About Say Do 100

Every engagement is different, but the ways I try to be useful are the same. Here are three of my habits I've noticed matter more than the actual outputs I'm asked to deliver:
 

1. Asking basic questions no one else is asking

 

Have you ever left a meeting where everybody was in alignment, but after everyone left the room, the momentum suddenly stalled? Even when the intentions are good and the stakeholders are all on board, it can be unclear who has to do what — and that confusion leads to inaction.

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One of the things I've noticed about my own work, from years in the corporate world and now as an independent consultant, is that I have a habit of asking really simple — sometimes even obvious — questions until there is full clarity on how to get where we want to be.

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For example:

 

During a long and productive meeting, the leaders of the IT department agreed on their next steps: they would work with finance to align budgets and develop a new process to track spend over the coming months.

 

"OK, who is 'finance'?" I asked.

 

A series of glances went around the room as people offered various names and eventually landed on four different individuals who would need to be pulled into this work. More questions followed and the discussion of next steps continued for longer than expected: "How do you spell their names? Should we meet with them, or can I help put together a spreadsheet of our budget to email them? When should we do this? What comes after?"

 

There was harmonious agreement in the meeting and the follow-up seemed so simple that everybody was easily aligned. Yet there was still a necessary deeper discussion on how they would actually execute. A well-laid strategy can fall apart when the specifics aren't carefully considered. That deeper conversation is often the actual work.

 

2. Getting the details right when the details matter

 

Spreadsheets with thousands of rows. Data feeds that don't reconcile. Reports where a mislabeled column has been quietly wrong for two years. Most people skim these — I read them.

 

The same is true of everything else a client hands me. If someone tells me they'll share five documents and I only see four, I'll ask about the fifth. If a reference is made to a prior version of a plan I haven't seen, I'll ask for it. If a chart cites a data source that isn't in the appendix, I'll go find it.

 

Most of what I catch isn't glamorous: a duplicated record, a broken formula, a missing attachment, two systems that describe the same thing using different names. But when a senior leader is about to make a decision based on the work, the underlying material needs to be complete and correct. The strategy work on top only holds up if what's underneath is clean.

 

3. Building things that outlast the engagement

 

The measure of a good engagement isn't what happens while I'm in the room. It's what happens six months after I've left.

 

I build for handoff from day one. The dashboards, playbooks, trackers, and repositories I create are structured so that someone on the client team can maintain them without calling me — or teach the next person how to. When I leave a project, the client owns the tools, understands how they work, and knows what to do when something needs to change.

 

Consulting doesn't have to work this way. Plenty of engagements produce polished deliverables that quietly stop being used once the consultant leaves. The test isn't how impressive the deliverable looks at handoff — it's whether the team is still using it a year later.

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