Four Questions That Change the Conversation: How to Reframe Any Project Business Case in 10 Minutes

What I See Every Day: The right people, with the right instincts, using the wrong language

A commenter on last week's post nailed something I've been circling around for the entire series: "Everything in a commercial business needs to contribute to at least one of reducing costs, increasing revenues, and mitigating risk. If we can align every initiative with those and quantify in £££s, we can make better decisions on prioritisation."

Exactly right. And here's the gap: most businesses have the revenue articulation nailed. The commercial team walks in with a number, a projection, a growth curve. That side of the equation is fluent.

But the other two, reducing costs and mitigating risk? The people who own those projects know they matter. They feel it. Their teams feel it. But when they walk into a prioritisation conversation, the language falls short. "We need to do this." "There's a risk." "This is important."

I saw this happen live during a webinar I hosted recently. We'd been discussing prioritisation frameworks and sequencing logic, and then we got to the Q&A. Someone asked the question: "How do you articulate the numbers behind risk?"

It's a great question and it's the question that sits underneath everything I've been writing about in this series. This person had a retention initiative they knew was critical. Staff turnover was climbing. Replacement costs were significant. There were early signs of a potential tribunal risk if underlying issues weren't addressed. But they'd never framed it as anything other than "we need to invest in retention" and they couldn't figure out how to make it compete with the commercial initiatives that came with revenue projections baked in.

So I walked them through the questions I always ask. And within about ten minutes, the initiative that had sounded like a "nice to have" HR programme was articulated as a quantified business risk that any CFO would take seriously.

The initiative didn't change. The four questions changed the language around it.

What Needs to Happen: Ask four questions before anything enters your prioritisation conversation

These aren't theoretical. They're the exact questions I use, with leadership teams, in governance reviews, in the conversations where a project's survival depends on how well someone can articulate why it matters.

Question 1: "What specifically happens if we don't do this?"

Not "things get worse." Not "there's a risk." Get specific, what breaks, what degrades, what exposure grows?

With the webinar attendee, the answer wasn't "we might lose people." Once we dug in, it was: "We're currently losing an average of X people per quarter from this team. Each replacement costs approximately £Y in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity during ramp-up. And there's a grievance pattern forming that, if unaddressed, creates tribunal exposure."

The difference between a sentiment and a consequence is evidence. If your CFO would need to ask "but what does that actually mean for us?", the articulation isn't specific enough yet.

Question 2: "How likely is this?"

Some consequences are certain, a regulatory deadline that will be missed, a contract that will auto-renew at unfavourable terms. Others are probable but not guaranteed. The distinction matters because it affects how your leadership team should weigh it. The key is honesty, not drama. Overstating probability to create urgency undermines every future case you present.

Question 3: "When does it hit?"

A consequence that materialises in 90 days competes very differently to one that materialises in 18 months. Your leadership team needs to know not just what happens but when, because that directly affects whether it needs to be prioritised now or can be deliberately sequenced later.

Question 4: "Does the cost grow the longer we wait?"

This is the question most business cases miss entirely and it's often the most powerful. Some costs are flat; deferring by a quarter doesn't change the eventual price tag. But many compound. The scope grows. The workarounds multiply. The team builds habits around the limitation. The eventual fix becomes harder, more expensive, and more disruptive than it would have been six months earlier.

For the retention initiative, the attrition costs weren't flat. Every quarter of inaction meant more departures, more recruitment spend, more institutional knowledge walking out the door, and a deepening cultural issue that would take longer to turn around the further it went.

What I'm not giving you (yet)

Those four questions will change your next prioritisation conversation. I'm confident of that.

But if you're thinking "How do I do this consistently across my whole backlog? How do I score and compare these projects against revenue initiatives? How do I present it so my CFO evaluates it with the same rigour as a commercial case?", that's the structured method I'm building behind these questions. More on that in Part 4.

For now, the four questions are enough to start. Use them this week.

Tip of the Week: Reframe one project using the four questions

Pick one initiative on your backlog that doesn't have a revenue number. Sit down with the project owner for 15 minutes and work through:

1. What specifically happens if we don't do this? Push past generalities. What breaks? What costs money? What exposure grows?

2. How likely is that? Certain, probable, or possible? What's the evidence?

3. When does it hit? Is there a fixed deadline, an approaching threshold, or a gradual erosion?

4. Does the cost grow the longer we wait? What does 6 more months of deferral look like compared to today?

Write down the answers. Read them back. Then compare what you've written to the original business case for that project. If the difference is significant, you've just proven the gap these questions close.

Bonus: Use this AI prompt to pressure-test your answers and sharpen the language.

Copy and paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or your AI tool of choice:

Next week in Part 4, I'll show you what happens when a project reframed with these questions sits side by side with a revenue initiative and the structured method for making that comparison land. Plus I'll be sharing a practical resource I've been building alongside this series.

• Curious about how we could work together? Book a 20-mintue intro call - no pitch, just pattern matching.

helen.beckford@felicetteconsultancy.com 
www.felicetteconsultancy.com | www.linkedin.com/in/hebeckford