Ward helps participants assess what they've made, and participants comment on each other's work.

The results can be unsettling. "I actually created a framework that collapsed," admits John Williams, owner of The Sausalito Group, an 11-person marketing company in Sausalito, California. The apparent problem: It lacked a robust foundation--a failing Williams said had dogged him throughout his business career.

"I'd work on the big stuff and gloss over the details. It's been my downfall in the past," Williams confesses. With that fault revealed through modeling, he returned to his office and shored things up, obtaining the rights to some key intellectual property he needed, and generally rethought his business strategy.

After a day of modeling, Ward's clients paste photos of their work onto written notes and are coached on the best ways to think about the imagery until the next meeting. Over the following two weeks, they return for two half-day follow-ups. Says Ward, "The process is a constant back and forth between modeling imagery, looking at the imagery and talking about the meaning of it all."

This article was originally published in the November 1998 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Feat Of Clay.