When is it okay to take shortcuts?

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
--Beverly Sills

Normally I'd agree, but I'm no longer really sure about that.  I've recently been working on a project that is one of the most creative and rewarding I've ever been involved with.  In working together so creatively, we have compressed some strategic planning steps, especially research.  We're collaborating very closely with our client, and relying on our collective sense of what "feels right".
 
Normally I'm a stickler for rigorous research, but in this case I'm cobbling together webpage intercepts and fast ad hoc interviews just to reassure the higher-ups that we're not being collectively delusional.  Is ad hoc and opportunistic a good process in this case?   If I had insisted on the long path process, would the work have been improved?

(I want to emphasize that we had some strong quantitative input going in that ensures that we are well grounded in our target's needs. In addition, our target is in fact part of the marketing industry, and most of us have worked with them in the course of our careers.  We're trusting that shared knowledge to let our strategies emerge intuitively.)

To be technical for a moment, our team and our clients are operating in a fully experiential mode-- intuitive, interactive, playful--less rational than usual.  Because we're collaborating, ideas and feedback are compressed into very short timeframes.  This means that there is an unusually fertile interaction going on that is itself providing a strong strategic framework--just not in a rational format.
 
Somehow, I am trusting my instincts.  What might seem like scary shortcuts to the rational side of me looks like imaginitive leaps to the experiential side of me. It helps that the casual research we have done has strongly confirmed that our intuitions are connecting with the audience--that increases my confidence that we are justified in taking big leaps instead of small, processy steps. 
 
Being grounded in an understanding of the target created an empathic framework that in this case is replacing an analytic framework.  Collaborating closely with our client is letting a strategic framework evolve, rather than be "architected."  The research we are doing is being used as a tuning fork, not sheet music.
 
Wow!  This is fun.  I may never have this line-up of circumstances again, but in this case, I think being experiential is going to result in really powerful work.