I gave a safe answer. My response was that I automate the rules-based and repeatable admin work that robs me of time doing more valuable things. My monthly accounting entries, setting up the calendar and to-dos for the week, and agenda preparation.

I said I would not automate delivery or anything client-facing that was not rote follow-up, like appointment reminders or subscription confirmations. But my response was exactly what can happen when we grab the first available answer.

Then this morning I read an essay by Giorgia Lupi in the New York Times. She’s a designer at Pentagram. Her piece is about using AI in the creative process, but it turned out to be about my work too.

And probably yours.

Her team was hired to make an installation about the New York subway system. They spent weeks studying records and open data. They even read through the missed connections board on Craigslist. What came out of that work treats each subway line as a living character. How some see the sun and others never do. Or, some trains wait for each other at junctions, while others never cross paths.

She’s clear that no prompt would have gotten her to the same place. A tool could have drawn the map, but it wouldn’t have thought to read the missed connections.

Her team does use AI. They use it after the thinking is done, to take something a person already defined and carry it out at scale. Where they won’t use it is the beginning where it can result in what she referred to as “visual elevator music.”

One of A.I.’s greatest selling points is that it removes the challenges and barriers for discovery. You type in a prompt, and A.I. gives you an answer. But sometimes discovery is as much about interrogating the questions.

The risk is not that AI will do bad work. It is that it will do good enough work, instantly, on the wrong question.

Figuring out the right question is the hard work. Looking for shortcuts isn’t new. We were trying to skip the slow part long before AI showed up. We subscribe before we identify the problem. We write the procedure before we ask the people who do the work. We hire before we know what the role is for.

The tool just makes skipping quicker.

Lupi writes about detours and weeks of wandering. How what looks like a dead end can turn into an idea. In a business, the wandering looks different. It’s the hour with the person on the front line who tells you why the new system isn’t being used. A meeting where nothing is decided, but someone finally says the real problem out loud.

The impulse to optimize for the obvious and to stop at the simplest answer is what I believe we have to resist.

That doesn’t seem productive. But, it’s where we’re going to find the real answer.

I’m not against AI tools. I use them. And, the line she draws makes sense to me. The machine can do the carrying out. But the people must do the finding out.

In the end, that panel question wasn’t really about which tasks should be automated automate. It was about how much of the thinking we are willing to give up before we’ve done it ourselves.

If I got that question again, I’d talk about just that.

The insects are starting to wake up, their sounds not yet overtaken by traffic on the street. Everything else is quiet, except for the occasional chitter of some small animal near the porch (probably the groundhog that ate my pickles.)

In that one moment, looking east into the field and orchard that wrap behind the neighbor’s yard, there is a small gathering of two or three deer. I never see them enter the frame. They just appear as one shadow under the tree, eventually splitting into separate silhouettes.

That’s when the dog notices them. I’m not sure if he sees or smells them - it doesn’t seem like they make any noise at all - but he starts a regular, polite bark like he’s calling them over.

They dip their heads for a moment, probably eating whatever crab apples or pears are on the ground, maybe even a pawpaw, and then disappear as ethereally as they showed up.

I think that might be why gloaming never got the morning treatment. Dusk is shared. Street and porch lights come on, kids head home, and everyone agrees the day is ending. This is different. It happens for those who are looking for it and it’s gone before there’s time to call anyone else outside.

And no amount of polite barking can convince it to stick around.

With a 4.6 mph jog, the program wasn’t crazy but the short warmup wasn’t enough to get me ready.

After the jog I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath. Although I was in the rest period and barely walking, my brain decided it was in trouble and I needed to stop immediately. I had to check my breathing and start touching and naming the buttons on the panel in front of me.

This wasn’t weakness or too much effort. A jog at that speed is very comfortable. It was my nervous system doing its job when faced with demand without any time to prepare.

Forcing change on someone does the exact same thing that program did to me that morning. With no warmup, there’s no warning or context, just a new tool, way of working, or org chart dropped on a Monday morning with a demand to keep up. Then like me, you’re surprised when what comes back isn’t performance. It’s skipping the next sprint, going back to walking at incline, or stepping away altogether.

As leaders we call that resistance to change, but I don’t think that’s what it is. It’s fight or flight wearing a golf shirt.

I had a writing workshop leader who talked about how it was evolutionary that the brain interpreted the unknown as danger. How it knows there’s no tiger inside the cave, but outside all bets are off.

Nobody’s nervous system asks for permission to react. Mine didn’t before it decided that treadmill was a threat. And your team’s isn’t going to before they decide your new initiative is a danger either, especially if all they’ve been given is the demand and none of the warmup.

So, what calms that threat response down? It’s not motivation. I wasn’t missing any drive to take on that Sprint 8 session. And it’s not a pep talk. I’d made my decision on the way to the gym. In my experience, it’s two things: awareness, or knowing what’s coming before it shows up, and input. It’s having some real say in what’s happening, even if just time to react.

Those aren’t soft or touchy-feely additions to the project plan. They’re the warmup. They are the things that tell your organization’s nervous system that it has time to prepare and there are no tigers on the other side of the cave.

I knew that was the fix for my own body before the next sprint. The next day, I added a few minutes of incline walking before switching programs. I added a warmup. That solution was clear once I wasn’t in mid-panic.

It’s less obvious at work. Change initiatives have deadlines and those deadlines are often urgent. So leaders skip the warmup, tell their teams to run, and then are surprised by the distress.

The answer isn’t to slow everything down, because some of those sprints are necessary and the deadlines real. But a hard sprint goes better with a bit of warmup. Even a forced change goes better with a little awareness and input.

The next time you need your team to sprint, what warmup are you giving them first?

Doing outreach is hard. If audience building is talking in front of a dark room, outreach is slipping something under the closed door.

With that in mind, I decided to send a batch of handwritten cards out to a few friends and colleagues a couple of weeks ago. These weren’t pitches. Most of them were more of the “hey, it’s been a while how are you?” variety.

I have no way of knowing if the card stood out more than just another email in the inbox, but one of them landed me a spot on a panel at the end of the month. I do know the call started with “I got your card,” so I’m using that as proof of concept.

If you’re trying to build an audience or awareness of your brand or offering, a borrowed audience like being a guest on a panel or podcast is a great way to do it. Think of it as someone else filling the room for you, turning on the lights, and making sure the mic is on.

When's the last time something arrived in your mailbox that made you want to pick up the phone?

It also means that you’re thinking about, or probably even start planning, 2027. Last fall we wrote about five questions to ask yourself and your team as you begin planning.

Those essential questions are still a great roadmap for the planning process, but something I read this week caused me to think about them differently.

I was working on some PDU for a project management certification and came across the definitions of a project, program and portfolio.

Projects are the easiest to define, and we all know one when we see it. It’s a task or group of tasks with a defined goal and a clear start and finish. A process improvement, software conversion, and an acquisition are all examples of a project.

A program is a group of related projects that are grouped for extra benefits. The whole of a program is greater than the sum of the individual projects. A program to improve speed to fulfilment may include projects to streamline facility layouts, implement new software for enterprise planning, inventory, or vendor management, and worker training.

Finally, a portfolio is focused on choosing and prioritizing the projects and programs to align with strategy and capacity.

What struck me was this definition of the difference between a portfolio and a program:

Programs ask “are we doing our projects right?” Portfolios ask “are we doing the right projects?”

Our daily and weekly plans should be about doing the work right, answering questions like “what do I need to do today to advance goal x?” But, when it comes to annual planning like you’re probably starting now, focus should be on doing the right things.

Let’s look at those five questions again, and propose some changes.

#1: Which business objective does this advance?

This question is first for a reason, and it holds up. Tying each plan to a business objective is the first step in building a portfolio instead of a pile of plans or work.

#2: What does success look like in one sentence?

This is a “doing projects right” question. It’s necessary for the success of each project, but a clear definition of doing it correctly does mean that the work earns its place in your 2027 plans.

#3: Who needs to be aligned for this to work?

Same here. Once we make a decision, we need to decide who is carrying it out. But, this is a project-level question. We’ll identify a better question to ask to reveal capacity later.

#4: What is the next smallest step we can take?

Ask this question over and over to keep your work manageable and aligned with its original purpose. But this question is too small in scope to build a portfolio around.

#5: What do we need to stop doing in order to make space?

This is one of the most important questions to ask about everything you are considering for your portfolio in 2027. This is the question that keeps you from having a list of a dozen priorities with no chance of finishing more than two.

Cutting your portfolio down to three-five realistic items may seem like shortening your reach. The world talks about stretch and Big Hairy Audacious Goals but building a portfolio of ten initiatives when you only have capacity for two isn’t being ambitious. It’s being structurally dishonest.

You have your proposed dozen. Here are the questions to ask, in order, to build your realistic portfolio:

#1: Which business objective does this advance?

This one stays. Ask it first and every time. If the work isn’t closely and easily tied to an objective, it doesn’t earn its place.

#2: What do we need to stop doing in order to make space?

If we think this initiative belongs on the list, what do we need to drop to make room? After all, you probably haven’t finished everything you set out to do in 2026.

#3 What are we structurally stopping, not just deprioritizing?

This may even be question #2A. Unclear answers to this question are how you end up with a list of twelve in the first place. Deprioritizing something doesn’t mean moving it down the list in case there is time. It means deciding that it doesn’t earn a place.

#4 Who loses a task, a meeting, or a responsibility because of this plan?

Don’t just consider clearing capacity for the organization as you plan. To earn its place, any new initiative must come with space for your teams.

#5 Which three priorities would still be true if you only had a third of the time you're assuming you'll have?

You probably already know which of your priorities would survive this cut. The hardest part is admitting the other nine were never really priorities to begin with.

A program is put together to make sure we doing our projects right. A portfolio asks whether the org is doing the right projects. These are two distinct questions, but most of the time we only get around to asking one of them.

Like most of you, I’ve spent a lot of my career working on the first question. How do we execute well, hit the date, and make a clean handoff? Those questions often have clear answer, making them feel productive to chase.

The second question is less cut and dried. It requires honesty with ourselves in a way that doesn’t show in a project plan. Honesty that’s counterintuitive. Honesty that says we’ll get more done if we try to do less. There’s no clean finish line when we ask if a project deserves the time we’re planning to give it. Or what we’d actually miss if we never started.

So we skip those questions for the ones that feel more like progress.

You probably know which three priorities on your list would survive if you had to cut that far. The more difficult part is admitting the nine that never should have been there in the first place.

Our daughter Mary moved in early on Monday. We’ve been in traffic on route 315. The cones leading to campus. Felt the urge to get out of everyone’s way just to find a bit of space to breathe.

That’s what I thought I’d feel on Monday. The practical relief of not being on other people’s timeline, not being bookended by their bins and boxes. Not feeling obligated to their urgency.

What surprised me was what we did with that extra space. We took a few pictures, talked about where things would go in the room. “Is this one bigger than last year?” It was nothing dramatic. I’m not trying to say we savored the time or tried to hold onto it, but we walked to another building and even took a couple of pictures (Mary wouldn’t sign the release for me to share.)

It’s a small thing, but we had a minute to say goodbye at the cars before we drove off. She to the parking deck, us to the highway.

Take away the crowds and you don’t automatically get meaning. But, you do get space. What you do with that space is still up to you.

Where would a little more space change what you notice?

Behind the door is his father’s old office as detailed in this article from last June. Dick Kempthorn ran the dealership on Cleveland Avenue from 1965 until he died in 2019, at 92. When the Volvo complex got renovated a few years later, the crew built the new interior walls around that office on purpose. Nobody wanted to touch it.

“Everybody treats this like a museum,” Eric said.

He wanted Huang, the new owner, and Huang’s two sons to understand his father as much as they understood the dealership. Then he told them the part every longtime customer already knows. Dick Kempthorn did business the old-fashioned way, on a handshake. One family alone has bought a hundred cars there.

On August 17, Kempthorn Motors was sold to Great Lakes Auto Group. After 88 years and three generations, Eric Kempthorn didn’t announce the sale like a loss. He talked about legacy, choosing a buyer who “shares our family values,” and making sure the name, the staff, and the story would all still be standing after the sale, even without a Kempthorn behind the counter.

The scale of Great Lakes presented the best opportunity to grow the Kempthorn Legacy, and it’s employees.

The same week, a few miles away, the Canton Repository ran a different kind of story. Jessie Newlon, 33, is co-owner of Gold’N Krisp Potato Chips. She started riding shotgun on the delivery route with her sister at fifteen and officially as an employee five years later. She learned production on the floor under her dad. And somewhere along the way her role turned to the financial and administrative side. Somewhere after that she became a co-owner alongside her mom and both sisters.

Sixty-five years and four generations of making one perfect thing.

Two Stark County business featured in the same week. With two different decisions about what to do with the business their parents and grandparents built. One sold. One is still all in the family. Neither is the model, and both are worth paying attention to.

Gold’N Krisp got where it is by roles sorting themselves out, in real time, over two decades. Delivery route. Production floor. Books. Ownership. Nobody handed Jessie Newlon a title. She grew into one, and so did her sisters, until four women each held a distinct, named piece of a business that used to be one man’s.

Kempthorn got where it is by asking a harder question early and answering it honestly: what actually needs to survive here, the family’s ownership or the family’s legacy? They chose Great Lakes specifically because it would keep the name, keep the staff, and has the resources to keep almost ninety years of history intact.

Different decisions. Same discipline underneath both of them.

That’s the part worth sitting with if you’re running a business right now. Clarity doesn’t tell you whether to keep the business in the family or sell it. It just makes sure that whichever way you go, you go on purpose. It’s about whether anyone inside the business could tell you right now what’s actually being protected and what isn’t. The name. The building. The relationships. The paycheck. The mission. Pick two people in your business and ask them separately. If you get two different answers, you don’t have a succession problem yet. You have a clarity problem that will become one, whichever direction you eventually go.

Dick Kempthorn’s advice to his kids, according to the family, was simpler than any of this: if you want something done, do it now. Jessie Newlon has her grandfather’s version of the same line tattooed on her arm, “do it now.”

Neither family waited for a plan to arrive from somewhere else. They just kept getting clear, out loud, with each other, one decision at a time. That’s the whole method. It’s not more complicated than that, and it’s not easier either.

What have you recognized, is worth protecting in your business, and what have you just never gotten around to deciding?

I can’t imagine it was the first time the family behind Great Lakes Auto Group had seen the door that was profiled in 2025.

Behind that door is Dick Kempthorn’s old office at Kempthorn Motors on Cleveland Avenue. Eric’s father ran the dealership from 1965 to 2019. When the building was renovated after Dick died, the crew built the new walls around that office on purpose. Nobody touched it.

“Everybody treats this like a museum,” Eric said.

Kempthorn Motors sold on August 17 after 88 years and three generations. And a fourth entering the business.

Eric Kempthorn talked about the decision like a family that knew exactly what it wanted out of it. He picked a buyer who “shares our family values.” He walked the new owners through his father’s history as much as he walked them through the books. He made sure the name stays on the building, and the staff stay employed.

That’s a family that had clearly already answered a hard question before the deal ever closed: what needs to survive here, the ownership or the legacy?

I keep coming back to this one because it’s not the version of a family business story we usually tell. It’s not about staying in the family at all costs. It’s about knowing what you’re protecting before you decide anything.

Where in your business have you avoided a decision because you haven’t actually named what you’re trying to protect?

First, the clickable headline:

At last month’s Business Connection Live Renee Powell talked to the Massillon Chamber about the growth and investment in her family’s Clearview Golf Club in East Canton. I’m always going to read an article about growth close to home, but this one was extra interesting as it showed that the golf industry at large continues to reverse some of its pre-pandemic challenges.

Then there was the lede:

The newest local private golf club is nowhere and everywhere.

Not a new course or resident league or partnership with a single club, but rather a “club without a course.” A community of like-minded golfers with access to tee times and top clubs in Chicago, Atlanta, and now NE Ohio. Tee times without friction. Membership without initiation.

The growth of NewClub landed with me because it follows two of my closely held beliefs:

First, when it comes to change deliberate is often faster. NewClub has added a new community about every four years - from its Chicago roots in 2017, to the Atlanta area four years later, and NE Ohio today. The model relies on deep course partnerships and vibrant communities of golfers. They probably could have grown faster, and may have even faced pressure to do so, but it would have been at the expense of their customers and their experience.

Charging into something new sounds good, but often comes with the kind of false starts and uneven progress that cost time and money.

The second belief builds closely on the first. Most growth is relational, not mechanical. Even when it looks mechanical on the surface: installing a new software, automating a process, integrating AI into a workflow, there are people at each step of the way. For change to truly stick, those people need to know why things are changing, the benefit to them, and have the tools and training to work in the new way. Without that, they are likely to look for ways to work around the change and go back to the old way of doing things.

NewClub probably could have worked through the mechanics of adding new regions and courses to their network faster. But, it would have been been without the people that are the heart of the community. They would have written the procedure that no one follows.

I don’t know if Considine and Colwell ever called it strategy. Probably just felt like the right pace. But nine years and three cities later, the slow way looks a lot like the smart way.

Where in your own business have you sped past the people part to get to the finish line faster? I’d bet you already know the answer.

The main idea of the talk was that what we often name as a dislike or fear of change is really a reaction to uncertainty. People, and SMB owners and leaders know this more than anyone, are not afraid of change per se. We’re always looking for ways to learn and grow and accomplishing things we didn’t even know were possible.

We are uncomfortable when there is a lack of clarity. When change is forced on us. When we’re given the procedure and not the context.

Preparing my comments led me to some pretty stark statistics from Gartner, Prosci, and LinkedIn:

1. 90% of businesses are in the middle of some kind of change.

2. 64% of people report being overwhelmed by that change.

3. Only 32% of those changes are going to be successful.

The antidote to the frustration and false starts is just as clear: clarity. Change that is effectively sponsored is successful at a rate of 3 to 1 vs. change that isn’t. Those successful changes are five times more likely to finish on schedule and nearly twice as likely to be on budget.

"Sponsorship" is what the data measures. What creates sponsorship is clarity. It’s naming the actual problem, the solution, and the priority. Without that, there's nothing to sponsor. That's the gap I help close.

There’s a 90% chance that you are going through change right now. As an SMB owner you wear many hats. I know because I do the same. I’m the analyst, solution designer, project manager and bookkeeper. I maintain the website, write the newsletter, answer the phone and emails.

What are you carrying right now? Bring it to Office Hours or schedule a Clarity Call.

PS. If you are interested, here’s a PDF of the deck

Canton Chamber Tip Club 06

560KB ∙ PDF file

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I’d done everything right. I gave my source everything it needed. Make, model, specs. It came back confident. SATA. So I bought SATA.

I cloned the old drive. Installed the new one. The case slid back in place. It booted clean. Everything that could go wrong went right.

And then nothing worked.

Shortcuts were missing. Programs wouldn’t load. It took one click in File Explorer to understand what had happened: the drive I’d disconnected to install the new one was my data drive. Not the OS drive. Not the one filling up. My C: drive was an M.2 stick tucked behind the motherboard. Right advice, but wrong drive.

The execution was clean. The diagnosis was wrong.

I’ve been in enough organizations to know what that moment feels like at scale. The campaign that launched on time and landed flat. The restructure that ran smoothly and solved nothing. The new software that got adopted and didn’t fix the problem. Everyone did their job. The thing still didn’t work.

Bad advice isn’t neutral. It’s worse than no advice.

No advice leaves you uncertain. Uncertain people ask more questions. They slow down. They look around. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it’s honest. It keeps you in the problem longer.

Bad advice closes the loop prematurely. It feels like clarity. You have a diagnosis, a plan, a part on the way. You stop asking questions because the question feels answered. And the better you are at execution, the deeper you get before you realize the premise was wrong.

The most dangerous moment isn’t when things go badly. It’s when everything goes right and nothing works.

The hard question, and the one that rarely gets asked, isn’t “what’s the solution?” It’s “are we solving the right problem?”

That question requires something most advice-giving skips. It requires sitting with the problem long enough to understand it. Not pattern-matching to a familiar answer. Not reaching for the closest available solution. Actually asking: what’s really going on here?

For me, it took pulling the service manual. Slowing down after the pivot didn’t work. Reading the actual specs of the machine in front of me. That’s when I found the extra SATA port I didn’t know existed. And realized the work I’d written off as wasted was actually done. The clone was good. It would boot from the new location. The false start wasn’t a failure. It just wasn’t useful yet.

The fix came. But only after I stopped executing and started diagnosing.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working inside organizations that were stuck: most execution problems are diagnosis problems in disguise. The plan is fine. The team is capable. The effort is real. But somewhere upstream, someone answered a question nobody fully asked.

What you actually need — before the plan, before the solution, before the confident advice — is someone willing to ask whether you’re working on the right drive.

So I asked for help. The advice was confident. I provided make, model, specs, everything it needed.

It told me SATA. I bought SATA.

I cloned the old drive. Installed the new one. The case slid back in place smoothly. It booted up without a problem. Everything that could go wrong went right.

But then shortcuts were missing and programs didn’t load. The drive I replaced was my data drive, not the OS drive.

My C: drive was an M.2 stick drive, not SATA. The execution was clean, but the diagnosis was wrong.

I sat with that for a minute. The frustration of it. Not just the mistake. The specific quality of a mistake that only happens when you do everything right.

Eventually I pulled the service manual. Found an extra SATA port I didn’t know existed. Ordered a data cable and a power splitter. And figured out that the clone I’d written off as wasted work would boot fine from the new location.

The false start wasn’t wasted. It just wasn’t useful yet.

But the thing I keep coming back to isn’t the pivot. It’s the moment before it. When everything worked and nothing was fixed.

Confident advice isn’t the same as correct advice. And the gap between them is usually invisible until it isn’t.

There’s a version of that I’ve always called discipline. Show up when you said you would and finish what you started. Don’t improvise when you committed to something. Eliminate decision fatigue.

But at one point this weekend, I had a window and a choice. The plan said wait. Something quieter said go.

So I went.

It felt strange. Not wrong. Just unfamiliar. Like a muscle I don’t use enough.

After a bit of discomfort the muscle felt better for having been used. The drive would still get me home, but under the lights it was also something new.

Often the plan stops being a tool and starts being a rule. How often risk avoidance looks like discipline from the inside. How often we stay in our processes, procedures, and the way we’ve always done it, not because it’s the right call, but because leaving wasn’t in the plan.

Rigidity dressed up as discipline is still rigidity.

Worth noticing.

So far, I’ve been using my two modern Lodge skillets, but last weekend I stumbled across a late-period era Wagner at an antique shop. Probably from the 60s or early 70s. Not quite vintage, but older than I.

It wasn't in bad shape. No warping, no cracks. Just decades of carbon and old seasoning built up in uneven layers. Just rough and dark and a little neglected looking.

Someone had loved that pan.

There’s a whole process for restoring a pan like that: lye bath or Easy Off with the yellow cap and a day in a garbage bag to release the old carbon and seasoning, a good scrub, maybe a vinegar bath for rust. Followed by a good wash with soap and water, a towel dry, and a spell on the burner to completely dry things out and open the pores in the iron.

That’s all procedure. Written and repeatable.

What was unexpected, and what struck me, was the look of the bare iron.

Specifically the circular tooling marks from the craftsperson who pulled that skillet out of its sandy mold, hooked it to a lathe, and expertly machined it to a smooth finish. That’s something you don’t see in modern skillets. That’s a direct connection from that person’s labor, though the stovetops, ovens, and campfires of the last 60 years, and into my care where I can pass it along someday.

It’s been through three rounds of seasoning now and even cooked its first cornbread. Eventually I may not be able so see it, but I’ll know that fingerprint left by the lathe is there, proof of the care that goes into crafting something designed to endure.

It came from a consulting firm. Cost real money. Arrived with a presentation, a framework, and maybe a roadmap. The recommendations were probably reasonable. Some of them were genuinely good.

None of it was ever implemented.

Part of my onboarding at one point in my career was being handed exactly that binder. It was how I was supposed to learn what a system could do. Not what it did. No plan behind it. No resources dedicated to it. Just pages of what was possible from someone who had already moved on to the next engagement.

I’ve thought about that binder a lot since.

Not because it was unusual, but because it wasn’t.

There’s a version of help that feels like help but is actually designed to keep you dependent on the helper.

The manager who answers every question directly, immediately, and completely feels like a resource. What they’re actually doing is making sure the team never has to think without them. Every answer creates the next question. The manager stays indispensable. The team stops growing.

The consulting firm that delivers recommendations without implementation has the same dynamic, whether they intend it or not. The binder creates the follow-on engagement. The client has pages but not progress. The next conversation starts with “we could help you implement this.”

It feels like service. It’s actually a grip.

The alternative is harder to sell because it looks like less in the short term.

The leader who delegates outcomes instead of tasks gives the team a problem to solve, not an answer to execute. It’s messier. It takes longer. The team makes mistakes they wouldn’t have made with tighter control. But they also develop the confidence to move without being told. Eventually they stop needing the same level of guidance.

That’s the goal. Not to make yourself unnecessary forever. To make yourself unnecessary for this problem.

A good thinking partner works the same way. They help you define what you’re actually solving for. They work through it with you, not for you. And when you’ve found the answer, they stop. Not because the relationship is over. Because the work is done.

I think about this in two distinct ways in my own practice.

Advisory is available when you need a perspective above the weeds. You define the problem. We work toward clarity together. You move forward on your own. That’s not a standing meeting or an ongoing retainer. It’s a conversation when you need one.

A project is different. I’m filling a role you don’t currently have for a specific, defined engagement with a clear outcome. When the outcome is achieved, the engagement ends.

In both cases the goal is the same. You leave better than you arrived. Clearer. More confident. Still independent.

That doesn't mean the relationship ends. It means if we work together again, it's because I helped. Not because I made myself hard to leave.

The dusty binder is a symptom of help that was never designed to end.

The question worth asking before you engage a consultant or advisor is how do they talk about success? If the answer is a deliverable, be careful. If the answer is your progress, you are in the right room.

It came from a consulting firm. Real money, real pages, a roadmap for what a system could do. No plan behind it. No resources. No one accountable for what happened next.

It was how I was supposed to learn what was possible.

I’ve seen versions of it everywhere since. The recommendations that never became decisions. The framework that lived in a presentation and nowhere else. The follow-up engagement to implement the recommendations from the last engagement.

It’s not always bad intent. Sometimes it’s just what happens when help is designed around a deliverable instead of an outcome.

A deliverable ends when the pages are done. An outcome ends when something actually improves.

The people I work with are busy enough already. The last thing they need is more pages.

So the operations and servicing teams got to work. They spent months rebuilding the entire document library. New naming structure. New keywords. New workflow. Carefully designed, thoroughly tested, properly documented. And fully converted. By the time they finished, they had something genuinely good. A real solution to a real problem.

Then they rolled it out.

And the loan officers kept their desk files.

What followed got diagnosed as a change management problem. Communication wasn’t sufficient. Training fell short. The front line was resistant to new ways of working. All of that became the story.

None of it was wrong, exactly. But it wasn’t the real problem either.

Nobody had asked the loan officers how they worked. Nobody sat with them long enough to understand what they reached for during a loan, how they moved through a file, what they needed to find and when. The project had been built entirely from the ops and servicing perspective because that’s who supposedly owned the problem. Their better system would be better for everyone.

The case was never made to everyone who had to change.

In many ways, things were worse than before. At least before the months spent on the project, everyone knew where the files were. Now there were two systems, neither of them complete, and a front line that had learned not to trust the next initiative.

When leaders tell me they have a communication problem, I listen carefully.

Communication is almost always part of it. But it’s also a very safe thing to say out loud. A leader can acknowledge poor communication without putting the decision itself on the table. The plan was right, the path was right, but we just didn’t bring people along soon enough or clearly enough. Fix the communication and move on.

It’s a convenient place to stop. And stopping there has a cost.

Think about deciding where to meet your spouse for dinner without asking her. You pick the place, show up at six, and she isn’t there. You call. She didn’t know. That’s a communication problem, and it’s easy to fix.

But say you tell her. And she still doesn’t want to go.

Now the communication problem has been solved and the resistance didn’t go away. Which means it was never really a communication problem. You picked a restaurant for yourself and expected her to want what you wanted. The case wasn’t made. It was assumed.

That’s what happened at the bank. The ops team solved their problem, communicated the solution, and called it change management when the front line didn’t follow. The harder question never got asked. Did we build a case that works for the people whose daily work we’re asking to change? There wasn’t a good answer, so the conversation stopped somewhere safer.

Most change efforts that stall aren’t stalling because of poor communication.

They’re stalling because the case was built for the people already convinced. The people in the room when the decision got made, who lived with the problem long enough to feel the solution as obvious. By the time anyone notices the disconnect, the project is months in, the budget is committed, and re-examining the case feels like going backward.

So the diagnosis becomes communication. Or training. Or culture. Anything that leaves the original decision intact.

The people who aren’t moving are often the first clear feedback the effort ever got. They’re not obstacles. They’re information.

The question worth asking before you launch is whether you’ve made a case that works for everyone who has to say yes. The time to ask it is before the months of work, before the rollout, before the communication plan.

Most teams ask how to communicate the decision. Fewer ask whether they’ve earned the right to make it.

Those are different questions. The first one is easier. The second one is the work.

Spent real time on it. Picked the metrics, designed the layout, got it into production. It was genuinely well made.

People kept sending emails with questions the dashboard was supposed to answer.

The easy explanation was that nobody read the announcement. And we all know people resist new tools. And maybe the training wasn’t enough.

The harder explanation was that nobody asked the people sending emails what they actually needed to see.

The dashboard answered my questions. Not theirs.

I keep coming back to this when leaders tell me they have a communication problem. Communication is almost always part of it. But it’s also a safe place to stop. You can admit poor communication without confronting the work that came before it.

The harder question is whether the case was built for the people who had to say yes. Not just the people already in the room.

The people still sending emails weren't the problem. They were the answer to a question I didn’t ask.

We didn’t workshop each other’s drafts. We didn’t share what we were working on. We got on a call, said hello, and wrote. Silently. For up to two hours.

It sounds strange but it worked remarkably well.

Nobody pushed anyone. Nobody checked in. People came and went as they needed. But, when the time was over, we’d done the thing that was easy to put off.

The accountability wasn’t pressure. It was just the quiet knowledge that someone else had blocked the same time and would be there when I logged on.

I’ve been thinking about that lately.

Protected thinking time is one of those things most leaders know they need and almost nobody actually keeps. Not because they don’t value it. Because it’s the easiest thing to give away. A meeting request lands. A question needs an answer. The calendar fills from the outside in.

Early Ink didn’t solve that just by adding discipline. It solved it by adding company. Writing, like leadership, can be lonely. And nobody wanted to be the one who didn’t show up. Once you were there, the work came easier than it did alone.

I’m holding lunchtime on Wednesdays for that same reason. Office Hours. Come with a question or just come to work. Either way, you won’t be keeping the time by yourself.

Join me for Office Hours here.