Benefits Facilitation using PRUB-Logic webinar

 

On Monday 1 December 2025 the APM Benefits and Value Interest Network hosted a thought-provoking webinar with Dr Phil Driver, joining live from New Zealand’s South Island (in the middle of the New Zealand night). The session introduced benefits facilitation through the PRUB-Logic framework, an approach that challenges long-standing assumptions in project management and offers a refreshingly practical way to link strategy, projects, uses and benefits.

A simple logic chain with profound implications
Phil’s opening proposition is arrestingly simple: “Projects create Results, which enable Uses, which create Benefits.” It is a clean logic chain grounded in physical reality, and yet it overturns a central belief – that project managers can somehow “realise” benefits.

According to Phil, only uses create benefits. Projects can enable or catalyse the uses, but cannot make them happen. Benefits realisation is therefore something project managers cannot deliver alone; what they can do is facilitate benefits by shaping results (or outputs, or capabilities) that people are willing and motivated to use.

This framing resonated strongly with attendees, many of whom recognised the truth behind “abandoned orphan results” – outputs that technically meet specification but are never used in practice. All those projects that were delivered successfully but gather dust – not 15% of all projects but at least 40%, and in some estimates 99.5%.

Understanding PRUB-Logic
Phil’s PRUB formulation: Projects → Results → Uses → Benefits; is deliberately stripped of jargon. Strategy language, he argued, has become bloated with abstract terms that mean different things to different stakeholders. PRUB instead focuses on physical actions in the real world: making things, using things and gaining worthwhile benefits from them. 
Two ideas in particular stood out:

1. Uses are voluntary
   Even the best-designed result does not guarantee that users will behave as intended. Phil illustrated this with a light-hearted but pointed example: a beautifully equipped gymnasium that people simply do not attend. The gym is an “enabling result” (it has a physical presence), but for users to use the gym, that requires motivation. A café next door or on-site childcare, he suggested, might operate as catalysing results to help convert enablement into action.
   
   
2. Motivational worth matters more than global worth
   Phil distinguished between global benefits (e.g. environmental gains) and motivational benefits (benefits experienced by individuals). A strategy might have strong societal “worth”, but if individuals perceive little personal benefit – or worse, a personal cost – they will not adopt the uses needed to generate the desired outcome. This creates a challenge for fields like climate action and sustainability, where global worth is high but personal incentives can be weak. 

A practical example: Chemical toilets after the Christchurch earthquake
One of the most engaging sections of the webinar revisited a now-classic PRUB case study: the deployment of chemical toilets after Christchurch’s devastating 2011 earthquake. The government’s initial project – distributing 30,000 chemical toilets in three days – was an extraordinary achievement. But the toilets quickly filled (nowhere to empty them), needed to be cleaned (which needed special cleaning stations), needed replacement chemicals after cleaning, and even when emptying stations, cleaning stations and stocks of chemicals were provided, elderly residents couldn’t carry the toilets to get them refreshed. 

Each problem required an additional project, and each new result enabled a further use. The story makes tangible Phil’s core message: understanding uses first would have predicted the required results and avoided the “surprises” that emerged only once real users tried to live with the outputs. Of course this was a deployment in an emergency, and an unforeseen emergency, so congratulations to the team who managed this succession of projects.

Benefits facilitation: An eight-step approach
Phil sets out an eight-step method for facilitating, rather than “realising”, benefits. The early stages focus on deep engagement with stakeholders to clarify:

• the global benefits a strategy seeks,
• the uses that must occur to create them,
• the motivational benefits that would make those uses worthwhile.

Or if this isn’t compelling, what uses would make it compelling and are those additional uses affordable.

Only after this do practitioners specify results and project activities (more traditional project management work). Phil challenged project professionals not to start with “What do you want us to build?”, but rather “What do users need to do, and why would they choose to do it?”.

Users are not like us
In one of the most reflective points of the session, Phil noted that project professionals are innovators or early adopter. Yet most users sit in the “early majority” or “late majority” categories of Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory. They are not motivated by curiosity or global vision but by tangible personal benefit – or by seeing others act first. This means they won’t act like you or me, they need far more convincing. 

Recognising and respecting this diversity of motivations is essential if results are to become used, and benefits generated. 

A compelling Q&A and a personal note
The webinar closed with a rich Q&A chaired by Merv Wyeth. Topics ranged from the role of sponsors, to accountability, to how to influence senior leaders and public sector settings where decisions are often predetermined. Phil emphasised diplomacy, facilitation and persistent inquiry (“What are the benefits you are really seeking?”).

Conclusion
This webinar delivered exactly what the Benefits and Value Interest Network aims to provide: practical insight paired with conceptual clarity. PRUB-Logic offers a disciplined, people-centred way to connect strategy to project delivery and to the behaviours that ultimately create benefits. 

 

Hugo Minney
APM Benefits and Value Interest Network Lead volunteer

 

Webinar resources

Phil has kindly allowed their presented material to be made available for viewing. The webinar recording on Vimeo and the slides on Slideshare, will soon be available in our APM resources area and also embedded below for reference.

The questions submitted during the broadcast are being reviewed, and as an additional resource the answers will be added shortly were possible.

This webinar content is suitable for professionals with any knowledge level of the project profession.

Speaker

Dr Phil Driver developed the OpenStrategies system based on PRUB-Logic. Phil has a PhD in engineering and extensive experience in research, business, industry and government. Phil has particular experience facilitating large-scale, complex, multistakeholder strategies on topics such as climate change, biodiversity and river catchment management.

His ideas have been or are about to be published by Taylor and Francis in three books:

• Validating Strategies – Linking Projects and Results to Uses and Benefits
• From Woe to Flow – Validating and Implementing Strategies
• and Strategies Using the Power of PRUB-Logic, draft with publisher