Is it a zero sum game

Any parent knows the math: anything I do is taking away from something else, because there is no spare time. If I go for a run, that’s time I’m not spending with my three-year-old Marlow. If I meet a friend to see Project Hail Mary (which I recently did, and it was an awesome movie — thanks for going with me, Charles), that’s an evening I’m not spending with my partner, Amy, or helping get our family ready for Passover, or doing any of the million small things it takes to keep everyone fed, clothed, and reasonably happy.

That’s everyone’s story. But for an independent consultant, those same minutes are income. I don’t get paid by existing. I know that’s not quite how salaried work functions, but it can feel that way from the other side. The only way I get paid is if I do the work; the only way I have the work is if I build the pipeline. So the zero-sum game cuts in a second direction, and now I’m balancing being a parent, a partner, a person, and a business owner — all at once, all the time.

I struggle with guilty feelings about this, because all of it is my choice. I can’t offload my guilt and convert it into anger at a boss who made me stay late at the office. When I stay late, it’s because I chose that over pretending for the 500th time that I’m Elsa and Marlow is Anna. (Actually, maybe I will stay late. (I hate Frozen so much.))

So instead it’s a series of trade-offs that are all — every one — on my shoulders. If I leave at 5pm to be home for dinner, bath, and bedtime, I think about the client work that didn’t get done, and I wonder if I’ve damaged the relationship. When Amy and Marlow go to the playground and I stay home to get ahead on a project so I’ll have time for new client outreach later in the week, I think about the fun they’re having and I feel the absence. I wonder if Marlow is sad I’m not there.

So much good

For the first few years of having a kid, I took stock of my life and liked what I found. I loved my child more than anything, and spending time with her was the best part of every day. Amy is an amazing person. She has the courage I wish I had, a way of seeing things that constantly gives me new perspective, and an emotional intelligence that makes me feel like I just put on my glasses (my eyesight is very bad). Work was full in a good way: I loved my clients, my projects, and my day-to-day activities. I was challenged and stretched.

It wasn’t all roses, of course. I don’t think my heart rate got above resting for the first 18 months of being a parent (unless inadvertently). I barely saw friends. My semi-regular board game night went out the window. I hardly watched any Liverpool soccer matches with my buddies, I didn’t see many new movies.

I told myself this was fine, because my life was filled with nothing but good things. My days were engaging, novel, full of love and joy. How could a stretch of days with so much good in them be anything other than perfect?

In retrospect, there was a trap here, and I could not see it. Because the things being pushed out were being pushed out by other things I loved, I didn’t register the loss. Every time I checked, all I saw was good. How could so much good be bad?

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the whole picture. Aristotle (I studied Ancient Greek language and literature in college) described the Golden Mean: a well-lived life involves many things, not just one thing, even if that one thing is incredible. The Golden Mean is about balance and moderation. The parts of me that weren’t being nurtured — the friendships, the body, the solitude — needed attention.

It didn’t become a crisis. But it’s been a long, slow project to reintroduce some balance.

One thing consulting gets right

One of the things I appreciate about consulting is that it builds in a version of this lesson by default. Because I spread myself across multiple clients and projects, my professional identity isn’t a single thing. That’s different from my previous life as a Chief of Staff and de facto COO/CFO of a large nonprofit, where I threw myself into the role so completely that it became my whole sense of professional worth. My social network, motivations, and beliefs about what I was doing all rested on one foundation. When it ended (as everything eventually does), the transition was wrenching. It was healthy in the long run but harder than it needed to be.

Consulting has built-in bulwarks against that kind of collapse. The work is spread out. No single client or project carries the full weight of my identity. I didn’t expect to need that structural resilience in my personal life, too, but here I am trying to apply the same principle to fatherhood, partnership, friendship, and the rest of it.

Still at it

I have a therapist. I meditate. I write. And these are still hard things, every day — the guilt, the trade-offs, the nagging feeling that I’m always taking from somewhere and giving to somewhere else, and always coming up short in at least one direction.

I’d love to hear from anyone wrestling with some version of this. These are the kinds of things that get easier when you talk about them with people who understand the particular shape of this life.

I didn’t have the answer, either, but I had a method: break the question into smaller pieces. How many doors per day can one canvasser knock? How many contact attempts does it take to get a completed conversation? What’s the realistic knock rate in urban versus rural areas, and what’s the split across those three states? How many working days are in the timeline? None of these sub-questions were hard to estimate. Combined, they gave us a staffing range that held up well enough to build a budget around.

I do some version of this on most engagements. A nonprofit wants to know whether a revenue target is realistic. A campaign director wants to know if there’s enough time to hit a persuasion goal before Election Day. An executive director wants to know how many staff a new program actually requires versus how many she wishes it required. I almost never have clean data for these questions. What I have is the ability to take the big unanswerable thing and decompose it into a set of smaller, answerable things.

It turns out this has a name. Enrico Fermi, the physicist, used to pose problems like this to his students, like “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” No one actually knows the real answer to this question — it’s not tracked anywhere, and they checked! But you can get in the ballpark if you estimate the population, the percentage of households with a piano, how often a piano needs tuning, and how many tunings one tuner can do in a year, and suddenly you’re close. The technique doesn’t produce a precise answer , but it does produce a range, and a range is almost always more useful than a pure guess.

I learned about Fermi problems from Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s book Superforecasting, which I want to spend some time on here because it reframed how I think about almost every part of the consulting relationship.

The forecasters who weren’t supposed to be good at this

Tetlock ran a large-scale research project called the Good Judgment Project that tracked thousands of people making predictions about geopolitical events over several years. A small subset of forecasters were consistently more accurate than the rest. They outperformed not just average participants but intelligence analysts with access to classified information. Tetlock called them superforecasters.

What set them apart was a set of habits: comfort with probability rather than certainty, a discipline of breaking problems into estimable parts rather than reasoning from gut feeling, willingness to update beliefs in small increments as new information arrives, and the humility to treat their own confidence as something to be calibrated rather than trusted.

That last one is the one I think about often. Superforecasters are people who maintain a more accurate picture of what they don’t know. They hold their beliefs loosely enough to revise them, and tightly enough to act on them. That balance — conviction without rigidity — is the posture I’m trying to maintain every time I walk into a client’s organization and start forming a diagnosis.

The Good Judgment Project’s website has a solid overview of the research (not paywalled). The book is a better read than most popular science. Gardner is a skilled co-writer and the narrative moves. But the framework itself is what I want to pull on here, because once I started seeing consulting through the lens of estimation under uncertainty, a bunch of other things I’d been reading clicked into place.

Why organizations can’t do what they know they should

One of Tetlock’s findings is that knowing the right approach doesn’t mean people will use it. Superforecasters have to fight their own cognitive biases constantly: the pull of overconfidence, the comfort of early conclusions, or the temptation to stop updating once you’ve landed on a view.

This dynamic is the subject of one of a great article, Alec Lewis’s piece in The Athletic, “NFL teams know the best way to draft, so why aren’t they doing it?” (gift article so you can get through the NYT paywall). Researchers including Nobel laureate Richard Thaler demonstrated nearly twenty years ago that NFL teams systematically overvalue high draft picks and would be better off accumulating more picks by trading down. The probability that any given pick outperforms the next player chosen at the same position is barely better than a coin flip. This research is well known, but most teams keep doing the opposite.

Lewis interviews fourteen general managers, coaches, scouts, and analytics staffers, and what emerges is a portrait of organizational decision-making that will be painfully familiar to anyone who consults with nonprofits. The GM is focused on job security more than long-term roster building. The coach believes he can develop raw talent better than the data suggests. The scouts want to justify the months they spent evaluating a prospect. Ownership understands the logic intellectually but can’t resist the emotional pull of a big, exciting pick. And there’s a culture-wide reluctance to admit that outcomes are more random than anyone wants to believe, because admitting that means admitting that your expertise is less predictive than you thought.

I’ve been the consultant holding a well-supported recommendation and watching a client choose the opposite. For a long time I interpreted that as a failure of persuasion on my part, or stubbornness on theirs. This article helped me see it differently: as a system of competing pressures that makes the irrational choice feel rational to the people inside it. The Fermi-style decomposition can produce the right answer, but the right answer still has to survive the organization.

Where good analysis goes to die

Which brings me to a piece I think every consultant should read: W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s “Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy,” originally published in Harvard Business Review in 1997.

Their central finding: people will commit to a decision they disagree with if they believe the process that produced it was fair. And they will sabotage a decision they agree with if they feel the process was unfair.

Kim and Mauborgne identify three principles at play in group processes: engagement (people affected by the decision had input), explanation (they understand why the decision was made), and expectation clarity (they know what’s expected of them going forward). The article includes a case study where identical changes were introduced at two manufacturing plants, one with fair process and one without. The plant that skipped it nearly fell apart, and the plant that practiced it transformed successfully.

This connects to the Superforecasting framework in a way I didn’t see at first. Tetlock’s superforecasters are good at getting to the right answer. But the right answer, deployed without fair process, often produces worse outcomes than a mediocre answer that everyone helped develop. I’ve delivered strategies that gathered dust, and when I look back at why, the explanation is almost always here: not in my analysis, but in how I presented it, who felt consulted, and whether the people responsible for implementation understood the reasoning behind the recommendation or just received the conclusion.

We wrote about the organizational mechanics of this in our Strategic Agility series. The management layer between strategy and execution is exactly where fair process lives or dies. (I think you can get the HBR article if you sign up for a free account. You get a few articles for free each month that way.)

The decisions that don’t deserve this much anguish

One more dimension of the uncertainty problem. Jeff Bezos, in a short section of Invent and Wander called “Disagree and Commit,” makes a distinction I now use with clients often: one-way doors versus two-way doors.

One-way doors are irreversible, high-consequence decisions. They deserve slow deliberation, multiple perspectives, and careful analysis. Two-way doors are reversible. If the decision turns out to be wrong, you can walk back through. Bezos’s observation is that as organizations grow, they start applying the slow, heavyweight one-way-door process to everything. The result is not better decisions but rather paralysis.

This maps directly onto the Fermi mindset. The Fermi approach says: I don’t need perfect data, I need a useful range. The Bezos framework says: I don’t need certainty about this decision, because if I’m wrong I can reverse it. Both are about calibrating the amount of deliberation to the actual stakes, and both require an honest assessment of how much you know and how much the decision actually costs if you’re wrong.

Most of the decisions I watch stall nonprofit organizations for weeks are two-way doors being treated like one-way doors. We built on this in our Strategic Agility piece on decision-making under uncertainty, where we turned the distinction into a practical tool called the Reversibility Test.

The room where it happens (badly)

There’s one more reading I want to mention, because it addresses the place where all of this thinking actually has to happen: the meeting.

Antony Jay’s “How To Run a Meeting,” published in Harvard Business Review in 1976 (I know), has aged better than almost anything I’ve read on the subject. Jay wrote a theory of what meetings are for — why human beings need them, what functions they perform that nothing else can replace, and how a chair should think about the role.

His most useful contribution is a taxonomy of what every agenda item is actually trying to accomplish: is it informative (share and discuss), constructive (generate something new), executive (assign responsibilities), or legislative (change the operating framework)? I’ve started mentally categorizing agenda items this way before meetings, and it clarifies why some meetings go nowhere, because nobody agreed on what the conversation was supposed to produce.

This matters for the Fermi problem, too. The moment of estimation and the moment of diagnosis almost always happen in a room with other people. The quality of the estimate depends not just on the thinking but on how the room is structured: who’s in it, whether junior voices are heard before senior voices anchor the conversation, or whether the chair has sorted out what each discussion is supposed to produce. Jay gives a structure for that. Susannah and I touched on some of this in our piece on why most meetings don’t need to exist.

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One more, for the bookshelf

Chris Zook and James Allen’s The Founder’s Mentality doesn’t connect to the Fermi framework as directly, but it’s worth including because it gives a diagnostic vocabulary for the organizational contexts where all of this plays out. Their argument: growth creates complexity, complexity creates internal dysfunction, and internal dysfunction kills the very thing that made the organization successful. They identify three predictable crises — overload, stall-out, and free fall — and most of the nonprofits I work with are somewhere in the first two without a name for what’s happening.

Having that name changes the engagement. Instead of solving symptoms, I can point at a pattern and say: this is overload, and here’s what usually comes next if we don’t address it. (The introduction and first chapter are enough to get the framework. The rest is case studies — useful but skippable if you’re short on time.)

The skill underneath all of it

What connects everything on this list is a single problem: how do you think clearly when you don’t have the information you want?

Fermi problems teach the method — decompose, estimate, combine. Superforecasting teaches the disposition — hold your beliefs loosely, update them often, calibrate your confidence. Fair process teaches the delivery — the best analysis in the world fails if the people who have to implement it don’t feel the process was legitimate. Bezos teaches the triage — not every decision deserves the same amount of anguish. Jay teaches the container — the meeting is where thinking either sharpens or falls apart. And Zook and Allen teach the context — the organizational dynamics that make clear thinking harder as organizations grow.

None of these were written for consultants. All of them describe what I actually do for a living more accurately than any consulting book I’ve read.

If you’ve come across something recently that changed how you think about the work — a book, an article, a paper from some other field entirely — reply to this email and tell me what it is. The best recommendations will show up in a future issue.

I have an office slash guest bedroom, a dual-monitor setup, noise-canceling headphones, good coffee within arm’s reach, and a door that closes. I have everything a person could want for focused work, and yet I routinely lose hours to the gravitational pull of Slack, email, finishing a half-read article, the sudden compulsion to check LinkedIn, or whatever else floats across my screen.

None of that exists on an airplane. My phone is in airplane mode. There’s no second screen. Nobody can reach me and I can’t reach anybody. Delta is always gassing up their free wifi, but I find that it rarely works or it works so bad that checking anything feels like punishment. I’m in a metal tube with a laptop, a tray table, and nowhere to be for the next few hours. And every single time, I land having written more, thought more clearly, and accomplished more real work than I would have in a full day at home.

The research backs up what the airplane already taught me

Angela Duckworth, the psychologist behind the concept of grit, published a piece in the New York Times late last year arguing that willpower is overrated (that’s a non-paywalled link, so check it out!). The people who are best at staying disciplined, she wrote, rarely rely on inner fortitude. Instead, they arrange their lives to minimize the need for willpower in the first place. She calls it situational agency.

An Olympic triathlete buys a house near the trails where he trains. A writer keeps off social media by not owning a smartphone. A teacher tells students to put their phones in their lockers, not their backpacks, and suddenly the lunchroom gets louder in the way lunchrooms should be.

Emily Berens and I wrote a few weeks ago about building a self-management system as an independent consultant: structure, prioritization, forcing mechanisms, the whole architecture. That article was about the system, and this piece is the daily-texture companion to that one. This one is about the Tuesday afternoon when you’re supposed to be writing a client memo and you’ve opened your inbox for the fourth time in twenty minutes.

This stuff applies to anyone who works from a computer, but it’s an acute problem for independent consultants specifically. When you worked in an office, the environment did a lot of this for you without anyone noticing. The commute created a transition between home-brain and work-brain. The physical office was a space designed for working, not for living; your novel and your laundry and your kid’s toys weren’t sitting in your peripheral vision. Colleagues provided ambient accountability, by which I mean the social reality that someone might glance at your screen or notice you’d been scrolling for twenty minutes. Meetings happened in a different room, which meant you physically moved between modes of work.

Independent consulting from home strips all of that away. You’re in the same chair, the same room, often the same screen, all day. The transitions that used to happen automatically now have to be built on purpose, and most of us don’t realize that until we’ve spent a year wondering why we can’t concentrate.

The airplane taught me that my focus problem is not a willpower problem, it’s an environment problem. And once I started treating it that way, things changed.

Return to W2, or the plan I didn’t think I needed

When I first went independent, one of the things I celebrated was the end of planning rituals. I was so glad not to have Monday morning check-ins or hourlong planning meetings. I didn’t have to report reporting what I was working on to a supervisor. I was free. I could just do the work.

What I actually did was meander. I’d start Monday with a vague sense of what needed to happen that week, pick up whatever felt most urgent or most interesting, and arrive at Friday wondering where the time went. I was doing stuff every day in the way that felt like productivity — lots of email, lots of tabs open, lots of meetings — but I wasn’t getting the important things done. The compounding work Emily and I wrote about, the work that builds a practice rather than just servicing it, kept sliding into next week.

So I went back to making a weekly plan, because I’d learned the hard way that my brain can’t hold a week in working memory and make good decisions about priority at the same time.

Here’s how it works now. Every Friday morning, I build my plan for the upcoming week. It’s actually a spreadsheet where each column is a day. At the very top, I have my personal things that are the non-negotiables I do every day, like get in some physical activity and play with my three-year old child. Below that, I have my non-recurring personal to-dos, like yesterday I needed to drop off a package at USPS and do the laundry. Then I have my work meetings for the day in order, and finally my work projects that I want to get done that day. I also get specific, so it’s not “work on the client report” but “finish sections 2 and 3 of the client report and send to Maria for review.”

Note this is not a calendar. A calendar is useful because you need to see your day and make sure things don’t overlap. But a calendar is a schedule, not a plan. A plan is a set of decisions about what matters and in what order.

Then I keep that plan open in front of me all day. It’s the first thing I go over in the morning after I make coffee, and I check it frequently as I get through things so I can cross them off. Crossing things off a list is a small pleasure, and everything I said I would do that day, I need to check off. If I don’t finish something, I don’t just let it float. A very important ritual is at the end of the day, I look at the rest of the week and revise my plan: what moves to tomorrow, what gets pushed, and what gets dropped. This five-minute reconciliation is where the real value lives, because it forces me to confront tradeoffs instead of pretending I’ll magically find more time.

The Friday planning session also includes a longer-term view: what do I care about this quarter, what’s the trajectory of my pipeline, and where am I investing in things that compound. That context is what prevents the weekly plan from becoming just a to-do list of whoever yelled loudest for my time.

Move the book

I love reading. I keep a book going at all times, and having it nearby for my late-morning coffee break or for clearing my head between long sessions is one of the genuine pleasures of working from home. But I learned the hard way that “nearby” can be a trap!

If the book is on my desk, it’s in my line of sight. And if it’s in my line of sight, I’m going to pick it up. Not for a full reading session, I tell myself, just to see what’s coming up in the next chapter, or to finish the page I stopped in the middle of. Then fifteen minutes vanish. This is the Duckworth argument: the problem isn’t that I lack the discipline to ignore a book. The problem is that the book is sitting three feet from my keyboard, and asking my brain to override that temptation fifty times a day is a losing strategy. So the book lives in another room until I’m ready for a break.

My general rule of thumb is if I don’t want to do something during my workday, I remove it from the space where I work. This sounds simple, but it works better than other productivity hacks I’ve tried. That also goes for things on my computer or on my phone.

Change the scenery

I don’t fully understand why this works, but when I’m stuck — when the deliverable isn’t coming together or my attention keeps fragmenting — moving to a different physical space often unlocks something. From my desk to the couch, from my apartment to a coffee shop, or from the coffee shop to a library.

It’s not about finding a “better” workspace. The couch isn’t objectively more conducive to writing than my desk. But the act of moving resets something in my brain. Maybe it’s that the new environment doesn’t carry the associations of the old one: the half-finished email I was going to get back to, the tab I left open, the mental residue of whatever I was doing before. I sit down somewhere new, and for a little while, the only thing in front of me is the thing I moved to do.

I think this is also why the airplane works. It’s not just the absence of distractions. It’s that I am in a completely different physical context, and my brain responds to the novelty by actually paying attention to what’s in front of it.

Unplug the second screen

This is another way to reverse-engineer the airplane.

I have a second monitor at my desk, and it’s essential for anything involving spreadsheets, comparing documents side by side, or building out a complex deliverable with lots of source material. But when I’m writing or thinking through a strategy or doing any kind of work that requires sustained attention, that second screen is trouble. It’s showing me something: my Gmail inbox, a Slack channel, or a browser with tabs open with interesting articles I saved to read later. Even if I’ve minimized everything, the screen is there, glowing in my peripheral vision, pulling a tiny thread of attention away from the main task all day long.

So when I need to focus, I unplug the monitor and move to a different spot. I take my laptop to the kitchen table or the couch or the coffee shop down the street. One screen, one task, and no ambient noise from the digital world. This is the airplane, minus the Biscoffs and the person reclining into my knees (I’m 6’3” tall, so it’s tough).

The key insight is that the second monitor isn’t a distraction because I’m weak-willed. It’s a distraction because it’s there. Duckworth’s research on phone placement and student grades found the same thing: the further away the phone, the better the grades. The students who moved their phones were not more disciplined people, but they’d made the temptation physically harder to act on, so they were more successful in avoiding distraction.

Kill your notifications

You’ve heard this before. I’m saying it again because you probably haven’t done it yet, or you’ve done it halfway.

Turn off all notifications on your computer. All of them: Slack, email, social media, texts, calendar reminders, everything. Every notification is a tiny interruption, and every interruption carries a recovery cost. Research suggests it takes over twenty minutes to fully regain deep focus after a distraction. If you get pinged six times in an hour, you haven’t had an hour of work. You’ve had six ten-minute fragments with no connective thread.

I know the objection: what if something is urgent? What I’ve found: almost nothing is. The things that feel urgent turns out to be urgent at the speed of an hour. Check your email and Slack on your terms, at intervals you decide. I do it roughly every ninety minutes or between finishing one project and starting a new one. Nothing has ever caught fire because I took ninety minutes to respond.

Virtual meetings (sob)

Everything I’ve described so far is about solo work: protecting your focus when you’re writing, building, and thinking. But a huge portion of most consultants’ weeks is spent in meetings, and virtually all of those meetings are now virtual. Consultant life means you’re staring at the very machine that houses every distraction you own.

This is a problem that didn’t exist in the same way ten years ago. When meetings happened over the phone, I could pace in my apartment and look out the window. The physical movement did something for attention that I didn’t fully appreciate until it was gone. Now I am pinned to a chair and a screen, watching a grid of faces while my email sits one alt-tab away. I find it genuinely hard to sustain attention on Zoom, because my body wants to be doing something else and my screen is offering a hundred alternatives at all times. (Oh how much I miss in-person meetings.)

A few things help. First, I try to abide by the same principle from earlier: I unplug my other screens before a virtual meeting starts. If I am on a laptop with no second monitor glowing in my periphery, there’s less to wander toward. Second, I push for phone calls when video isn’t essential. Not every conversation needs to be a Zoom. When I can take a call on my phone and walk around my apartment or step outside, my listening improves noticeably. I ask better questions, and I catch things I’d miss if I were sitting at my desk watching myself in a tiny rectangle.

Third — and this was the biggest change for me — I went back to handwritten notes. For years I took meeting notes on my computer because it was better for search, better for organization, and easier to share. All of that is true, but it was also destroying my ability to listen. When my hands are on a keyboard and I’m looking at a screen, I am one reflex away from checking something. The note-taking becomes a cover story for being on my computer, and my attention fractures.

When I switched back to a notebook, the difference was immediate. Writing by hand is slower, which forces me to listen for what actually matters rather than transcribing everything. My eyes are on the page and the person, not on a screen full of temptations. And the physical act of writing seems to anchor my attention in a way that typing doesn’t. There’s research on this, but I didn’t need the research. I could feel it.

If you need your notes to be searchable later, a product like the reMarkable splits the difference. I get the feel and focus benefits of handwriting without losing the digital archive. (Thanks to for the recommendation!) But even a plain notebook you never look at again is worth it if it keeps you present during the conversation.

Track what you want to do more of

There’s an old management adage: what gets measured gets done. I’ve found this to be true.

I track my Substack newsletters in my own spreadsheet — when I sent each one, the open rate, the click-through rate, the likes, the shares, and the new subscribers. I track every consulting engagement I’ve ever had: what I produced, how many hours I worked, what I delivered, what I got paid.

The tracking creates the same effect as a manager glancing at my weekly report. It crates an awareness that I said I’d do something, and here’s whether I did it.

If you don’t know where to start, pick one category that matters to your practice and start recording it. Revenue by client. Hours by project type. Business development outreach per week. Proposals sent versus proposals won. The specific category matters less than the act of making your work visible to yourself.

It’s still hard, though!

I have not conquered distraction. I am a person who has built an environment that makes distraction slightly harder and focus slightly easier, and the gap between those two states turns out to be worth a lot.

But the system fails regularly. When I’m tired, my complete lack of willpower can overwhelm even the best system. It fails when a project is in the murky middle — past the excitement of starting but nowhere near the satisfaction of finishing, so I just don’t feel like heading down into the boring salt mines.

On those days, I still check my email when I said I wouldn’t. I still pick up the book that I moved to the other room because I walked in there to get water and there it was. The system hasn’t made me into some kind of focus monk, but I have attained some more-than-marginal gains on most days.

The Emily Berens piece ended with a great line: if a task matters to your practice but you keep postponing it, stop debating willpower and change the environment instead. This is what that looks like in practice for me: it’s a weekly plan on a Friday morning, a book moved to another room, a monitor unplugged, and a phone silenced. These are small rearrangements of a physical space that add up to a fundamentally different workday.

Nobody is going to protect your focus for you. That’s the deal we made when we went independent. But you don’t have to rely on discipline alone to keep the deal. You can build the airplane on the ground.

Priorities get interpreted differently across teams. You’re losing too many great people. Issues surface late — or not at all.

Nothing is broken enough to force a reset, but you have the sense that your organization, as strong as the people are, isn’t making the impact it could.

This is not a strategy problem. It’s a management problem.

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Good strategy fails too often. Not because the plan was wrong, but because there was no reliable way to carry it through the organization. When teams are spinning their wheels or getting stuck, it is almost always because the management layer doesn’t have the systems and support it needs to function well.

If you’re new to this series, we’ve previously covered why management infrastructure matters and what excellent management looks like in practice. Both are worth your time.

This piece shows you the whole system, and the rest of the series will give you practical, low-lift ways to strengthen each element of your management infrastructure.

Here’s what we’ll cover. Management infrastructure has three distinct domains, each solving a different problem. Structural Clarity is about whether managers actually know what the job is and have what they need to do it consistently. Collective Leadership is about whether managers operate as a coordinated layer or just a group of individuals who happen to share a reporting structure. And Management System Continuity is about whether your management strength holds when people leave, roles shift, and the organization evolves…or resets every time. For each, we’ll lay out what strong looks like, what happens when it breaks down, and a few diagnostic questions to help you figure out where you stand.

What Management Infrastructure Actually Is

Strategy is the plan for how you’ll win. Execution is the work that gets you there. Management is everything in between — the mechanism that converts intent into action, across teams, over time.

When that mechanism is strong, strategy travels. When it’s weak, it gets lost in translation, reinterpreted by each manager, filtered through each team, and diluted by the time it reaches the people doing the work.

Infrastructure is what makes the mechanism strong. Not just individual managers but the system they operate within.

Management infrastructure is a system, built deliberately, operated collectively, and strengthened over time.

That system has three parts. Each solves a different problem.

Domain 1: Structural Clarity

Structural Clarity is about the role itself. Do managers actually understand what the job is, and do they have what they need to do it consistently?

Strong structural clarity means four things are true:

1. There’s a shared definition of what excellent management looks like (and it’s used consistently)

2. Managers understand their job is to own team outcomes, not to be high-performing individual contributors who play a largely administrative role with direct reports

3. Decision boundaries are clear enough that managers know when to move and when to align

4. Core practices — 1:1s, feedback, performance conversations — are defined and used consistently.

When this breaks down: expectations vary by team, accountability weakens, and managers fill in the gaps — each in their own way. And over time, those differences become the system.

Quick check:

• Do you have a shared, explicit definition of excellent management and management goals and are they regularly used to guide, support, and make hiring and promotion decisions?

• Do your managers fully embrace their role of owning team outcomes, or are they still doing too much of the work themselves?

• Are decision boundaries clear? Do managers know when they can act independently vs when they need to align or get sign-off?

• Do managers have access to the core practices of strong management, and are they using them consistently?

Domain 2: Collective Leadership

Collective Leadership is about how managers operate together. Do they function as a coordinated leadership layer or as a set of individuals who happen to share a reporting structure?

This is a domain organizations often skip entirely.

When managers operate as a team, their impact can multiply — and the management layer becomes more than a collection of individuals doing the same job in parallel.

Strong collective leadership means three things are true: managers have a consistent shared forum to align, calibrate, coordinate and solve problems together; they are getting the context they need to lead and have clear pathways to surface what senior leaders need to hear with a consistent information flow across the management layer — downward with context, upward with signal; and there is one person with explicit responsibility for owning the health and strengthening of the management layer.

When this breaks down: Managers often receive information too late, without context, or inconsistently. Teams move in different directions. Decisions conflict and alignment is hard to find. Issues that cross team lines fall through the gaps — and senior leaders lose the signal. Cross-organization learning happens sporadically at best, and managers are left to navigate through challenges alone. The responsibility for addressing any of this doesn’t quite belong to anyone, so it persists, and even the strongest managers can struggle.

Quick check:

• Do your managers have a consistent, shared forum for alignment, collaboration and shared problem-solving?

• Does information flow reliably in both directions, with managers receiving the context they need and having clear pathways to surface what senior leaders need to hear?

• Is it someone’s actual, explicit responsibility to manage the management layer and do they have capacity dedicated to strengthening it and tools to do that?

Domain 3: Management System Continuity

Management System Continuity is about durability. Does management strength hold as people change, roles shift, and the organization evolves — or does it reset every time someone leaves?

The pattern is familiar. A strong manager builds a strong team. That manager gets worn down without a system built to support them. They leave.The team struggles. The senior team scrambles. A replacement is found and the cycle starts again. This isn’t a talent problem. It’s a continuity problem, and it’s entirely solvable.

Strong continuity means three things are true: Manager support and development is ongoing and embedded in the work, not understood as solely a one-time training; managers have the time and capacity to manage well, not just carry individual workload with a new title; and potential new managers are identified and have opportunities to build their skills before they’re promoted, not starting after.

When this breaks down: Management quality fluctuates with individuals and there’s no consistent path for improvement. Strong managers build strong teams and when they leave, team performance drops and resets. Development is episodic. New managers are underprepared. Managers don’t have enough time or capacity to manage as well as they want to and need to, so the work may still get done, but performance issues go unaddressed, development conversations don’t happen, and team problems compound. Some of your top staff start to leave. Organizational effectiveness becomes dependent on whoever happens to be there at the time.

Quick check

• Is manager development ongoing and embedded in the work — or treated as a one-time event only, with minimal follow-up?

• Do your managers have the time and capacity they need to manage well?

• Do you know who your next managers might be — and are you supporting them to build their skills now, before they’re promoted?

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Where to Start (No Overhaul Required)

You very likely have many of these elements in place already and others that are missing or not as strong as they could be. If you see gaps in more than one domain, that’s normal.

You don’t need to fix everything at once (and we encourage you not to). Strengthening even one part of the system makes the whole layer stronger.

If you don’t yet have a written, shared definition of what excellent management looks like, that’s your foundation. Start there. (See Article 2.)

If you have that, look at the three domains and pick something that won’t take a ton of effort, but will move things in the right direction — strengthen something that already exists or begin building where the gap is sharpest.

Just make one deliberate move. A single structural fix, a clear decision boundary, a consistent 1:1 practice, a manager forum that meets and is useful — any one of these will make a substantive difference and add strength to the system.

Management infrastructure isn’t built in a sprint. But it also doesn’t require a total overhaul. It requires someone deciding that the management layer is worth investing in as a system and then doing that systematically and consistently.

Making that decision gives you a lasting advantage — a deeper impact and the ability to hold up when things get hard.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is to make the system you have stronger than it is today.

From here, we’ll focus on the how — practical ways to make real improvements that fit inside the work you’re already doing.

I wanted to hear from the other side. Sasha Rosen and I have been friends since 2006. We have two decades of working in overlapping corners of the political and organizing worlds, trading notes, pushing each other, and watching each other build things. Sasha is the CEO of The Outreach Team, which she has grown it into a national force in civic engagement, running grassroots campaigns on clean energy, reproductive freedom, democracy reform, and more across 25-plus states. Before that she built and led two other field companies from the ground up, and along the way has employed well over a thousand people.

Sasha is one of those leaders whose ambition is quiet and whose judgment is loud. She is the kind of person who hires a consultant to help her figure out whether she needs a full-time CFO, and then trusts the answer when it's no. Over the past six years, her team has brought on somewhere between 40 and 50 independent consultants. In 2024 alone, they hired about 15 business development consultants, plus a fractional CFO, DEIJ consultants, and others. I don't know anyone on the client side with more firsthand experience hiring, managing, evaluating, and yes, firing independent consultants.

So I asked her: how do you decide you need one? What do you look for? And what makes the difference between someone who earns more work and someone who quietly gets let go?

When a Full-Time Hire Isn’t the Answer

Sasha’s team first turned to consultants in a serious way in 2023, when they identified business development as a strategic weakness. They were strong at running campaigns but lacked access and influence in enough places. The initial instinct was to hire someone in-house. That didn’t work, because the problem itself didn’t have a single-employee shape.

“We realized it’s not that we just need one person,” Sasha told me. “We need multiple people with different expertise in different states with different networks.”

The same logic applied when the team identified a gap in their financial systems. They considered hiring a full-time CFO or controller and even talked to a headhunter. But the headhunter asked what they were looking for, and the answer was: we’re trying to figure that out. So they hired a consultant to define the need itself, build the systems, and serve as a stopgap while they determined whether a full-time role even made sense. In the end, it didn’t, and that same consultant remains as fractional CFO.

The pattern Sasha described comes down to three categories. First: project-based work with a defined timeline, where you need outside expertise to solve a specific problem. Second: strategic or structural questions where an external perspective — someone who knows how other organizations operate — is the whole point. Third: highly specialized access, where the consultant provides on-the-ground intelligence and relationships in a specific geography or field. In that third category, Sasha hired someone in Maine who provides access to key decision-makers and real-time intelligence on what’s happening across C3 and C4 tables — the kind of knowledge that would otherwise require a full-time state director, but then that person wouldn’t have enough else to do.

What struck me is how specialized these needs have become. A generalist business development hire was never going to work, given how narrow and varied The Outreach Team’s work is across different states. Consultants allow for diversification of expertise in a way that a single full-time role never could.

The Networking Tax

I asked Sasha how she actually finds these consultants. The answer was immediate and unsurprising, but still worth hearing from the client side: it’s all relationships.

Almost every consultant her team has ever hired came either from someone they already knew or through an introduction from a trusted contact. They’ve issued an RFP exactly twice, and even those went out through networking. “There are no good listservs for consultants,” Sasha said. “I always feel bad about that, because if I were trying to sell myself, I don’t know where I’d go. It’s just networking. That’s all it is.”

This tracks with the research we published last summer, where consultants reported sourcing essentially all of their engagements through their personal networks. But hearing it from the buyer confirms something important: the networking isn’t optional, and there is no alternative channel waiting to be discovered.

Sasha did add a nuance, though. Most of the time, her team isn’t even actively looking for a consultant. Someone pitches an idea during a conversation, and the team decides to bring them on for a discrete project. The business development consultants were the one exception — a genuinely intentional search, where they even hired a separate consultant to identify the right people in specific states.

So the hiring process, most of the time, is less like a job search and more like a relationship that crosses a threshold.

What Gets You Hired (and What Gets You Kept)

When Sasha evaluates a consultant, she’s not usually comparing three candidates against each other. She’s evaluating one person against the job. The two things she looks for: previous experience doing the kind of work needed, and trusted people who vouch for the person. That second one is less about formal references and more about knowing someone real in the world who says this consultant is legitimate and won’t waste your money.

Sasha was candid about the hit rate. Of the eight business development consultants hired in 2024, about five — roughly 60% — actually delivered business. The rest didn’t produce. One consultant demanded a high upfront retainer and high referral fees. In retrospect, Sasha sees that as a red flag. For business development work, the ideal structure is a low retainer and high referral fees, tying compensation directly to the consultant’s ability to produce. Asking for both signals that the consultant wants to get paid regardless of whether they deliver.

What determines whether the relationship continues is simple and unsentimental: short initial contracts, clear deliverables, and observable results. Consultants who deliver often get extended to ongoing contracts. Those who don’t are let go. “If you just do your job, there’s usually more money and work to be had,” Sasha said. “The problem is when you don’t do anything.”

Pricing Negotiations

The most revealing part of our conversation was about pricing, and it centered on a consultant who has become something of a model engagement.

Sasha first hired this consultant on a three-month contract for $12,000 total, which she considered an excellent deal. Based on this person’s performance, the next contract was six months at $5,000 a month. When the third negotiation came around in December, Sasha had mentally budgeted $8,000 to $10,000 a month and was ready to nearly double the consultant’s rate. Then they proposed $12,000 a month.

Sasha negotiated down to $10,000. She now regrets it. “This person is worth way more than $12K a month,” Sasha told me. She plans to give the consultant an additional bonus at some point as a retroactive thank-you.

The lesson for consultants: ask for what you’re worth. Sasha’s words, not mine. “If you don’t ask for it, you won’t get it. People will just say no if they can’t do it.”

Sasha expects consultants to cost more than an equivalent in-house person — that’s built into her mental model. She’s covering less of the consultant’s time, so the hourly or monthly rate should be higher. What she doesn’t want is to feel gouged.

Sasha’s strong preference is for retainers or lump sums over hourly billing. She doesn’t want to monitor how much time someone spends on a task. She wants the job done, within the agreed-upon timeframe, for the agreed-upon price.

The Mistakes That End Contracts

I asked Sasha about the most common mistakes consultants make. Three came up repeatedly.

The first is failing to communicate about availability. Consultants have other clients. Sasha knows this and accepts it. But she needs to know when someone will and won’t be responsive, especially for time-sensitive work. The consultants she values most are the ones who proactively flag their schedule and set expectations. The ones who annoy her most go quiet without explanation.

The second is more basic than you’d think: some consultants get hired and then never reach out. No meeting set up. No check-in. Sasha has had consultants who were on a retainer and simply didn’t initiate contact for two months. By the time they circled back asking what she needed, the answer was: nothing anymore.

The third ties pricing to attention. One consultant on a $1,000-a-month retainer never did much of anything. Sasha suspects the fee was too low for the consultant to prioritize the relationship. The lesson cuts both ways: if a retainer is so small that you’re not going to pay attention, don’t take the money. The retainer exists so you pay attention. If it doesn’t accomplish that, the whole arrangement is pointless.

The Advice

I asked Sasha what she’d tell any consultant who wanted to work with a firm like The Outreach Team. She was direct: don’t send cold pitches, understand the organization’s actual business and whether your services are relevant, and connect through an existing relationship.

And then the part that most consultants need to hear: don’t get discouraged by slow responses. Sasha acknowledged that her team often recognizes the value of what a consultant is offering but doesn’t have the bandwidth to act on it. The issue is timing and capacity, not disinterest. Consultants who stay in touch and nurture the relationship — without being pushy — are the ones who are top of mind when the timing finally aligns.

“Nine out of ten of the most important factors are just timing,” I said to her. Sasha agreed. “So that when the timing is right, they think of you.” That’s the whole game.

Which brings us back to the truth that runs through every conversation we have in this community—there is no substitute for relationships, and the work of maintaining them never stops. Sasha, who hires consultants all the time, described her own business development process in almost identical terms: go meet people, get on their radar, and reach out when you hear something relevant. It’s just as hard for the buyer as it is for the seller. The only difference is who’s sitting on which side of the table, and even that changes more often than you’d think.

Some people miss the paycheck cadence. Some miss the camaraderie. Some miss the simplicity of “I’m here; I’m doing the thing.”

But the sneaky one—the one almost nobody names—is management. We blame Office Space! (Yes, children of the 80s here.)

Not “being managed” in an infantilizing sense or check-the-box performance reviews or corporate rituals. We mean the invisible scaffolding: the steady rhythm, the expectation that you’ll do what you say you’ll do, and the moment someone asks “How did that go?” and your brain magically finds traction.

Independent consulting strips that away. And in the social impact ecosystem—where many of us didn’t become consultants because we dreamed of running a business—it can create a specific kind of drift: you can get excellent results for clients and still feel oddly unmoored. The story we keep coming back to in this Substack is simple: social impact consultants want sustainable, fulfilling practices with autonomy and impact, but they lack the built-in professional development resources and peer support that employment often bundled for free.

So here’s the angle I wanted to think about with my friend and longtime colleague and collaborator Emily Berens. Emily runs Trellis Strategies, where she coaches executives and leadership teams at social impact organizations through their hardest management challenges. Before that, she spent nearly a decade as a Partner at The Management Center, coaching leaders of major social change organizations and—as TMC’s first-ever talent lead—rebuilding their hiring systems with equity at the center while the organization tripled in size. She is, in other words, a person who has spent her career thinking about what makes management actually work, and then helping people do it. I wanted her brain on this because independent consultants face a version of the same problem her clients face inside organizations: the systems of great management are missing, and nobody is going to install them for you.

By management, we mean the system that helps a person keep expanding their impact while getting consistently excellent work out the door. It’s a set of functions. And independent consultants are missing those functions right when they need them most.

Thesis: Independent consultants don’t need a manager, but they do need management. We can deliberately recreate the most valuable parts of management, and that’s what this article is about.

The Missing Layer You Only Notice When It’s Gone

Most consultants we know are highly accountable to their clients. They deliver. They respond. They show up prepared.

But there’s a second kind of accountability that employment provides and consulting often dissolves: accountability to your own practice and the work that compounds over time.

Emily put it bluntly: she feels highly accountable to clients for getting them results, but basically no accountability to anyone other than herself for the work that builds the business or the craft over the long run.

That distinction matters because a consulting practice has two engines:

• The delivery engine (current clients, current work, current revenue)

• The compounding engine (pipeline, positioning, reusable assets, skill growth, relationships, leverage)

Well-run organizations give you compounding-engine support by default: managers, peers, recurring meetings, training budgets, mentorship, and feedback and reflection loops. Independent consulting asks you to build that infrastructure yourself while still doing the delivery work that pays the bills.

This is a systems problem. If you feel stuck, it’s worth asking: what was your old environment doing for you that you now have to do on purpose?

What Great Managers Actually Do (That You Can Steal)

In our conversation, Emily broke the missing pieces into five buckets that independent consultants can recreate:

1) Structure and regularity

Organizations create rhythm automatically: weekly check-ins, planning cycles, clear milestones, and recurring reviews. When you go independent, you have to provide the rhythm, so it often disappears first.

By structure, we mean a repeating cadence that reduces “reinventing the week.” It’s the calendar and rituals that make progress more likely than procrastination.

2) Prioritization

Great managers help you figure out what actually matters right now—and, just as importantly, what doesn’t. They force the question: of everything you could be doing, what are the three things that will move your practice forward most?

Independent consultants can do this for themselves, but most don’t do it with any regularity. Without a forcing function, priorities tend to drift toward whatever feels most urgent or most comfortable, which isn’t the same as what’s most important. A regular practice of stepping back and naming your top priorities—quarterly, monthly, even weekly—is one of the highest-leverage habits you can build into your routine.

3) Accountability

Accountability means “someone will notice whether you did the thing.” We recommend just enough social reality to keep the important work from evaporating.

Clients create accountability for delivery, but they rarely create accountability for business development, sharpening your positioning, or building reusable assets.

4) Forcing mechanisms

Forcing mechanisms mean a constraint that reduces reliance on willpower. It’s a setup where doing the thing you need to do becomes the path of least resistance.

This came up because “I should do business development” and “Why can’t I make myself do business development?” are different problems. The second one isn’t solved by more intention. It’s solved by changing the environment.

A concrete example: as a manager, Emily used simple progress-tracking tables and regular check-ins. The value is not the spreadsheet, it’s that you can’t hide from the question “Am I on track: yes/no?”

5) Getting better (not just getting it done)

This is the layer most consultants never formalize, which is wild because it’s where compounding lives.

Getting better involves creating feedback and reflection loops that improve your consulting craft (how you work) and your expertise (what you know), not just finishing the next deliverable.

A DIY Management System for Consultants

Don’t overhaul your life. Install one layer at a time.

Rhythm: make compounding work non-optional

The delivery engine will happily consume every hour you give it.

So give the compounding engine a protected slot. A small one is fine. The goal is continuity.

Example: a Tuesday 60-90 minute “compounding block” that is not optional. If you miss it, you don’t “make it up sometime.” You reschedule it within 72 hours. That rule is what turns it from aspiration into a system.

This block is where you do the unbillable work that prevents future chaos: pipeline outreach, skill-building, proposal templates, a case study, a pricing page, a reusable workshop deck, or outreach to a referral partner.

Prioritization: decide before you do

Before you fill that compounding block, you need to know what goes in it. Set a brief quarterly check-in with yourself—even 30 minutes—where you ask: what are the two or three things that would most change my practice over the next 90 days? Write them down. Put your other ideas for compounding work on a “not now” list.

Then at the start of each week, pick one compounding task that connects to those priorities. Not five, just one. The discipline is in the choosing, not just the doing.

Accountability: add one human who will notice

Emily’s simplest version is a text message-based pact.

You tell someone, “I’m going to do X, and I will text you by noon on Friday that it’s done.” If it’s not done, they text you Friday afternoon asking where it is.

A next-level version is setting up a regular call—every week or every other week—with an accountability partner. There’s a lot you can do with a regular call, but as part of it, you each say specifically what you’re committing to get done, knowing you’ll hold each other to that on the next call.

Two details make this work:

• The commitment you make should be small enough that you’ll actually follow through. You’re building a habit of keeping promises to yourself, not training for a marathon.

• The partner doesn’t have to be an expert. They do have to be someone whose opinion matters and who you don’t want to let down.

A peer, a former colleague, or a fellow consultant would all work. If you can’t find one, a small group can substitute as long as it stays specific and lightweight.

Forcing mechanisms: stop negotiating with yourself

If you keep waiting to feel like doing something, you’re choosing willpower. If you pre-commit with time, money, or social expectation, you’re choosing a forcing mechanism.

Two forcing mechanisms Emily mentioned (and we’ve both seen work in practice):

1. Borrow the organizing playbook. Say what you’ll do, disappear for a fixed window, report back. It’s boring, but it works.

2. Spend money. Hire someone—designer, editor, coach—for a defined output and deadline. The cost creates momentum and focus.

The point is to manufacture follow-through.

Feedback: ask clients about your delivery, and ask yourself

Most consultants get feedback from their clients when something is broken or when a client is thrilled. That’s a terrible sampling method. Or they get feedback at the end of an engagement through a survey or exit interview. This has its uses, but it means they learn something to improve on that could have been incorporated months ago if they had just asked.

A better pattern: a midpoint check-in that is short, direct, and normalized.

Here are a couple questions we like:

• What am I doing that’s especially helpful and I should keep doing?

• What could I do better in how I’m showing up?

A useful approach is to offer a self-critique first (“Here’s one place I think I could improve…”). It lowers the social risk for the client to be honest.

This feedback improves your craft: communication, facilitation, speed, clarity, stakeholder management, and expectation-setting.

For expertise (the actual domain), clients usually can’t coach you. That’s where peers, mentors, and community matter. Setting up a regular call with another expert in your field, or cultivating a relationship where you can check in when you’ve got a thorny challenge, can be invaluable in helping you continue to sharpen your thinking.

Self-reflection can matter as much as external feedback. One way Emily recommends building this in is keeping a doc called “lessons learned”: after every client engagement, write at least one thing you did well and one thing you could do better. It doesn’t have to be profound — just the act of reflecting in itself has a lot of power. Building this in at the end of every engagement is one natural place to do it; doing it every week (perhaps as the first 2 minutes of your compounding block) is even better.

Client ≠ Manager

A note of caution before we wrap up. If you treat clients as your sole manager, you’ll optimize for their short-term needs, not your long-term practice. But if you can get results that thrill your clients while also managing your own growth, you will be setting yourself up to make an even bigger impact over the long term.

Clients are great at making the urgent feel urgent. But the work that compounds—positioning, pipeline, reusable IP, skill growth—is important and rarely urgent. Without some self-created management, the important work becomes the thing you “get to when you can,” which is another way of saying “never.”

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The Point of All This

Consulting sells autonomy, but it quietly takes away something many of us depended on: a shared container for getting better. Strong management does a few unglamorous things extremely well: it creates rhythm, makes progress strategic and visible, keeps you growing, and forces the important work to happen before it becomes a crisis.

Independence doesn’t remove the need for those functions. It just transfers full responsibility for them onto you.

The good news is that this isn’t an all-or-nothing project. You don’t have to become a different person or build an elaborate operating system. You can start small and still get real lift. Add the minimum viable structure that protects the autonomy you care about. If a task matters to your practice but you keep postponing it, stop debating willpower and change the environment instead.

Pick one thing to try this week:

• Put a recurring compounding block in your calendar with a reschedule rule (not a “skip” rule).

• A quarterly priorities check-in, even if it’s just you and a notebook.

• Add a human who will notice and text you Friday afternoon if you don’t follow through.

• A small financial commitment like a designer or a coach who creates a deadline you can’t ignore.

If we had to compress the whole argument into a single line, it would be this: don’t wait for management to arrive—borrow it. The consultants who sustain long, high-impact careers aren’t just talented; they create the conditions that help their talent compound. Build the minimum structure that keeps your practice moving, improving, and feeling like yours.

A few questions to ponder as we wrap up:

• Where do you feel the accountability gap most: pipeline, ops, writing, skill-building, or something else?

• How do we design community structures that create accountability without turning into constant interruption?

• If you added one midpoint feedback check-in to every engagement, what question would you ask first?

• What would a truly valuable community of practice look like for your specific consulting niche?

Three weeks later, I was knee-deep in a leadership conflict that had nothing to do with planning. The Executive Director hired me to do one thing, but the Deputy Director I was assigned to partner with wanted something totally different. They didn’t even see a problem, and wondered why I had been hired in the first place. The leadership team had fundamentally different visions for the organization’s future and its present needs, and that misalignment was quietly poisoning the nonprofit’s ability to execute.

I should have caught this before my first billable hour. I didn’t, because I’d skipped the part of the process that would have surfaced it.

I wrote a while back about the signals to watch for when scoping new engagements — the red lights, yellow lights, and green lights that help you decide whether to take the work. But I’ve never written about what happens after you say yes. The contract is signed, the start date is on the calendar, and now you’re staring at a blank page wondering how to actually begin.

This is the part of consulting I learned the hard way. The first 30 days of a new engagement will shape whether the whole thing succeeds or quietly goes sideways, and most of us learn that through expensive mistakes.

Before Your First Billable Meeting

I now request documents from every new client before we sit down together for the first time. Strategic plans, board minutes from the past year, financial statements, previous consultant reports, internal planning documents — anything they’re willing to share. I tell them I want to use our first meeting to ask informed questions rather than basic ones.

This matters more than the sum of the documents. When you walk into a first meeting cold, you spend most of it absorbing information the client thinks of at that moment. You’re paying attention to facts but you lose out on the opportunity to also glean dynamics. When you’ve read the board minutes and the last strategic plan, you can listen for what’s not being said. You can notice that the strategic plan mentions “expanding digital capacity” on page three and the person sitting across from you hasn’t brought it up once. You can ask about the gap between the plan’s revenue projections and the actual financials you reviewed. These are the questions that make a client think, “this person has done their homework.” More importantly, these are the questions that surface the real problems.

The document request also functions as an early diagnostic of the client relationship itself. How quickly do they respond? Do they send everything, or hold back certain materials? Is there a document they reference in conversation that they didn’t include? I had one client who sent me a big sheaf of materials, but the most crucial stuff for the engagement never arrived. When I asked about it, there was a long pause. That pause told me more about the engagement I was walking into than the document itself ever could have.

The Questionnaire I Send Everyone

After a few engagements where I realized I was asking the same basic questions in our first meeting that I could have answered in advance, I built a pre-engagement questionnaire. It has changed how I start every new engagement.

The questionnaire covers four areas.

1. Organization background: their structure, size, what makes them distinct in their sector.

2. Project context: what prompted them to seek consulting support, what they’ve already tried, what constraints exist that I should know about.

3. Expectations: specific outcomes they’re hoping for, how they’ll measure success, what timeline they’re working with.

4. Working preferences: how they like to communicate, how they want to receive deliverables, what has and hasn’t worked in previous consulting relationships.

That last section is the sleeper. “What has worked well or not worked in previous consulting engagements?” is the single most useful question I ask. The answers tell me so much that will be useful: whether the last consultant overpromised, whether the client has realistic expectations about what external support can accomplish, or whether they’ve been burned by someone who delivered a beautiful report that sat on a shelf.

One client wrote, “Our last consultant was brilliant but never listened to our staff. They came in with a framework and applied it regardless of what we told them.” I read that and restructured my first month’s plan to center staff interviews.

I send the questionnaire about a week before our first meeting. Most clients complete it within a few days. The ones who don’t are telling me something, too.

The Presenting Problem Is Almost Never the Real Problem

This is the single most important thing I’ve learned about starting new engagements, and I still have to remind myself of it every time. I always feel anxious in those first 30 days because of this dynamic, which I’ve seen in every consultant engagement I’ve ever had.

Clients hire you because they’ve identified a problem. It could be declining donations, staff turnover, a board that can’t align on strategy, or a program that isn’t delivering results. These are real problems, and they deserve to be taken seriously, but they are almost always symptoms of something underneath.

The engagement I described at the top is the clearest example from my own practice, but I’ve seen the pattern dozens of times. An organization tells me they need help with strategic planning, and the actual issue is that two senior leaders have irreconcilable visions for the organization’s future and nobody has named the conflict. A client says they want to build a new program, and the real barrier is that their culture prohibits spending money on anything perceived as non-essential — a norm that made sense during their early years of financial scarcity and now prevents them from investing in growth.

I’ve started keeping what I think of as a diagnostic log during the first two weeks of every engagement. On one side, I write down what the client told me the problem was. On the other side, I write down what I’m actually observing. The distance between those two columns is where the real work lives.

This means resisting the urge to solve things immediately. The anxiety of a new engagement — the desire to prove your value, to show the client they made the right choice — pushes you toward premature solutions. I’ve done it. You show up with a theory and start trying to produce stuff before you’ve understood the terrain. I always want to feel productive, but I am usually being counterproductive. A thorough first few weeks of listening will save you months of rework later.

Running Stakeholder Interviews When You’re the Outsider

I schedule individual conversations with people at multiple levels of the organization during the first two weeks, not just the person who hired me. This is where the richest information lives.

The executive director will tell you one version of the organization’s challenges. The development director will tell you another. The program manager who’s been there for twelve years will tell you a third, and the composite version is usually the most accurate.

These conversations require a specific kind of listening. You’re not interviewing for information you can put in a report. You’re listening for contradictions between what different people tell you, because those contradictions reveal the organizational dynamics that will shape your entire engagement. When the ED says the board is “very supportive” and a senior staffer says “the board doesn’t really understand what we do,” you’ve just learned something critical about the political landscape you’re operating in.

I ask each person the same core question in different ways: “What would need to be true for this project to succeed?” Or put it another way: “If we look back a year from now, what is the most likely reason this works, and the most likely reason it fails?”

The answers vary wildly. One person will talk about resources. Another will talk about buy-in. Another will say something like, “Honestly? The ED would need to stop changing priorities every two months.” That’s not information you’ll get in a group meeting, and it’s not information the person who hired you will volunteer.

After the stakeholder conversations, I write a brief internal document, just for me, summarizing what I’ve heard and where the stories diverge. This document has saved me more times than I can count. It becomes my map for the engagement.

The Early-Win Strategy

I always feel like I’m on a tightrope those early days of an engagement, though, because I want to spend as much time learning as I can, but it can erode client confidence if it goes on too long. You’re asking questions, conducting interviews, and reviewing documents, and the client is watching the clock and wondering when you’re going to actually do something.

So I’ve learned to run two tracks simultaneously. The first track is the deep learning work. The second track is scanning for early wins, which are small, visible problems I can solve quickly that build credibility for the longer work ahead.

A good early win has three qualities: it’s high-visibility (people will notice it got fixed), it’s feasible within the first few weeks, and it aligns with the broader goals of the engagement so it doesn’t feel like a distraction. Maybe it’s streamlining a reporting process that’s eating up staff time, or restructuring a meeting agenda that everyone quietly hates, or producing a simple framework that helps the team talk about a recurring tension they haven’t had language for.

I frame these explicitly as experiments, not solutions. “I noticed X during our conversations, and I want to try something that might help. Let’s see how it works.” This sets the right expectation. I am not claiming to have fixed their organization in week two. But I have demonstrated that I am listening, I am capable, and the engagement is going to produce tangible value.

The early win buys you the time and trust to do the deeper diagnostic work that the engagement actually requires.

What I Do Now That I Didn’t Do at First

I used to treat the first meeting as the beginning of the engagement. Now I treat the signed contract as the beginning and the first meeting as a milestone I’ve already prepared for. The document review, the questionnaire, the reading all happens before the clock starts in the client’s mind.

I also used to schedule a “kickoff meeting” that tried to accomplish everything: rapport-building, information-gathering, expectation-setting, and project planning. Now I separate those functions.

The first meeting is for listening and asking questions informed by my pre-reading. The expectations conversation is a separate session where we collaboratively define what success looks like, how we’ll communicate, and what happens when — not if — the scope needs to shift. The project plan comes after the initial research, not before, because any plan I write before I’ve talked to the people doing the work is a fiction.

And I now end every learning phase with a formal presentation of findings before moving into execution. This is a practice I resisted for a long time because it felt like it slowed things down. It does slow things down. It also prevents the most common failure mode in consulting, which is executing on a plan that was built on incomplete understanding.

The presentation is a short document summarizing what I’ve learned, what I believe the real challenges are (which may differ from what was originally described), and what I recommend as the path forward. The client gets to push back, add context, and correct my misunderstandings. We revise it together, and then we move forward with a shared picture of reality instead of two separate ones.

Beginnings Still Suck

I wish I could say I’ve systematized this so thoroughly that new engagements feel routine. They don’t. The first few weeks of any client relationship still carry a specific kind of anxiety: the awareness that I’m forming impressions that might be wrong, making judgments with incomplete information, and building trust with people who don’t yet have reason to trust me.

What’s changed is that I’ve stopped trying to resolve that anxiety by rushing toward solutions. The discomfort of not knowing is part of the job. It’s actually a signal that I’m paying attention, and that I haven’t defaulted to a framework before I understand the terrain. The engagements that went wrong were the ones where I moved fast to make the uncertainty go away. The ones that went well were the ones where I sat in the uncertainty long enough to see what it was trying to show me.

The first discovery call I ever took as an independent consultant, I talked for most of it. I described my background, explained my approach, and walked through examples of past work. The potential client was polite and asked a few questions. We scheduled a follow-up.

What I understand now is that I had it backwards. A discovery call isn’t a pitch, so your job is not to demonstrate that you’re impressive. The point to understand the problem well enough that you can describe it back to the client better than they can describe it themselves. When you can do that, the proposal almost writes itself.

What are we talking about?

A discovery call is a structured first conversation with a potential client — typically thirty to sixty minutes — where your goal is to understand their problem, their context, and whether there’s a genuine fit before either of you commits to anything. It usually happens after an initial introduction or referral, once someone has expressed enough interest to warrant a real conversation, but before you’ve written a single word of a proposal. Think of it as the difference between a first date and an application: you’re not trying to close anything, you’re trying to find out if there’s something worth closing.

Here’s how I structure them.

Before you dial in

Do thirty minutes of research. Look at recent board decks, annual reports, press, and their job postings. Job postings are underrated. They tell you where the organization is investing and what they can’t get done internally.

Your goal is to come in knowing something specific. It signals that you take the engagement seriously before it’s even an engagement.

The opening (two minutes)

I always start by resetting the purpose of the call. Something like:

I want to spend most of our time understanding what you’re dealing with. I have some questions prepared, but treat this as a conversation. I’m less interested in presenting myself than in understanding whether there’s a real fit here.

This does two things. It gives the client permission to talk, which most people want to do. And it signals that you’re not desperate, which changes the power dynamic in ways that matter later when you’re negotiating scope and rates.

Understand the problem (ten to twelve minutes)

Start broad, then go deep. The opening question I almost always use is some version of:

Walk me through what’s going on and what made you reach out now.

The word now is doing real work in that sentence. Organizations often live with problems for years before hiring someone to address them. Something has changed: a new ED, a funder pushing for evaluation, a grant that came through, or (hopefully not, but sometimes!) a crisis. Understanding the triggering event tells you a lot about the urgency of the problem and the political dynamics around it.

After they answer, I go deeper with:

How long has this been an issue? What have you already tried?

What they’ve tried (and why it didn’t work) is often the most useful intelligence you’ll gather on the whole call. It tells you about the constraints they’re operating under, the internal politics, and what a realistic solution actually needs to account for.

The follow-up I use most often:

Can you give me a specific example of where this showed up recently?

Abstract problem descriptions are hard to scope, but a concrete recent example is something you can actually work with.

Understand what success looks like (five minutes)

This is where most consultants don’t push hard enough. What does good look like a year from now? is fine, but it’s not specific enough. I push further:

If you looked back six months from now and said ‘that was exactly what we needed,’ what would have happened? What would be different?

Sometimes clients have very clear answers. Sometimes they don’t, and the vagueness is informative. An organization that can’t articulate what success looks like is going to have a hard time evaluating your work, which can create problems downstream.

I also ask:

Who else will have a view on whether this went well?

This surfaces the political landscape — funders, board members, program staff, whoever’s affected — and helps you understand whether the person you’re talking to actually has the authority to define success.

Qualify (five minutes)

You need to know three things before you’ll be able to close any new engagement: budget, decision process, and timeline. A potential client who checks all three boxes is “qualified.”

On budget:

I want to make sure we’re in the same ballpark before we go further. Do you have a rough sense of what’s allocated for this?

Most clients expect this question. If they deflect completely, that’s a signal worth noting.

On decision process:

Walk me through what happens after this call on your end. Who else would be involved in a decision like this?

This tells you whether you’re talking to the actual decision-maker, whether there’s a committee, whether there’s a procurement process you’re not expecting.

On timeline:

Is there a point by which you’d need something in place like a board meeting, a grant deadline, something else?

Timeline pressure is often what separates a real engagement from an exploratory conversation that goes nowhere.

Listen for the emotional charge

This is the part that matters most. As the client is talking, pay attention to which problems they describe with urgency and which ones they describe flatly. Both matter, but the felt ones are what will actually motivate action.

When something comes up that seems emotionally loaded — frustration, embarrassment, real urgency — go deeper. Don’t move on. Ask them to say more. Ask what it costs them when it doesn’t get addressed. That’s where the real scope is.

Close the call (two minutes)

I don’t try to book the next meeting at the end of a discovery call. I say something like:

This has been really helpful. I want to think about what I’m hearing and come back to you with a sense of how I’d approach this. Does that work?

This gives you time to actually think, which means you’ll write a better proposal. It also signals that you’re not going to immediately paper over their problem with a scope of work you wrote in an hour. Most clients find that reassuring.

Then I send a follow-up the same day that reflects back what I heard: the problem, the stakes, what success looks like. Two things could happen. If I got it right, the client feels understood, which builds trust. If I got something wrong, they’ll tell me, and I’ve learned something important before I write anything.

The hidden purpose of a discovery call

The discovery call is also the moment you decide if you want the work. You’re evaluating them as much as they’re evaluating you. Is the problem real? Is the organization positioned to act on your recommendations? Is the person you’re talking to actually going to be a reasonable client?

I’ve left discovery calls knowing the work was real but the engagement would be painful. Taking those projects anyway is almost always a mistake. The call is information. Use it.

As part of the larger Strategic Agility Reboot Series, this sub-series is focused on how to build the conditions for great management across your team: grounded in clear standards, and enabled and sustained by an infrastructure that makes management excellence the default, not the exception.

Today: what excellent management actually means and the first step to operationalizing it, whether you own management for your whole organization, your team, or just yourself.

What does “excellent” actually mean? Our version

Great staff management means setting an organization (or team) up to deliver on its mission long-term by making sure you have the right people in the right roles, each with what they need to make their greatest impact over time.

Excellent management includes four core pillars. Here’s a little more on each.

1. Equity

None of the others matter — they won’t work — if equity isn’t the operating principle underneath all of them. Whether you’re building trust, setting expectations, or investing in someone’s growth — the questions always include: for whom, on what basis, and have I checked for implicit bias? If the answer is shaped more by shared identity and unconscious bias than actual performance and potential, the whole system is compromised.

2. Results focus over the long term

Not just making people feel good. Not just hitting this quarter’s metrics. Real impact, delivered consistently, over time. That requires two things that are easy to deprioritize when everyone is busy:

• Strategic trade-offs. The ability to think several moves ahead and make short-term sacrifices where needed for long-term gain.

• Investment in people’s growth. People leave when they feel that their organization isn’t supporting them and their growth. The ones who stay in those circumstances aren’t set up to contribute at their highest level. That’s not just a retention problem — it’s a results problem.

Excellent managers invest in their people and in themselves. A manager who isn’t growing is a ceiling.

3. Clarity and accountability

Clarity lives in three core places: the role itself, the goals that define success, and discrete projects. It also includes how work gets navigated, like how decisions get made, and how trade-offs are weighed.

Accountability follows: expecting people to do what they said, actively supporting them when they fall short, and making harder decisions when the gap persists.

4. Trust, cohesion, and strategic coherence

Trust is the foundation — relationships strong enough to make candor possible, where people share strategic insights, flag problems before they become crises, and feel genuinely valued. Built on that: team cohesion, the sense that people are in it together, and strategic coherence — where people understand how their work connects to everyone else’s, how decisions ripple across roles, and what it feels like to operate as a unit.

That’s the definition. Now here’s where it gets structural.

What you can do from where you are.

→ If you lead the organization or have org-wide authority over management practice — This work is yours to lead or make sure someone else does. Draft it, get input, and put it in motion.

→ If you manage managers but don’t set the tone for the whole org — You don’t have to wait. Build the framework for your department or division. Define what excellent management looks like for your team and build in the feedback loops and coaching conversations that help your managers actually get there. A draft you can update is infinitely more useful than a perfect one that never arrives.

→ If you’re a manager who isn’t managing managers — Use this for yourself. Take the definition and bring it into a conversation with your own manager. Where do you feel strong? What would help you get there? You’re not asking for a favor. You’re asking for the infrastructure you need to do your best work.

Wherever you sit: You don’t need permission to get clearer. You might need to adjust later. That’s fine. Clarity now beats waiting for the perfect conditions that may never come.

The Next Step: Develop a Set of Baseline Management Goals

This is where you begin building infrastructure.

Baseline Management Goals describe what excellence actually looks like for your organization, and they become goals for every manager, regardless of scope or level.

Expectations that are written down, shared, and checked in on regularly are the first structural layer of a system that makes great management the default.

Managers can add goals specific to their context on top of these, but the baseline applies to everyone.

For more ideas on what additional manager-specific goals could look like, click here.

Example Set of Baseline Management Goals

BASELINE MANAGER GOALS FOR 2026

• All of the people on my team are on track to hit their goals or have a plan to shift strategies

• For each person on my team, I can point to at least 2 indicators that tell me they feel valued — as a person, for their work, and for their input. Indicators could include:

  • they regularly contribute their ideas and expertise in decision-making

  • they have strong working relationships within and outside of our team

  • they’ve given me thoughtful feedback about how I can improve in my own management

  • they’ve told me directly

• Any performance problems have been addressed fairly, thoughtfully, and quickly

• There are no discrepancies by race or gender identity in any of the above areas

If you want to go deeper on the how-to of goal setting, check out this guide.

Questions? Pushback? Requests? Email us at Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com.

Your Move This Week: Draft & Get Input

1. Draft your set of baseline management goals — it doesn’t have to be perfect, what you want is a version you can share with other people to get their feedback. You can use our sample above as a starting point or start fresh.

These questions can help you get started:

• When a manager is doing an excellent job, how do you know?

• What results do you see?

• How will you know whether they’re on track?

2. Get some initial input.

If you’re building this for your team, your list includes:

• Your own manager — you’ll want at least quick alignment on your plan and on the first draft before you send it out more broadly.

• All of the managers on your team. We’re serious. You could get to a version by engaging just a small group, but engaging all managers will get you better insights and stronger alignment on the final product. Skipping this step will bite you later.

• Additional individual staff (where useful) — you can do this through: a working group that gives deeper input from early on, managers getting input from their teams once you have a good working draft, an all-staff comment period closer to final.

If you’re building this for your organization, your list also includes:

• Your senior leadership team — you’ll want alignment at the top before this rolls out broadly, both on the definition of excellence and on the plan for implementation.

Balance getting the input you need without creating layers or barriers that aren’t meaningful.

Don’t get stalled out by process overwhelm: Start by thinking through whose input you need first, and send your draft to that person or group.

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Tips for Getting Input

1. Be transparent about what kind of input you’re asking for. Not all feedback is the same, and people give better reactions when they know what you need. Name which mode you’re in:

• Brainstorming — You’re early, open to anything, and want people to think out loud with you.

• Kicking the tires — You have a draft and a theory, and you want people to push back, test it, and make it better. Tear it down if needed.

• Big red flags only — This is mostly baked. It’s gone through real refinement. You’re not looking for a rewrite; you’re asking people to catch anything glaring before you finalize.

Naming the mode upfront saves everyone time and energy — and signals that you’ve actually thought about what you need, which makes people more likely to give it to you.

2. Lay out specific questions. This helps people know you really do want their thoughts, and helps you get the specific input you need.

• Does this definition reflect what you think excellent management actually looks like here?

• What’s missing?

• What’s here that doesn’t belong?

• Is there anything that’s unclear or needs to be defined differently?

And when you’ve gathered input and made changes — tell them. Circle back. This is one of the fastest ways to signal that this isn’t just an exercise. It builds alignment, gets you better input down the road, and marks the beginning of real infrastructure.

Questions? Pushback? Requests? Email us at Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com.

Who Responded

The group skews experienced. More than three-quarters have been consulting for 10+ years, with another 15% in the 6–10 year range. Only 8% have been at it for fewer than five years. Primary areas of expertise split almost evenly between strategy/planning and digital work (38% each), with coaching/staff support at 15% and development at 9%.

How They Charge

Retainers are the most common fee model, used by 46% of respondents. Monthly retainer rates range from about $2,500 to $16,400, with most consultants targeting an hourly equivalent somewhere between $150 and $350. Project-based fees come next at 31%, with project rates typically landing between $10,000 and $20,000 (or $1,500–$2,500 per day for those who think in daily terms). About 15% bill hourly, ranging from $100 to $350 per hour. The remaining 8% use short-term monthly arrangements, usually targeting $175–$200 per hour equivalent.

Most consultants don’t stick rigidly to one model. They shift depending on the client, the scope, and the relationship.

What They Earn

Compressing all the responses into hourly equivalents, the average rate works out to $234 per hour. The median and mode both sit at $250. The floor is $100; the ceiling is $350. Most consultants aim for or exceed a $150–$200 benchmark in practice, though they’ll flex in either direction depending on the engagement.

How They Decide What to Charge

More than half the respondents use value-based pricing — pegging their rate to the perceived impact for the client rather than simply counting hours. An equal share relies on experience and previous engagements as their primary benchmark. Client budget capacity is just as common a factor: consultants adjust within a range depending on what the organization can bear. Project complexity matters too, though fewer than half cited it as a primary driver.

Nobody’s using just one of these inputs. Everyone is triangulating.

Do They Charge Nonprofits Differently?

Yes, mostly. Over 45% adjust their rates based on client type, typically discounting for nonprofits or organizations whose mission they believe in. About a third keep rates consistent in principle but negotiate in special cases. Roughly a quarter charge a single rate regardless of sector, guided by project factors rather than client type.

Do They Publish Their Rates?

Almost universally, no. Only one respondent makes rates publicly visible. The rest prefer the flexibility to tailor proposals to each engagement — which makes sense given how many variables they’re already juggling.

How Often They Revisit Pricing

Almost two-thirds reevaluate their rates with every new engagement. About a quarter review annually or every few years. The rest change rates only when forced to by rising costs or new market information. This is a group that thinks about pricing frequently, even if they don’t always act on it.

What Pushes Rates Up

The top drivers for rate increases: client feedback and demonstrated results, tied with market demand (both at 46%). Increased experience and expertise came next at 39%. Improved service offerings and competitive positioning tied at 31%.

How Confident They Feel

On a 1–5 scale, nobody picked 1 or 2 — but nobody picked 5, either. Everyone clustered at 3 or 4, with 4 getting roughly 50% more votes than 3. This is a group that feels competent but not fully calibrated. They know they’re in the right neighborhood; they’re less sure they’re in the right house.

What They Want Next

The recurring requests: examples of what competitors charge, case studies comparing retainer versus project-based versus hourly models, strategies for pitching retainer arrangements to clients, simple negotiation frameworks, and guidance on billing for travel, site visits, and other add-ons. The theme across all of it is that consultants want more comparative data. Pricing in this sector is a private conversation by default, and most people have a nagging suspicion that they’re operating with incomplete information.

They’re probably right.

What This Tells Us

There’s no standard rate for independent consulting in the social impact space — and there probably shouldn’t be. The range is too wide, the variables too numerous, and the client relationships too varied for a single number to mean much. But a few patterns are clear: experienced consultants gravitate toward retainers, most calibrate rates against multiple factors simultaneously, and nearly everyone wants more transparency from their peers about how pricing actually works.

We’re planning an updated version of this survey later this year. If you’d like to participate or have suggestions for questions we should add, let us know.

Appendix

A close family friend who knew what I was going through back then gave me encouragement and support. He said, “Experience is the hardest teacher, because you get the test first and the lesson after.”

At the time, I just felt comforted by his words. I was someone who prided himself too much on always getting things right. Now I had to incorporate this failure into my story, and my friend’s advice gave me a way to fit it in without completely tearing down my identity.

Over time, I’ve thought more about that line — you get the test first and the lesson after — and the other ways it applies. It got me wondering how many experiences I had avoided out of the fear of not passing the test, and therefore how many lessons I never learned.

We have a few big pieces coming up soon here on the Chorus Consultant Community and in the Strategic Agility Series, so the article today is shorter than usual. I want to share some of the tests I failed and the lessons I learned after. Hopefully it can be a small nudge to everyone to embrace the experience knowing full well you might not pass.

Thinking I could persist through a leadership transition

I had a longtime client with whom I had a deep and trusting relationship, including with the Executive Director and other senior leadership. I provided value and went above and beyond many times over the years. Then, they had a leadership transition. I thought for sure my contributions were unimpeachable, and the new ED (who had been on the senior leadership team) would want to retain my services ongoing.

Well, that didn’t happen.

But I learned something. I went into the new relationship trying to just port over the previous arrangement and thinking we’d continue as before. I should have treated it like an audition for a new contract. Maybe I had my foot in the door, but this was a new prospect whose business I had to win. If I could do it all over again, I would have done a discovery meeting, submitted a proposal and SOW, and negotiated brand new terms. I still might not have converted the contract, but I would have improved my chances.

Saying yes to a project I didn’t know how to scope

I had one engagement that started off with general strategic advising on financial planning and Board engagement and communications. Then the client asked me to manage deployment of a large-scale new software solution.

I was excited to take this on and said “yes.” But I had never overseen a project like this before. My time expectations proved unrealistic, and the project went several months beyond my original plan. The problem was that I was due to start my parental leave after Labor Day, but the project wasn’t finished. I didn’t give myself many good options, so I just had to tie things up and transition them to a staffer as well as I could. I am not proud of my work on this.

Next time, I would get some advice from an expert before taking on a big new project. Then, I could do accurate scoping of time and resources needed before committing to the work.

Being too transactional and not having a real plan to stay in touch with people

Raise your hand if I’ve ever sent you an email out of the blue after more than 5 years of no contact asking you for something…

So many hands up. Ack, the shame!

I’ve done this so many times, I can’t keep track anymore. Lately, I made the mistake of assuming as long as I offered something useful in return, folks would want to take me up on it. Wrong. Again.

What I’ve learned is people want to help each other if they have a good relationship. That doesn’t mean we talk on the phone once a week. We don’t really have to be in frequent, regular contact. But we do need to have a basis for our relationship rooted in personal connection, not transaction.

So, I’m trying to be better about this. My barrier isn’t interest or caring, either. It’s just time. Cultivating flourishing relationships (or at least healthy ones) takes time, and that’s always short. However, in a business that’s all about relationships, it has to be a top priority.

There’s a thread running through all three of these. In each case, the version of me who showed up believed he already knew enough. I knew my client relationship was solid. I knew I could figure out a software deployment. I knew that offering value in an email was sufficient to rekindle a dormant connection. The confidence wasn’t arrogance, exactly; it was more like a refusal to feel the discomfort of not knowing. And that refusal is what made the test so much harder than it needed to be.

My friend’s line has lodged itself somewhere permanent in me now, the way the best advice does. I catch myself applying it in real time. When something feels uncertain or exposing, when I notice that familiar tightening in my chest that says you might not be good enough for this, I try to hear it differently. That feeling is the test arriving before the lesson.

I still haven’t fully let go of the board failure, but I no longer try to fit it into a tidy narrative about resilience or growth. It just sits there, a little jagged, reminding me that I learned something I couldn’t have learned any other way.

That’s a pretty good snapshot of independent consulting. You’re capable and committed. You’re also juggling a dozen invisible balls, and that’s exactly why most business development advice doesn’t stick. It assumes you have spare afternoons, boundless energy, and a personality built for relentless outreach.

Michaela’s first year as an independent consultant looked like what many of us quietly experience: lots of capability, not enough clarity, and a persistent sense that “I should be doing more.” As she put it, “I don’t think people knew what to hire me for.” She had coaching expertise, consulting experience, and a background in organizing and nonprofit work. She could do almost anything, which meant potential clients couldn’t picture her doing any specific thing.

Then something shifted. Michaela built a business development practice small enough to actually keep. Within three months, she went from her slowest period to her busiest ever.

I have long admired Michaela’s approach. I’ve seen her deliberate LinkedIn posts and creative lead generation strategy. So I asked her to chat with me about what she’s tried, learned, and can share with others.

The Mistake of Waiting for the Perfect Afternoon

Michaela’s early attempts at systematic business development followed a familiar pattern.

“I thought I needed a big chunk of time,” she explained. “I would say to myself,I need to devote an afternoon to business development. And because of that, I need a whole long list of people that I’m going to reach out to.”

She would block the time on her calendar, but when the time came, she didn’t have the momentum. She would do other things and the list never got built. Business development kept getting pushed to tomorrow.

Everything changed when she started working with Rebecca Van Damm, a marketing advisor who defines herself as a “thought partner for thought leaders”. Rebecca asked a great question.

Together, they created a daily morning ritual. Michaela committed to three actions: positive affirmations to address all her business fears, ten minutes of free writing, and three business development emails per day. After two weeks, three emails felt like too many, so she adjusted to one email per day.

That flexibility is part of why it works.

The Minimum Viable Business Development (BD) Practice

By “business development,” Michaela means any outreach or connection that keeps her network active and aware of her work: reconnecting with former colleagues, following up on past conversations, reaching out to potential collaborators, or staying in touch with people she genuinely values.

The core of Michaela’s approach isn’t “networking” in the cringe sense or cold outreach to strangers. It’s a small daily habit that keeps her relationships warm and her thinking sharp.

Michaela’s Minimum Viable BD Practice (20 minutes/day)

1. Affirmations (2–3 minutes): out loud, positive, and addressing her loudest fears at the moment

2. Free writing (10 minutes): brain dump, polishing drafts, or scheduling a post

3. One email (5–10 minutes): any outreach that maintains connection: a check-in, a follow-up, a response, or a quick reconnection.

The key is consistency.

Direct BD vs. Ambient Credibility: The Two-Speed System

This is where Michaela gets especially practical.

The email is direct business development: it creates conversations, reopens relationships, and surfaces opportunities.

The writing is ambient credibility: it’s how people remember what she does, how she thinks, and why they should reach out.

Some days her ten minutes of writing is a pure brain dump. Other days it becomes a LinkedIn post. Over time, that practice helped her develop a consistent LinkedIn presence, first posting weekly then twice per week.

Michaela doesn’t see LinkedIn as business development exactly, though a few clients have found her there.

“To me, Linkedin is about developing my thought leadership on what’s important to me and staying visible” she said. “And maybe it’s a validator. I hope people see my posts and think, oh right, I need to email Michaela about that thing.”

She started this daily practice in July during a slow period. By the fall, Michaela’s calendar had filled up.

Three Copy/Paste Templates You Can Use Today

If your brain locks up when you try to “do Business Development,” steal these ones from Michaela. They’re intentionally simple, warm, and not sales-y.

1) The low-pressure check-in (warm contact)

Subject: Quick catch-up?
Hey [Name],

I realized it’s been a while since we connected, and I’d genuinely love to hear how things are going with [work/project].

No agenda on my side, I just thought of you and wanted to say hi. If you’re up for it, want to grab 20 minutes sometime in the next couple weeks?

– Michaela

2) The guilt-free follow-up (assume the best)

Subject: Bumping this up (no rush)
Hey [Name]

I am following up in case this got buried. I totally understand if the timing is hectic.

If it is a no or “not now,” feel free to tell me, no worries either way. I appreciate you keeping me in the loop.

Warmly,
Michaela

(Michaela’s mindset here is key here. She shared with me that nine times out of ten, they just lost it in their inbox.)

3) The “specific but brief” Slack/listserv post

Hi [community], I recently partnered with a small organization to build a simple, values-aligned competency model that [clarified what skills are essential at every level of the organization, set clear expectations, etc]

We created something they can now use for skills-based performance management, hiring, and leadership development systems.

This is one way I love supporting organizations as they strengthen their leadership development pathways.

If you’re thinking about evolving this work in 2026, especially in ways that support transparency, clarity, and staff growth, I’d love to connect. Schedule time to discuss:[Booking link]

This works because it’s concrete. It names a real deliverable, and it makes the next step easy.

Starting Where Networking Feels Natural

For years, Michaela avoided networking. She had worked as a recruiter, a job that required constant cold calls. The experience turned her off to anything that felt like “prospecting.”

When she started her consulting practice, she realized she’d been defining networking in the narrowest, most unpleasant way.

“There are all these people from my network that I haven’t kept in good touch with that I actually just genuinely want to catch up with,” she said.

That became her starting point: low-stakes conversations with people she actually wanted to talk to. Those conversations built her confidence because she was “practicing sharing what I’m up to on people that I really wanted to talk to.”

She also got more intentional about why she was reaching out.

“Have an objective,” she advised. “And also get clear on what’s important to you to communicate to them about what you’re doing and how they can help.

“What’s more interesting: Focusing on your fear of imposing? Or focusing on your curiosity and desire to reconnect with your network? I choose curiosity and remember that I’m not ‘pitching.’ I’m reconnecting with intention”

One thing that’s helped her feel more comfortable with this kind of connection is to ask everyone how she can support them, too. It demonstrates that these touchpoints are a two-way street.

Share

What Didn’t Work

Not every experiment worked.

Michaela tried offering free webinars and workshops, some solo and some with collaborators. One on “naming and taming your organizational ghosts” drew good attendance and positive feedback. But none of the free offerings turned into business.

Looking back, she sees what was off: the energy was subtly transactional.

“I think I was too focused on what I wanted out of it than what value I was delivering.” Michaela admitted. “ No one wants to go to a workshop and be sold something.”

If she were to do workshops again, she’d change three things:

• Choose content based on what she now knows resonates with clients

• Charge a small amount so people make a mutual investment and actually show up

• Treat it like a gift: deliver genuine value you can stand behind and are genuinely excited to share with more people

Meanwhile, one tactic has worked: occasional promotion in targeted Slack groups and listservs. However, it’s very important to make sure you’re operating within the rules of your group. Many networking Slack groups and listservs have a “no pitches” policy, or a specific channel for promotion. Michaela takes care to follow the rules of the group, and uses this tactic purposefully and infrequently to make sure it will really stick.

The Clarity That Comes From Doing

The daily practice gave Michaela something she didn’t expect: clarity about what she actually offers.

At first, her message to the market was basically “I can do anything.” And she could. But “anything” is almost impossible for a client to buy.

As she got more deliberate about business development—having conversations, following curiosity, noticing patterns—she realized something important: her work had a through-line.

“The through-line for all of my work is leadership development,” she said.

Her consulting (performance management systems, facilitation, training) was leadership development. Her coaching was leadership development. What had long felt like two separate tracks were actually reinforcing each other.

That clarity came from doing the work of staying in motion: sending one email, having one conversation, noticing what resonated, and learning what people actually wanted to hire her for.

Business development isn’t just how you find clients. It’s also how you test whether your “offer” matches what the market can understand and buy.

A Little Bit of Time Goes a Long Way

Near the end of our conversation, Michaela said something that feels almost too simple but is so true.

Her approach works because it’s realistic. It’s built for real life: messy days, inconsistent energy, and the fact that most independent consultants can’t magically summon “a free afternoon” on command.

For Michaela, the practice is affirmations, ten minutes of writing, and one email. For you, it might be different. But the principle holds: consistency beats intensity. Small actions taken regularly beat big efforts that never happen.

Michaela still doesn’t consider herself an expert in business development. But that’s part of what makes this valuable: it’s not theory. It’s a system she’s actually living, adjusting, learning, and keeping.

Michaela Howard is an independent consultant and coach who specializes in leadership development and organizational capacity-building. Grounded in a background in organizing, strategic planning, and nonprofit management, her work centers on developing people, strengthening systems, and cultivating cultures of shared leadership. She writes a monthly newsletter exploring leadership lessons through the lens of organizing principles. Learn more at michaelahoward.com.

For those new to the Strategic Agility series: a strategic operating system is the set of structures, rhythms, and decision-making infrastructure that make it possible to build for the long-term while executing in the short-term.

In our most recent work, we’ve been focused on three non-negotiable capabilities of this system for your organization:

• Bring the right people in.

• Manage them effectively once they’re there.

• Move them out if and when you need to.

We’ve written about #1, bringing the right people in (hiring) and #3, moving them out when you need to (firing). This article kicks off a dedicated series on #2 — managing people effectively across the organization once they’re there.

Over the course of this series, we will walk you through everything you need to build the infrastructure that makes great management the default, whether your organization has one manager or 100.

To get us started, we’re going to talk about how cars work

Let’s Talk About How Cars Work

A car has an engine.
The engine generates power.
But engines don’t move cars.

Transmissions do.

The engine creates force. The transmission converts that force into motion. It transfers power from the engine to the wheels. Without it, the engine can roar all it wants. The car won’t go anywhere.

Or worse — it will lurch, grind, overheat, and eventually break down.

Let’s talk about how organizations work.
An organization has a strategy.
Strategy generates direction and force.

But strategy doesn’t move organizations.

Management does.

Before we go further, this isn’t an argument that managers aren’t doing enough. Most managers are working incredibly hard. They care. They’re trying. Many are holding more complexity than their roles were ever designed to carry.

It’s an argument that committed, skilled managers who are asked to manage without a solid management infrastructure are ultimately being set up to fail.

Good managers operating within a strong management infrastructure are what convert strategic power into effective execution.

Without those components, the strategy can be bold, ambitious, and logically sound — and the organization still won’t move.

Or worse — it will surge in one area, stall in another, overextend in a third, and burn people out in the process.

When a car roars but won’t move, we don’t blame the engine. We don’t blame the driver.

We inspect the system that converts power into motion.

In organizations, when execution falters, we point to almost everything else:

→ The strategy — “We had the wrong plan.” (Execution failed, so the plan must be wrong.)
→ The people — “We have the wrong people.” (Talent should fix the system.)
→ The culture — “We don’t have a culture of accountability.” (As if culture exists outside structure.)
→ The external circumstances — “The environment shifted.” (Volatility explains inconsistency.)
→ The individual — “They’re not strong enough.” (We never defined strong.)

These are the easiest explanations to reach for. So we reach for them.

The plan might be part of it. The people might be part of it.

But when execution falters, it’s usually a breakdown in the system — the management system.

Transmissions are infrastructure — deliberately engineered systems built for precision and performance. They regulate power. They synchronize movement. They absorb strain. They ensure force reaches the wheels without tearing the system apart.

And when execution is steady — when talented people collaborate effectively and deliver sustained impact over months and years — that is a system working.

Management must be built the same way: as infrastructure.

When that infrastructure is weak, undefined, or inconsistent, no amount of horsepower will move you forward.

But when it’s strong, clear, and supported, power and momentum compound.

People, strategy, culture, and circumstances matter but infrastructure is what aligns them.

That’s what this series will show you how to do: build the infrastructure that makes strong management across your organization the default.

We’ll introduce the full management infrastructure in the next article. From there, we’ll go deep on each component — the templates, the frameworks, the tools.

But today, start here.

Define what good management looks like in your organization.

It sounds simple. Most organizations have never done it.

If you haven’t, or don’t, define it, every manager builds their own version. Standards drift. Expectations vary. Accountability becomes personality-dependent.

Some managers quietly hold the bar or raise it. Others quietly lower it. And some never realize there’s a bar in the first place.

No one is operating from the same definition. And no one is being held to one or fully supported to reach it.

The fix isn’t more training. It isn’t better feedback. It’s clarity.

A written management framework outlines the following:

• Why management matters here — and what “excellent” management looks like in practice.

• How managers will be supported to meet that standard.

It doesn’t have to be long.
It has to be deliberate.
And it has to be written.

Because if it isn’t written, reinforced, and tied to hiring and promotion decisions, it isn’t infrastructure.

It’s preference.

And preference is not a system.

Your move this week: Write it down.

Take 30 minutes and answer these two questions:

This is just for you — for now. And it’s just the first draft. Soon, you’ll want to gather input and share it with your management team, and we’ll give you tools to do that. For now, use this exercise to capture your own thinking.

We’ll share how we answer these questions as part of this series, but this step is about capturing your answers.

1. Why does management matter here? What does “excellent” actually mean?

You might write things like:

• Ensuring each person has what they need to succeed

• Flagging patterns, risks, and opportunities across the organization

• Translating organizational decisions into clarity for their teams

• Serving as a connective tissue between strategy and day-to-day work, and between their teams and the broader organization

Then think through what those things actually need to look like in your organization.

2. How will we support managers in meeting that bar?
What development, coaching, and infrastructure exist — or need to exist — to help them get there?

If there’s a gap between what you just wrote down and what you are seeing, that is okay. It’s normal and it’s fixable.

Not by asking people to try harder and not by (only) sending them to training, but by building the infrastructure that makes good management the default over time.

That’s what this series will show you how to do.

Start with the 30 minutes above.

We want to talk to you!

If any of this landed — whether you’re in the thick of these challenges or you’ve developed approaches that work — we want to hear about it. We’re scheduling 20-minute conversations with leaders to understand what’s helping you stay grounded and where you’re struggling. Your insights shape how we build this series.

Send us an email at info@hookrodgersconsulting.com to get on the books.

Jen Job didn’t get into consulting because she was running from a bad manager. But she learned something that messes with the whole “no boss” fantasy:

People think, “If I’m just my own boss, it’ll be fine.” But you don’t have one boss anymore—you have six. And you don’t have the protections of a workplace. Your clients can drop you in 30 days. You’re the first expense they’ll cut.

Independent consulting at its best can be an escape from some of the slog of workplace dynamics. But as my conversation with Jen revealed, it’s also a test of whether you can navigate those dynamics in a different form, and without institutional support!

First, Meet Jen

I’ve known Jen for a few years, and she’s one of those rare people who combines real strategic range with the kind of steadiness that makes everyone around her better. She’s the principal of BreakGlass Strategies, where she helps progressive organizations with digital strategy that’s both fast and high-quality. She’s been doing this work for over a decade, spanning fundraising, list growth, message testing, and cross-channel execution (email, paid media, and more). She’s the person you want in the room when the plan needs to be both principled and practical.

But Jen isn’t just “good at digital.” She’s unusually good at the human part: clear boundaries, sharp instincts about what’s actually needed, and a bias toward getting the work done without drama. She’s built a reputation as a strategic force behind the scenes—long-term, not just in bursts—which you can feel in the way clients talk about her impact.

All of that is why I took her “six bosses” line seriously. It’s not a cute comment. It’s wisdom earned the hard way, from someone who’s lived the real tradeoffs of going independent and still chose it anyway.

Boss #0: The Myth of “No Boss”

Jen didn’t literally hand me a numbered list, but her point is dead-on: independence doesn’t remove bosses. It actually multiplies them!

Here’s what “six bosses” usually looks like:

1. Your client contact (The person who assigns your work and makes the call about whether you stay or go.)

2. Your client’s internal stakeholders (Those are the campaigners, the Comms team – anyone who comes with the “quick question” that ends up doubling your work)

3. The budget owner (The guy who cuts vendors first when things tighten)

4. Your pipeline (The need to always be looking to the next contract,whether you feel like it or not)

5. Your capacity and health (This is he constraint you can’t outsource – or if you do, you become someone else’s boss, which comes with its own pitfalls)

6. The admin state (This is the administrivia you don’t really care about but can make or break you – invoicing, taxes, insurance, tools, licenses)

Multiply that by the number of clients you have, and it gets bigger than six fast. And unlike a traditional job, there’s no HR buffer and no putting you on a Performance Improvement Plan. If things get awkward, you can be gone in a month.

That risk hits differently for Jen, because she’s a single mom: no second income, no partner’s insurance safety net. She’s doing this on hard mode.

Boss #6 (First): The Admin State Chooses You Every Day

If you’ve never been independent, it’s hard to appreciate how much “work” isn’t the work. Contracts. Invoicing. Tooling. Taxes. Insurance. The little frictions that don’t feel like a job until they’re your job. For instance, Jen found out when she started that anyone who writes fundraising emails in her state requires a license that must be renewed annually – even if her clients are out of state.

One reason Jen’s story is useful is that she doesn’t romanticize independence. She’s honest about the tradeoffs: when you don’t have institutional protection, you build your own systems, and you pay for them in time, attention, and stress.

Boss #5: Your Capacity Is the Real Ceiling

There’s no manager to tell you to stop. There’s no team to soak up overflow. There’s just your calendar, your brain, your energy, and the fact that if you burn out you don’t get sick leave. In fact, you just fall behind and potentially lose out on income.

Jen’s “six bosses” framing forces the hard question: Can you protect your capacity while still saying yes enough to make the business work?

Her answer is refreshingly simple: it’s less about tools and more about people skills.

Boss #1 and #2: The Human Bosses (Clients + Stakeholders)

When I asked Jen about her strengths, she didn’t start with technical chops. She started with people:

I can read people pretty well and tell what they need and what type of communication works with them. I know how to set boundaries without making it seem like I’m saying no.

That’s an underrated consulting superpower: delivering what clients want without getting trapped by how they asked for it, especially when there are multiple stakeholders pulling you in different directions.

Three ways to say “no” without saying “no”

If you can do this well, you manage expectations, keep relationships intact, and protect your time without turning every boundary into a fight.

Boss #1’s Favorite Test: Can You Be Boringly Dependable?

Jen’s other critical strength is less glamorous but more rare: dependability.

Clients don’t have to chase her or ask twice. In a world where follow-through is inconsistent, “this will happen without reminders” becomes a differentiator.

It’s also a hedge against the “30-day drop” reality. When budgets tighten, it’s easier to cut the vendor who creates friction than the one who quietly makes things work.

Boss #4: The Pipeline Doesn’t Care That You’re Busy

Jen made two mistakes early on that are common. The first was underinvesting in business development.

She focused on doing great work for existing clients, but didn’t consistently carve out time for networking and building a pipeline. The problem is obvious: if you rely on a small number of clients and one drops, you’re suddenly in a hole.

This is where the “six bosses” framework is brutal: your pipeline is a boss. It wants time every week, even when you’re slammed, even when you’re tired, even when you’d rather tell yourself you’ll get to it later.

Boss #2: Scope Creep Is a Stakeholder With Teeth

The second mistake was letting scope creep become the norm.

Jen prefers value-based or work-product-based pricing: get paid for delivering outcomes and things she produces, not for hours worked. One client pushed hard for hourly billing. Jen refused, but they still asked for “just one more thing” beyond the agreed deliverables. And because she didn’t like saying no, she kept doing it.

Eventually, they were getting two consultants for the price of one.

Jen ended the relationship, and the lesson stuck: once scope creep becomes normal, it’s painful to claw back. Hourly billing also punishes efficiency. If Jen can do in two hours what someone else takes four hours to do, she shouldn’t earn less for being faster!

Don’t mistake scope creep for misunderstanding. It’s a negotiation. And if you don’t negotiate, you’ll still get negotiated with. Better to grit your teeth and dive in.

Boss #3: The Budget Owner Wants Fewer Vendors

Conventional wisdom says: specialize narrowly. Pick one thing and become known for it.

Jen’s experience is a little different, and the reason comes down to the budget boss.

She started in email, but expanded into SMS, social ads, and even direct mail. On the other side, organizations increasingly want fewer vendors. Budget pressure means fewer internal staff to manage multiple consultants. So if you can cover multiple channels, you become easier to keep.

Jen has even seen consultants lose clients because the “ad people” a client used started offering email, too. The client would rather pay one shop than coordinate four.

Jen isn’t saying to be a generalist at everything. She’s saying that you should be broad across channels, but not scattered across too many organizations. The breadth works because she’s a solo consultant and the offering is her.

Boss #5 (Again): Benefits, Security, and the Reality of Risk

Jen still loves consulting, even with all of this, but she’s also practical about risk.

She recently took a role that was a pay cut compared to pure independent work, butcame with health insurance and a 401(k). That mattered because her Affordable Care Act premium was about to jump.

Jen still consults on the side because she likes having multiple things going. Variety keeps her sharp and keeps options open.

Boss #0 (Again)

Jen’s path, from high school English teacher to digital strategist, wasn’t planned. She followed what interested her and what clients needed. She learned SMS tools because a client required it. She got into ads because a friend needed QA help. She took on direct mail because someone said it wasn’t that different from email.

What made it work wasn’t being the world’s best at a single platform.

It was:

• reading people,

• delivering consistently,

• and setting boundaries without turning every boundary into a fight.

Which brings us back to the real punchline: you don’t lose bosses when you go independent. You just trade one boss for six, and find out whether you can manage all of them at once.

Several folks wrote back to me in response to an article I sent a couple weeks ago: Organizing Loses When Politics Becomes Identity. I think a lot about these topics, so here is a branch that goes in a slightly different direction about the nonprofit sector. Specifically, how community and identity can also be commercialized in a way that harms the people doing the work, the nonprofits themselves, and the causes everyone is ostensibly trying to advance.

And if you’re building organizations (or trying to survive inside one), it’s also about a hard design question: what kind of belonging are we offering, and what does it cost?

I spent 14 years working inside of nonprofits. The first step I saw was politics becoming identity, but the second step and the far stronger one is not belief but belonging. And movements get brittle when they confuse high-intensity social bonding for durable moral purpose.

The hidden retention engine

Let me separate three kinds of claims upfront, so we can be honest about what we know.

• Fact: A lot of political and nonprofit work has high turnover.

• Observation: Many people describe feeling both meaning and exhaustion, often at the same time.

• Inference: The “meaning” often comes less from the stated mission and more from the social experience of being inside a committed in-group.

That inference is the point of this piece.

In Organizing Loses…, I argued that when politics becomes identity, we start treating disagreement as contamination. That dynamic weakens organizing because organizing requires coalition-building, and coalition-building requires negotiating difference without moralizing it into betrayal.

Here’s the adjacent problem: even when people privately sense the identity dynamic is warping the work, they often stay. Even when the strategy isn’t sound, the tactics aren’t effective, and they don’t really believe the theory of change anymore. They stay because leaving would mean losing their community.

And when an organization’s retention is powered by community rather than competence, two things happen:

1. Leaders get a labor force that will tolerate incoherence longer than they should.
   

2. Workers internalize the organization’s needs as personal obligations because “us” feels like “me.”

By belonging I mean: a felt sense that you are known, needed, and morally safe among a particular group of people. You can hate the job, question the strategy, and still feel relief walking into the office because you know the jokes, the rituals, the shared language, the “we survived that night together” shorthand.

That relief is real, and also dangerous.

How the “summer camp trap” gets built

By the summer camp trap I mean a high-intensity bonding environment where shared hardship, moral purpose, and social life fuse together, making exit feel like exile. Anyone who has been on an electoral campaign or canvassed (or worked in theater, etc.) knows what this is like.

You wake up early. You knock doors in weather that makes no sense for a human being. You get rejected all day. You come home wrung out. Then you debrief with the same twenty people who lived the same day. Someone cooks something. Someone’s blasting music. Someone’s flirting. Someone’s crying. You laugh too hard at something that isn’t even that funny. You feel alive and deeply connected with your colleagues.

The work may be inefficient or strategically muddled, but the social system is brilliant. It converts misery into intimacy.

Let me offer another Fact/Observation/Inference framework.

• Fact: Hard shared experiences can produce strong bonds (military units, sports teams, disaster response, startups).

• Observation: Campaign and nonprofit environments often use shared intensity as a recruitment and retention force.

• Inference: When intensity becomes the primary fuel, organizations start selecting for people who crave intensity, not people who build power well.

That last inference is where the trap turns structural.

Because if your retention depends on the “camp” feeling, you will, usually unconsciously, design the organization to keep producing it: urgent deadlines, constant mobilization, moralized framing, a permanent sense of emergency.

And then “politics becomes identity” becomes a business model.

Why I stayed after belief faded

In my early work, there were stretches when I didn’t believe the activity matched the rhetoric. I had doubts about whether we were building power or just producing outputs that looked like power: calls made, doors knocked, dollars raised, signatures gathered.

Those doubts didn’t immediately change my behavior. I still showed up.

Why?

Because the work had become my social world.

It was where my friends were. It was where my romantic prospects were. It was where I felt morally legible. It was where my inner life had a storyline: I’m the kind of person who does this. I craved the sense that the people around me could interpret my choices as good, rather than selfish or suspect.

But when a group controls your moral legibility, it controls your choices more than you think.

So even when I could see the cracks, I was still tethered by the fear of losing the only community where my values felt fluent.

This is the link back to last week’s piece/ In Organizing Loses…, politics-as-identity makes disagreement feel like a threat to self. Here, the summer camp trap makes exit feel like a threat to self.

One punishes dissent. The other punishes departure. Same structure, different pressure point.

Belonging vs. purpose

Let’s define a term that matters here: purpose.

By purpose I mean: a stable commitment to an aim that remains coherent even when your social environment changes. You can leave one organization, lose your friend group, and still work for the same underlying goal, because the goal is not fused to a particular tribe.

Belonging is not purpose. Belonging is a human need, and it’s important we all have it! The mistake is using politics to meet it in ways that make the work fragile.

Here’s how the fusion happens:

1. Shared moral language gives the group a sense of righteousness.

2. Shared hardship gives the group a sense of intimacy.

3. Shared enemies give the group a sense of clarity.

4. Scarcity (time, money, sleep) gives the group a sense of urgency.

Together, they create a strong identity field, a social environment where your status, belonging, and self-worth are strongly conditioned on visible alignment with the group’s moral story. In those circumstances, you’re not evaluated only on outcomes or craft, but on how you speak, what you signal, and which disagreements you are willing to publicly perform.

In an identity field, the safest move is often to intensify your alignment. which means the organization becomes worse at reality-testing.

And that’s where organizing loses…again. Because organizing requires reality-testing: What do people actually care about? What will they show up for? What tradeoffs are they willing to make? What message travels? What coalition is possible?

A strong identity field substitutes “what we say about ourselves” for “what we can build with others.”

Counterargument: But what about community?

A fair counterpoint is: Of course the community matters. People join movements for relationships. Solidarity isn’t a side effect—it’s the goal.

I agree with the best version of that argument. In a fractured society, political work is one of the few places people experience cross-class intimacy, mutual aid, and shared meaning. Asking movements to be “less identity-based” can be a disguised demand to be emotionally sterile, which tends to advantage people who already have community and security elsewhere.

That’s a real and necessary critique.

Here’s my response, also in accountable form:

• Fact: Humans need belonging; movements often provide it.

• Observation: Belonging can be a source of courage, sacrifice, and sustained engagement.

• Inference: Belonging becomes corrosive when it becomes the primary retention mechanism and the primary moral credential, because then the organization starts optimizing for social coherence over external effectiveness.

In other words: I’m not arguing against solidarity. I’m arguing against dependence, which is the condition where you can’t leave without losing your identity, and where leaders can implicitly leverage that dependency to keep the machine running.

Healthy solidarity makes people stronger and more autonomous. The summer-camp trap makes people more loyal and less free.

What the trap does to movements

1) It selects for intensity-seekers, not builders

Builders are people who can recruit, train, and retain others while translating values into durable structures. We need people who can create a volunteer ladder that keeps people engaged for months, not days; teach them how to run a meeting; and build relationships with groups you don’t like.

When an org confuses intensity for progress, it burns out builders and rewards performers.

2) It turns moral language into social currency

When belonging is scarce, moral performance becomes a way to secure it.

This is one reason “politics becomes identity” becomes hard to reverse. Even if people privately soften, the social incentives reward hardness.

3) It makes exit feel like betrayal and that warps honesty inside the org

If leaving is treated as defection, then staying requires self-justification. Self-justification makes people less able to name what’s not working, because naming it would threaten the very thing they’re relying on: membership.

So the organization loses feedback. The work decays. The community tightens. The identity field thickens.

A simple question

Am I staying because the work is right, or because the community is my identity?

If it’s the latter, you don’t have to panic. You just have to start disentangling. Find belonging that isn’t contingent on your politics. Find purpose that isn’t contingent on your tribe. Then you can re-enter the work with clearer eyes, and movements will get stronger people, not just loyal ones.

That’s the kind of identity worth building: one that doesn’t require captivity to feel like commitment.

In the early 1980s, Van Halen was the biggest touring rock band in the world—and one of the most technically demanding. They were the first act to bring massive arena-scale lighting and staging rigs into smaller markets: nine eighteen-wheeler trucks of gear rolling into venues that had only ever handled three.

Along with this staggering infrastructure, they gave each hosting venue a 53-page contract rider detailing their specific requirements, and buried between voltage specs and load-bearing requirements was Article 126: “M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).”

The press treated this as rock star excess; spoiled brats demanding candy sorted by color. But it was not a diva move; it was a critical diagnostic.

If Van Halen walked backstage and saw brown M&M’s in the bowl, they knew the venue hadn’t read the rider carefully. And if they hadn’t read the contract carefully, the load-bearing calculations might be wrong. The power specs might be off. The rigging that held ten tons of lighting above the stage—directly above the band—might not hold. With nine trucks of heavy staging and lighting gear, a missed detail could mean a collapsed stage or an electrical fire.

In 1980, Van Halen arrived at a venue in Southern Colorado, hours after the venue had already set up the show’s equipment, and found Brown M&Ms in a bowl. They immediately ordered a full technical check and within minutes a significant structural problem was discovered: the staging had already sunk through the venue’s new flooring.

Had Van Halen taken the stage as it was, with the added weight of the band, crew, and movement during a live performance, the floor would have given way and the rigging, holding nine eighteen-wheelers’ worth of electrical equipment, would have come crashing down in a packed venue.

The Brown M&M diagnostic was not just a warning system, it was a confirmation tool; one small, visible failure that reliably predicted much larger ones.

Your ability to Fire people is your Brown M&M

A real strategic operating system has three non-negotiable capabilities: bring the right people in, manage them effectively once they’re there, and move them out if and when you need to.

Hiring is aspirational—it reveals what you hope for. Managing is intentional—it reveals what you’re willing to invest in. Firing is operationalizing your strategy. And how well you can (or can’t) do it is revelatory.

Your ability to fire someone, at the right time and in the right way, is one of the biggest indicators of organizational health, leadership effectiveness, and strategic fitness.

Firing well (timely, risk-managed, in a thoughtful way) is the one capability that depends on every other part of the strategic operating system working—the same parts that determine whether your organization can set direction, align resources, hold standards, and adapt when things change.

If your organization can fire well, it means:

• Roles are defined by outcomes, not activities.

• Expectations are communicated, not assumed.

• Direct communication is the norm, not the exception.

• Feedback is specific, useful, and delivered before it’s too late.

• Performance standards exist and are enforced consistently.

• Leaders trust that the system will back them when they act.

• HR operates as a strategic partner, not an obstacle to overcome.

• The accountability chain runs unbroken from Purpose to daily operations.

If your organization can’t fire well, those things are broken. Maybe all of them.

The cost of not firing someone who should be let go is enormous—and it compounds.
Time: Hours spent managing around the role instead of leading through it. 
Team: Absorbing the underperformance. Scrambling to keep work from dropping or slowed down. A growing belief that expectations, or good work, actually matter. Your stronger performers brushing off their resumes. 
Credibility: Standards have bent. Accountability has softened. Commitment to purpose and mission is questioned. 
Strategy: Priorities suffering. Opportunities passed by. 
Impact: Outcomes compromised. Critical milestones delayed. The toll paid by the people you exist to serve.

Now, Run the Test

You already know if there is someone who isn’t working out.

Now ask yourself honestly: could your organization move that person out—in a timely, defensible and fair way, without it becoming a crisis?

If the answer is yes, and it’s happening tomorrow, then you are the unicorn.

If the answer is no, then you’ve found your brown M&M. And like Roth walking backstage, your next move isn’t to fix the candy bowl. It’s to line-check the entire production.

Here’s where to look.

Line-Check #1: Role Clarity

The first place most systems break is at the beginning: what the role actually requires was never made explicit.

When expectations are vague, accountability is impossible. You can’t hold someone to a standard that was never communicated. And you certainly can’t defend a firing when the person can reasonably say, “No one ever told me what success looked like.”

Is there a list of clear goals and expectations for the role? Was that list informed by and aligned on by the key stakeholders? Was it reviewed with the employee? Did you check for understanding? Could the staff person and their manager independently describe what success looks like in this role and arrive at the same answer? And have the staff person’s goals shifted along with any strategic shifts so they reflect your actual current expectations? If not, then this person was set up to fail and it’s your fault. They may very well still need to be let go, but you’ve got to go back and clean up the process from step 1.

Line-Check #2: Feedback Infrastructure

If you can’t fire someone, ask: was this person told—specifically, directly, and in writing—that their performance wasn’t meeting expectations? And were they told on several occasions over time without seeing improvement?

In most organizations, the answer is no. Managers haven’t built muscle around giving effective feedback, or they have but bad culture suffocated good skills and now feedback is vague, euphemistic, or absent entirely. Leaders hint. They soften. They sandwich so hard the meat disappears.

The person in the role receives just enough signal to feel uneasy but never enough clarity to change course or understand the stakes.

Responsible firing requires specific, documented feedback delivered early and often. Without that, firing feels arbitrary and cruel—because it is. You haven’t built the process that makes the decision legible.

Line-Check #3: Discipline Infrastructure

Feedback tells someone where they stand. Discipline infrastructure gives them a structured path to close the gap or confirms that it can’t be closed. Without it, there’s no bridge between “we told them” and “we acted.”

This is where most organizations have the biggest gap. They may deliver some version of feedback, but when the feedback doesn’t produce change, there’s no defined next step. No escalation path. No structured process that moves from verbal conversation to written documentation to formal improvement plan to decision. So the feedback just… repeats. The same conversation, quarter after quarter, with no trajectory and no consequence.

What the infrastructure actually requires:

A codified progressive sequence. Verbal warning, written warning, formal improvement plan, separation. Everyone, from the manager to the employee to HR to senior leadership, should know the steps and what triggers each one.

A real improvement plan template. Not a vague directive to “do better.” A defined gap, measurable milestones, a specific timeline (often 30 days or fewer is enough; reserve longer periods only where it’s truly needed), a clear picture of what success looks like, a plan for what kinds of reasonable supports they’ll get to improve the missing skills, and an explicit statement of what happens if it’s not met.

Honest alignment before the process starts. The manager and anyone else who plays a key role in the process (their manager? HR?) have to be aligned on what the improvement plan is actually for. Is this a genuine chance to course-correct, or a documented path to exit? Both are legitimate. But everyone involved needs to be honest about which one it is.

Clear evaluation criteria. What constitutes “meeting milestones” vs. “showing effort but not getting there” needs to be defined upfront and not adjudicated after the fact. Without this, the evaluation at the end becomes subjective, and subjective evaluations get challenged, reversed, or avoided entirely.

A decision framework for when discipline is and isn’t appropriate. Sometimes the gap is trainable and a structured plan is the right move. Sometimes the misalignment is fundamental: a values mismatch, a role that’s shifted beyond the person’s capacity, or a fit issue that no improvement plan will fix. Leaders need guidance on when to engage the discipline process and when to move directly toward separation, so that performance improvement plans (PIPs) aren’t used to delay the inevitable.

Manager training. Most managers have never been taught how to write an improvement plan that is honest, specific, and legally defensible. They’ve never practiced delivering one. They don’t know how to hold the line through the uncomfortable middle period. This is a skill that has to be built.

And then there’s the cultural layer: the organization has to actually use this infrastructure.

The standard for the organization should be that progressive discipline is a responsibility to the person, not a punishment: we owe you clarity about where you stand and a real chance to close the gap.

Line-Check #4: Institutional Trust

Here’s the one that rarely gets named out loud: leaders don’t trust the organization to stand behind them.

Before they ask “Should this person go?” they ask a quieter, more pragmatic question: What happens to me if I try to do this?

Will HR back the decision—or retreat into risk management the moment things get uncomfortable? Will peers support it—or second-guess it in private meetings after the fact? Will senior leadership hold the line—or flinch and ask for “one more chance” once emotions rise? Will the documentation process protect anyone—or collapse under scrutiny?

When the answer is “I’m not sure,” most leaders stall, which is the rational choice! Firing is one of the few decisions where the consequences are asymmetric: if it goes well, nothing visible happens; if it goes poorly, the leader owns the fallout reputationally, politically, and sometimes legally.

Imagine if Roth found brown M&Ms night after night and nothing happened—the crew shrugged, the promoter pushed back, and the show went on anyway. The diagnostic would still work. It would just stop mattering.

That’s what happens when leaders surface performance problems and the organization doesn’t back them up. Over time, leaders learn to stop pulling the trigger on the diagnostic at all. They soften feedback. They manage around the problem. They stop naming what they see. And the organization learns a devastating lesson: standards exist, but they don’t mean anything.

Line-Check #5: The Accountability Chain

A strategic operating system links purpose to priorities, priorities to roles, roles to performance, and performance to consequences. When the chain is intact, firing is the natural, unsurprising conclusion of a transparent process. When it’s broken, firing feels like an emotional cliff-edge, because there’s nothing connecting the decision to anything that came before it.

Check each link:

Purpose to priorities. Does everyone in the organization know what the current strategic priorities actually are?

Priorities to roles. Is each role explicitly connected to a strategic priority? Can each person articulate how their work advances the strategy? Or are roles defined by activities rather than outcomes?

Roles to performance. Are there real, defined, measurable expectations for each role?

Performance to consequences. When someone doesn’t meet those standards, does anything actually happen? Do they hear directly and clearly from their manager where they missed the mark, and have a chance to improve?

When any link in this chain is broken, the final step—firing someone who is consistently not meeting expectations—becomes impossible. Not because the leader lacks nerve, but because the system never built the connective tissue that makes the decision defensible.

Line-Check #6: The Stories Leaders Tell Themselves

Even when the infrastructure exists, leaders often stall because of narratives that feel like compassion but function as avoidance. These are the rationalizations that surface the moment someone says, “Well, you need to fire that person”:

• “We’d lose too much institutional knowledge.”

• “No one else could do this role right now.”

• “This just isn’t the right moment.”

• “They’re not great, but they’re not terrible.”

• “Replacing them would be incredibly disruptive.”

• “What if we just narrow the scope a bit?”

• “I feel responsible for this person’s livelihood.”

Notice what’s missing from all of these: any clear assessment of whether the person is doing the job at the level the strategy requires. These aren’t arguments for keeping someone. They’re confessions that the system can’t tolerate the consequences.

This one: “I feel responsible for this person’s livelihood.” That instinct is human. But it’s misplaced. Your responsibility as a leader is to the mission, the strategy, the stakeholders, and the team executing the work. When you keep someone in a role they’re failing at because you feel bad about what firing means for their life, you are prioritizing one person’s comfort over everyone else’s ability to do their jobs, the mission you were hired to support, and the job you get paid to do. And you’re likely holding them back from finding a role that is truly a good fit for them.

And here’s the part nobody says: keeping someone in a role they’re failing at isn’t protecting them either. They know. They feel the workarounds, the reassigned projects, the conversations that stop when they enter the room. This is a person’s career—finite, non-renewable time—and keeping someone in a role where they cannot succeed is both a strategic and a moral failure. Unless you are prepared to keep them on staff at the same pay grade until they retire, you are not helping them. You are spending their time for them.

Line-Check #7: Union Environments

Everything above applies in union environments, and the stakes are higher, not lower. Collective bargaining agreements do not eliminate the strategic imperative to manage performance. They define the process by which you do it. Leaders who treat the contract as a reason not to act are confusing constraint with exemption.

Union environments require more discipline, not less: clearer roles, tighter documentation, earlier feedback, and strict adherence to progressive discipline. This is infrastructure that protects everyone. The contract governs how you act. Strategy determines when and why you must.

What the Diagnostic Demands

Van Halen didn’t put the M&M clause in the rider because they cared about candy. They put it there because they understood that when the stakes are high, you need a fast, reliable way to know whether the system beneath you is working—before something fails catastrophically.

Firing works the same way in an organization. It’s not the point. It’s the test. And if the test reveals failure, the response is to build the infrastructure that makes firing someone fair, defensible, and unsurprising.

If you find brown M&Ms in the bowl, don’t just pick them out. Line-check the entire production.

Start building.

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Here is a little story that sets the scene. A few years back, I sent a proposal to a prospective client. The executive director called me the next day with a question: “Your proposal is solid, but I’m curious about something. How do you measure whether you’ve been successful with us?”

I had a few answers ready at hand client satisfaction and project deliverables. After we hung up, I realized I’d missed the real question. He wasn’t asking about project metrics. He was asking how I define success for myself as an independent consultant.

That conversation exposed something that is the theme I’ve been exploring repeatedly here and previously. Independent consultants operate without the scaffolding that traditional employment provides: we don’t have performance reviews, a clear advancement path, or externally imposed benchmarks. We must invent our own yardsticks, but many of us never do this work deliberately.

Over time I’ve come to see this as one of seven mindset shifts that make independent consulting feel less like improvisation and more like leadership:

1. Create your own measures of success

2. Use client work to expand your capabilities

3. Hold client service and self-development at the same time

4. Connect projects into a coherent narrative

5. Treat challenges as growth, not tests

6. Adapt your offer to stay relevant

7. Manage toward outcomes, not activities

In another recent newsletter about leadership, I explored how we lead our clients and our own businesses. But leadership requires more than recognizing our role. It demands specific internal shifts that change how we approach our work.

Creating Your Own Measures

When I left organizational life to consult independently, I lost something I was honestly kind of addicted to: external validation. Now, no one tells me if I am doing well. I don’t get annual reviews anymore confirm my performance. I found this absence disorienting from day one of independent consulting.

As I approach my 6th anniversary of working solo, I believe the solution is to develop personal metrics that reflect what consulting excellence means to you. By personal metrics, I mean specific indicators that tell you whether you’re building the practice you want.

These metrics might include client retention rates, the percentage of work that comes from referrals, or how often clients implement your recommendations. You might track your effective hourly rate or the number of projects that stretch your capabilities. The specific measures matter less than the act of choosing them deliberately.

I developed three primary indicators for my practice. First, I track whether clients engage me for follow-on work within eighteen months. This tells me if I delivered enough value to warrant continued partnership. Second, I monitor how many new clients come through existing client referrals. This reveals whether I’m building the kind of relationships that prompt recommendations. Third, I assess whether each project leaves me with new capabilities or intellectual property I can apply elsewhere.

This last measure connects to a second critical shift: viewing client work as a frontier for your own growth.

Micro-action: Write down 3 metrics you’ll review quarterly: one about client value, one about business health, and one about your growth.

Expanding Your Capabilities Through Client Work

Early in my consulting practice, I accepted only projects that felt comfortable. I wanted to deliver with confidence, which meant staying within my established expertise. This approach kept me safe but stagnant.

I now approach client selection differently. I look for the intersection between what clients need and what would expand my capabilities. I wouldn’t recommend seeking work you’re unqualified to do, but rather searching for projects that require you to develop adjacent skills while still delivering on your core expertise.

A nonprofit client once asked for help with strategic planning. I’d done this work many times. But during our initial conversation, she mentioned their board wanted to understand their theory of change more deeply. I’d studied theory of change methodology but hadn’t formally facilitated an organization through developing one. I proposed incorporating this into the strategic planning process.

The project stretched me. I spent evenings reading current thinking on theory of change frameworks. I reached out to colleagues who specialized in this work. The client received exceptional value because I brought fresh energy and current research to the engagement. And I gained a new methodology I could offer future clients.

This approach requires viewing each client engagement through a dual lens: what outcome will serve the client, and what capability will I develop. When these objectives align, you deliver exceptional value while growing your practice.

Reflective question: What’s the smallest "adjacent stretch" you could build into your next engagement without putting the client at risk?

Hold Two Jobs at Once: Client Outcomes & Your Growth

Independent consultants navigate a constant tension. We’re deeply committed to client success, yet we must also develop our own practices and capabilities. Finding balance between these imperatives requires intention.

Some consultants err toward complete self-sacrifice, saying yes to every client request and burning out in service to others. Others prioritize their own development at the expense of client needs, using engagements primarily as learning laboratories. Neither extreme serves well.

I’ve found that transparency helps navigate this tension. When appropriate, I share my development goals with clients and find ways to align them with client outcomes. Last year, I told a client I was developing expertise in digital transformation for small nonprofits. We discussed how this aligned with their needs, and they welcomed my investment in learning that would benefit their project.

This transparency builds trust. Clients appreciate knowing you’re invested in growing capabilities that serve their needs. It also positions you as a learning partner rather than an all-knowing expert, which often leads to more honest and productive relationships.

Tell: If your week has no protected time for learning, your practice is borrowing against its future.

Connecting Individual Engagements to Larger Purpose

The most successful consultants I know maintain a coherent narrative about their work. They can explain not just what they do, but why they do it and how each client engagement contributes to a larger mission.

This narrative serves two purposes. First, it provides meaning and continuity to work that might otherwise feel fragmented. When you move from client to client, project to project, a connecting story prevents your practice from feeling like a series of disconnected transactions.

Second, this narrative helps clients understand how their specific project fits into broader sector trends or challenges. This contextual framing adds value beyond immediate deliverables and positions you as a strategic partner.

My narrative centers on helping nonprofit organizations start something new. Each client engagement, regardless of its specific focus, connects to this larger purpose. When I work on strategic planning, I’m helping an organization prepare for what’s next. When I facilitate board development, I’m building the board’s capacity to start new things.

Your narrative should evolve as you gain new experiences and insights. After each engagement, I reflect on how it fits into or changes my understanding of my purpose.

Micro-action: After each project, write a 2-sentence "why this mattered" note: what changed for the client, and what it revealed about your bigger mission.

Embracing Growth Through Challenge

A growth mindset, the belief that abilities develop through dedication and effort and that we all have the capacity to grow and improve, is particularly valuable for independent consultants. We must continuously adapt to new client contexts, each with unique cultures, challenges, and constraints.

This mindset shift means approaching client challenges as opportunities to develop new capabilities rather than tests of existing expertise. When a client presents a problem I haven’t encountered before, my first thought is no longer “Do I know how to solve this?” but rather “What will I learn by solving this?”

Once, a client asked for help with something I’d never done: facilitating a merger conversation between two organizations. I could have referred them to a consultant with merger experience. Instead, I reframed the challenge. I had deep expertise in facilitation, organizational development, and change management. A merger was simply an application of these skills in a new context.

I was transparent with the client about my lack of merger-specific experience while highlighting the relevant capabilities I would bring. They appreciated my honesty and hired me. The engagement taught me about merger dynamics I now apply in other contexts.

Modeling this growth mindset for clients often strengthens relationships. When you’re transparent about your learning process and how you develop new approaches to address their challenges, you demonstrate the same kind of adaptation you’re encouraging in them.

Reflective question: What would you attempt if you could be honest about being a learner without losing credibility?

Treat Your Offer Like a Living Thing

The consulting landscape shifts constantly. Client needs evolve, new methodologies emerge, and sector priorities change. The ability to adapt is perhaps the most critical factor in building a sustainable practice.

This requires regularly reassessing your service offerings, methodologies, and target clients to ensure they reflect current needs and opportunities. It means being willing to let go of approaches that no longer serve you or your clients, even if they once formed the core of your practice.

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When I first started out, much of my work focused on strategic planning using traditional frameworks. I noticed clients increasingly requested help with implementation rather than planning. They had plenty of plans sitting on shelves. They needed support turning strategy into action.

I could have continued marketing strategic planning services. Instead, I adapted my offerings to emphasize implementation support and capacity building. This shift required developing new tools and approaches, but it aligned my services with what clients actually needed.

Micro-action: Once a quarter, ask two clients: "What are you trying to do this year that feels hard right now?" Then adjust your offering language accordingly.

Focusing on Outcomes Over Activities

Clients hire consultants for outcomes, not activities. Yet many consultants focus more on their methodology than on the results they’re trying to achieve. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of our role.

At the start of each engagement, I work with clients to establish clear, measurable outcomes that define success. What will be different when our work together is complete? How will we know we’ve succeeded? These questions anchor everything that follows.

This outcome focus gives you flexibility in how you reach the destination. When clients become overly focused on specific methodologies or processes, you can redirect the conversation to results. When scope creep emerges, you can use agreed-upon outcomes to guide discussions about priorities and resources.

A client once asked me to conduct a comprehensive organizational assessment using a specific framework they’d found online. Rather than immediately agreeing, I asked what they hoped to accomplish with the assessment. They wanted clarity about where to focus limited resources for maximum impact.

We agreed on that outcome, then discussed the best way to reach it. The specific assessment framework they’d found might help, but so might other approaches. By focusing on the destination rather than the journey, we maintained flexibility to adapt our methodology as we learned more about their context.

Tell: If you can’t state the outcome in one sentence, you’re not ready to lock in the methodology.

The Compounding Effect

These seven mindset elements interconnect and reinforce each other. When you create your own success measures, you’re better positioned to invent new frontiers for growth. When you focus on outcomes over activities, you gain flexibility to balance client service with your own development. When you maintain a coherent narrative about your work, you see how each adaptation contributes to your larger purpose.

Cultivating these mindsets alongside your technical expertise creates a consulting practice that delivers exceptional value to clients while supporting your own professional growth and fulfillment. This is what leadership as an independent consultant ultimately means: guiding others while continuously developing yourself.

Which of these mindset shifts challenges you most right now? I’d be interested to hear how you’re navigating these tensions in your own practice.

Thanks,
Sam

But pretty quickly I noticed something that confused me.

A bunch of the heavy hitters weren’t in the sessions at all.

At one point I saw a well-known progressive pollster posted up in the lobby for most of the day, just sitting there, chatting with people as they passed by. And I remember thinking: wait, what are they doing? Did they not care about the content? Did they already know everything?

Over time and after going to a lot more of these events, I think I understand what was going on. Conferences aren’t just places you go to learn things (or not just to learn things!). They’re temporary little cities where your industry gathers, and the real advantage is how much relationship momentum you can build in a short window.

Conferences can be expensive and exhausting, and it’s easy to come home with a tote bag full of swag and exactly zero new work. But with a little intention, they can also be one of the best ways to strengthen existing client relationships, start a few new ones that actually go somewhere, and build the kind of long-term reputation that makes your business feel steadier.

Why conferences still matter

It’s become oddly difficult to meet clients in person. Offices are emptier. Travel is more deliberate. Even when budgets exist, calendars are jammed and meetings default to Zoom.

Conferences are one of the last places where in-person time is socially sanctioned. People expect to run into peers, to grab a coffee between sessions, or to talk shop in a hallway. That expectation is the asset.

Because the setting reduces friction, a conference can compress months of “we should catch up sometime” into a few hours of real interaction…if you arrive with a plan.

And one more layer of stakes specific to social impact consulting: the ecosystem is dense, values-driven, and reputation-sensitive. A warm introduction and a couple of high-signal conversations can matter more than a giant email list.

Start by choosing how you’ll attend

The tricky part is that conferences feel like they should work the way school works: you show up, you absorb information, you take notes, and you go home smarter. Some of that should happen! But if your goal is to grow a consulting practice, “getting smarter” is rarely the bottleneck. The bottleneck is time, follow-up, and a steady enough flow of relationships that you’re not constantly starting from zero.

So when I talk about “making the most” of conferences, I’m not talking about becoming some kind of glad-handing extrovert or running around handing out business cards like Halloween candy. I’m talking about choosing a simple plan you can actually execute.

With that framing, the question changes from “Which sessions should I attend?” to something more practical: What role am I playing at this conference, and what would have to happen for this trip to be worth it?

There are three common modes, each with different economics:

General admission: the default that’s usually correct

By “general admission,” I mean you buy a regular ticket that gets you into sessions/plenaries/exhibit hall and puts you in the social stream.

For most independent consultants, this is the sweet spot. It is the lowest cost, offers maximum flexibility, and you can move between learning, meetings, and serendipity without being tethered to a booth.

Speaker: the “free ticket” that pays twice

By “speaker,” I mean presenting a session or training, or serving on a panel.

Often it comes with a comped ticket (sometimes not), but the bigger payoff is earned attention. People have a reason to talk to you that isn’t “so what do you do?” It’s “I liked that thing you said.”

Example: if your talk includes a specific framework or case study (even anonymized), you’ve created a shared reference point. That makes follow-ups easier and less salesy.

Sponsor/exhibitor: expensive, high-throughput, hard to pull off solo

By “sponsor,” I mean paying for visibility and usually a booth/table in the exhibit hall.

This can work, but the trap is thinking you’re buying attention when you’re really buying logistics. Many conferences charge not just for the sponsorship tier, but also for furniture rental, electricity, and the little fees that quietly stack up. Most of the time, the sponsorship starts off around $1,500-$2,000 and then the extra fees are another $1,000.

Booths can deliver strong volume. Chorus has averaged roughly 40 stops per conference in the exhibit hall. But that model fits best when (a) you have a clear offer that makes sense in 30 seconds, and (b) you can staff it without losing the rest of the conference. If you’re a solo consultant, you need a strong theory for why high-throughput conversations at a table beat targeted meetings elsewhere. My advice is to start off smaller and attend the conference with a general admission ticket. See if it’s the right mix of potential clients and the right vibes for your business. If it is, then maybe try this out in a future year. I wouldn’t recommend doing anything that just gives you visibility (e.g. “coffee break brought to you by Sam Landenwitsch”) unless you are an egomaniac. Kidding.

Pricing notes:
Most conferences price-discriminate by time. The earlier you commit, the cheaper the ticket/sponsorship. If you might attend, get on the email list and watch pricing 9-12 months out. Also, some events trade discounted/free admission for volunteering. This is worth considering if cash is tight and time is flexible.

The highest-leverage use case: conferences for existing clients

If you do nothing else, do this.

Conferences are disproportionately good for deepening relationships with people who already pay you (or have paid you). In a world where consulting can drift into transactional Zoom check-ins, a 30-minute in-person coffee can reset trust and momentum.

Here’s the simple playbook:

• Email clients 3-4 weeks ahead: “Are you going to X? I’ll be there and would love to grab coffee.”

• Offer two specific windows (“Wed 9-11am or Thu 2-4pm”).

• Keep it light: your goal is to reconnect, trade notes, and spot new needs, not to force an upsell.

Why it works: your client is already at the conference for their own reasons. You’re not asking them to make a separate trip or carve out a special meeting. You’re just taking advantage of overlap.

How to land speaking slots

Most conferences open calls for speakers 6-9 months in advance. The easiest mistake is to submit generic topics that sound fine but don’t match the conference’s selection logic.

In practice, conferences tend to want one of two things:

Category 1: papers/results

Some events want rigor: research, data, case studies with clear outcomes. Bridge is often in this category.

If you have repeated patterns across clients like a before/after process improvement or a measurable lift, and you can turn it into a real case study, and you can translate that into a talk that’s both useful and credible, even if you anonymize details…then you have a shot at being selected! Point is the bar is high.

Category 2: trainings/panels

Other events want practical skill-building or viewpoint diversity. NTC and Netroots often lean this way.

Here, topicality matters. If the ecosystem is debating a new tactic or facing a new constraint, strong proposals meet the moment. For example, last summer all the talk was about “flooding the zone,” so I saw a bunch of sessions touching on this topic.

Conferences often limit submissions (commonly 3-5). Having great co-presenters is a real plus to getting selected. Some conferences also let the community vote so you can use that to improve the odds of being selected.

“Low-cost conference success” is mostly pre-work

Let me define a term: edge meetings.

By “edge meetings,” I mean conversations you schedule just outside the official programming like breakfast, coffee, a quiet walk, or a late-afternoon snack where you can actually hear each other.

Edge meetings are where independent consultants win, because they let you network without the performative vibe of a loud happy hour.

A minimalist system for making this happen:

1. Ge a seaking slot.

2. Tell your list you’ll be there and invite meetups before or after your session.

3. If someone can’t attend your session at the conference, offer a follow-up webinar or recap call afterward.

That last piece matters because it turns the conference into a content engine instead of a one-off trip.

Repeat attendance for the win

The first year you attend a conference, you’re mostly learning who’s there, what people care about, what the sub-tribes look like, and which rooms feel like your people. The second and third years are when it starts to pay.

Then you’re continuing conversations instead of starting from zero. You recognize faces. You have context. The relationship cost drops.

This is one reason conferences are uniquely helpful for social impact consultants who feel isolated and reinvent the wheel alone: repetition turns a big room of strangers into a loose peer network.

Networking for introverts

By networking, I mean creating the conditions for future collaboration.

A few tactics that work even if you hate milling around:

• Arrive early to social events. Before circles form, people are more available.

• Set a bounded goal. “One hour, four conversations” turns dread into a finite task.

• Pick two or even just one event. Don’t try to do everything; do one thing well and then treat yourself to a milkshake afterward.

• Go, but then invite to a structured format. Rather than digging in at the loud bar, spend a few minutes getting to know each other, then invite them to a coffee tomorrow.

• Know what you want to say. First, have your personal elevator pitch ready and practice getting into it from a variety of intros. Second, have a couple good questions ready to break the ice. “Tell me about something cool you’ve worked on lately.” “What do you think of the 2028 primaries?” things anyone can answer!

The 2026 slate

Here’s what I’m planning in 2026:

• NTC (Detroit, March 10–13): this year the emphasis is fewer random collisions, more intentional 1:1s. One-day table presence, but the real plan is pre-scheduled meetings.

• Netroots Nation (Philadelphia, June 4–6): the payoff here is compounding familiarity. Returning feels different once you have continuity because conversations resume instead of reboot.

• BridgeTECH (National Harbor, July 28): a tighter, tools-and-tech-stack crowd (nonprofit technologists + fundraisers). Smaller can be better when you’re trying to find “your” people.

• Bridge (National Harbor, MD, July 29–31): historically solid lead quality for us, but I’m pushing harder on speaking proposals because I think that’s where leverage lives.

• TNPA Leadership Summit (San Antonio, Sept 14–16): new addition. The sponsor list signals a high density of senior nonprofit leaders running big direct response/digital programs.

• NonProfit POWER (Baltimore, dates TBD but usually early December): expensive, but unusually qualified attendees and structured networking that tends to produce real conversations instead of vague “let’s connect.”

If you’re an independent consultant, pick events where (a) your clients already go, and (b) the format creates enough repeated contact that reputation can do work on your behalf.

See you there?

Generally speaking, go to conferences if you can name three people you’ll deepen relationships with and three people you’ll try to meet, then block time for follow-up the week after.

If you can’t name the people, you’re not going to “figure it out there.” You’re going to wander, learn some things, and call it networking.

And learning is fine. But if your goal is a sustainable consulting practice, then conferences work best when they’re designed as relationship accelerators.

If you’re wondering “who is going,” you usually have to sign up to get an attendance list. But if you’re wondering about a specific person, ask me! I’ve been to many conferences, and I know who usually goes. I’m happy to help. sam@chorusai.co

If you want to catch up on some previous pieces that are also about this set of topics, check them out here:

A Room We’ve All Been In

A friend once described a certain kind of progressive event as “a TED Talk wearing a Patagonia vest.”

You know the scene. “Good” and “smart” people. Fancy seltzers and solid snacks. I always leave feeling sad, inspired, and a little judged by a trifold about climate grief.

And then… nothing changes. Or worse: the other team changes things. Again.

The thing that I’ve written about a lot on this Substack is how the folks inside these rooms often care so so so much. Many took lower pay, higher stress, and long hours because they wanted their lives to mean something. I had this life for almost 15 years, so I get it.

But I think these folks are part of a deeper problem. When politics becomes a form of identity — when our movements start optimizing for who we are rather than what we can win — we drift toward tactics that feel righteous but fail to build durable power.

That’s not a blanket critique of “identity politics” as in “people have identities and those identities matter.” Of course they do. By identity-politics (hyphenated), I mean something narrower: politics used as an identity badge. Politics when it becomes a way to sort people into “us” and “them,” to prove moral membership, and to secure belonging inside a tribe.

I recently read one new piece that brought to mind an older piece from a couple months ago:

• A New Yorker essay about what Democrats could learn from MAGA’s organizing, and how the left gets tied up in infighting and litmus tests.

• A Voice of San Diego story about the Sierra Club trying to expand in working-class, majority-Latino South County and struggling to become relevant to locals.

These are the subjects of today’s article.

The left is loud, but not sturdy

Charles Duhigg’s New Yorker essay makes the case the left is good at mobilizing: getting lots of people to do a thing on demand like march, donate, call a senator, repost a graphic, or attend a rally.

The author argues, though, that the left is worse at organizing: building local infrastructure, leadership, relationships, and habits that persist after the dopamine wears off.

The New Yorker quotes political scientist Hahrie Han’s clean distinction:

I want that printed on a tote bag that no one is allowed to bring to a march until they’ve hosted a precinct meeting.

Because here’s the problem: mobilizing looks like impact. It photographs well. It feels like history. Most of all, it feels great to do and is highly photographable. Organizing looks like someone’s basement and a spreadsheet and a pot of coffee that tastes like regret.

But organizing is how you get wins that survive.

The New Yorker diagnosis: litmus tests eat coalitions

Duhigg’s piece (and the researchers he quotes) makes a claim that would have shocked me 15 years ago when I came of age during the Obama years: conservatives have gotten better at building broad coalitions, while Democrats often fracture over litmus tests.

A movement can have values without demanding identical values from every participant. The article quotes sociologist Liz McKenna: movements need shared core values, but “the requirement can’t be that every value is shared,” and “making room for difference… is table stakes.”

The piece gives concrete examples of exclusion dynamics (who gets ejected, who gets disinvited, which flags are unacceptable), and then connects that dynamic to a broader strategic failure: if you screen out the ambivalent, you screen out the future committed.

There’s also a quietly devastating story about the Women’s March: massive turnout, rapid professionalization, internal disputes over inclusion and ideology, leaders accusing one another of racism and antisemitism, and then the groups “fell into factional infighting or drifted apart.”

This is what identity-politics (hyphenated) does at scale. When the movement is a moral community first and a power-building project second, the dominant questions become: Who belongs? and What feels good? Not: What wins?

And once the central task is proving belonging and optimizing for spiritual fulfillment, you get a predictable playbook:

• symbolic actions (high moral signal, low power transfer),

• internal policing (status competition disguised as virtue),

• and fragile coalitions.

The microcosm: Sierra Club’s South County problem

Now zoom in.

Voice of San Diego profiles Charles Rilli, a deputy director in the Sierra Club’s San Diego chapter, hired to boost membership in majority-Latino South San Diego County.

[T]hough South San Diego County has some of the region’s fastest growing communities and worst environmental problems, fewer than 10 percent of the Club’s 13,000 San Diego County members currently live south of downtown San Diego.

There is no South County equivalent to the Club’s North County local chapter subgroups. None of the Club’s senior San Diego leaders lives in South County. And, until recently, the club was not a major voice in many of the region’s most high-profile environmental debates, including the Tijuana River sewage crisis.

And the story gives you two contrasting scenes.

Scene A: Climate Week vibes (artisanal edition)

An October 3 climate event is well attended, but “few attendees appeared to be South County natives.” Many are affiliated with organizations headquartered outside the area. There’s even a table for a zero-waste nonprofit called Sustainability is Sexy.

After the panel, guests “linger with drinks in hand” and snack on “artisanal breads, cheeses, fruit and wraps.”

Scene B: A local threat, local turnout (pizza edition)

Two weeks earlier, in National City, residents (many Spanish speakers) pack a Planning Commission meeting to oppose a diesel fuel transfer station near homes and a school.

They fuel up on Little Caesars, march around City Hall, line up to speak, and the commission votes 4–1 against the project.

The story draws an inference that feels right: working-class South County residents respond most readily when the issue is framed as an imminent threat or injustice affecting daily life—not as an abstract moral cause.

This is the whole thing in miniature.

Not “Sierra Club bad.” Not “climate grief fake.” Not “artisanal cheese is the enemy” (though it is occasionally complicit).

It’s that mobilizing without local belonging and local stakes produces events that are spiritually nourishing for the already-initiated and politically irrelevant to everyone else.

Even Rilli says it plainly: “Mobilizing members here is hard,” because working-class communities are focused on getting by and supporting families—and the organization has to “reframe environmental issues as economic issues.”

That’s organizing talk. That’s meet people where they are talk.

But the microcosm shows how easy it is to slide back into identity-politics (hyphenated): the movement becomes a place where already-aligned people gather to affirm shared moral reality, rather than a machine that converts the unaligned into allies through material stakes, relationships, and repeatable pathways to leadership.

Identity-politics as a strategy substitute

A lot of left-of-center institutions (nonprofits, advocacy orgs, movement spaces) are trying to solve two problems at once:

1. Make the world better.

2. Make the participants feel like good, coherent people while doing it.

When resources are scarce and outcomes are uncertain, Problem #2 can quietly dominate. It’s easier to deliver belonging than to deliver policy wins.

Identity-politics (hyphenated) is what happens when Problem #2 becomes the hidden product.

By identity-politics (hyphenated), I mean: a system where political participation is rewarded primarily as moral performance and group membership.

Concrete examples:

• The biggest penalty is not “we lost the vote,” but “someone on our side thinks I’m harmful.”

• The biggest prize is not “we gained a precinct captain,” but “I’m seen as one of the good ones.”

• Meetings drift from planning to purification rituals: statement edits, language policing, symbolic resolutions—anything that produces consensus-as-belonging.

  

This is where my old taxonomy shows up. Every movement ends up recruiting some mix of:

• Table-flippers: people whose nervous system wants confrontation and rupture.

• Defenders: people who keep the institution from collapsing (sometimes by smoothing over hard truths).

• Do-gooders: people who want to help, be kind, and feel useful—and can be recruited into endless “support” tasks that never touch power.

(And yes, we contain multitudes.)

I’m not calling anyone fake. But I believe this incentive structure is real.

Here’s the strongest counterpoint I can offer: Identity isn’t just a vibe; it’s lived experience. Movements that ignore identity reproduce harm. “Big tent” politics can become a cover for telling marginalized people to swallow injustice for the sake of unity. Sometimes exclusion is rational: you don’t want your movement captured by people who oppose your basic dignity. You don’t want “diversity of opinion” to mean “welcome the folks who want you gone.”

All true. Here are two responses, offered carefully.

First: there’s a difference between boundary-setting and boundary-addiction. A movement needs non-negotiables. But it also needs a conversion pathway—a way for ordinary, inconsistent, half-formed humans to move toward commitment. If the only safe entry point is full ideological fluency, you will not build power at scale. The New Yorker quotes Munson’s research that many activists become committed because they find community first, not because they arrived pre-pure.

Second: we can protet people from harm while still not narrowing our focus to optimizing for only moral unanimity.

If you want power, you have to make it someone’s problem

The Sierra Club story contains a quiet lesson about recruitment. Rilli talks about door-to-door composting work in Queens: people cared more about rats than “the environment,” and he had to understand their concerns rather than tell them what to do.

Organizing starts when you stop trying to win arguments and start trying to win people—with stakes that are real in their lives.

And it’s not just messaging. It’s structure:

• local leaders who can act without waiting for headquarters,

• repeated touchpoints that turn strangers into friends,

• and pathways that turn participants into decision-makers.

The New Yorker’s critique of some organizations is instructive here: local groups were impactful, but national leadership focused on high-profile protests and “maintaining ideological unity,” even discouraging chapters from endorsing certain candidates.

Theda Skocpol’s blunt line from the New Yorker piece lands: if you want real change, stop funneling resources into “symbolic maneuvers and purist politics.”

Ouch. Also: yes.

There’s a pause. Then the Big Boss leans back and says: “I think Option B is the smart play.”

Heads nod. Someone says, “Yeah, that feels right to me too.”

The conversation then turns to operationalizing the “smart play.”

Nine months later, the initial problem is worse. In the debrief, someone says, “We made smart choices with the information we had.” And everyone nods again.

The Anatomy of a Vacuum

That scene was inevitable. Not because of who was in the room, but because of what wasn’t.

No criteria for what makes a choice strategic—so “smart” filled the void. No protocol for how decisions of this magnitude get made—so the first confident voice won. No norm for pressure-testing—so agreement was the path of least resistance. No protected time for strategic thinking—so it got crammed into 4pm on a Friday when everyone was already depleted. No separation between proposing and deciding—so the Big Boss did both in one sentence. No practice at this—so the team didn’t have the muscle to engage even if they wanted to. No learning loop connecting past decisions to outcomes—so nine months later, the same pattern will repeat.

And this isn’t just one room. It’s every room. “Smart” shows up in weekly check-ins, performance reviews, hiring debriefs, feedback conversations, Slack threads. The word has been operationally normalized—baked into how organizations talk about people and decisions at every level. Which means the gap compounds everywhere, all the time.

This is how organizations fail. How promising leaders flame out. How movements that should have won don’t. Not in one dramatic moment, but in a thousand small moments where “smart” papers over two gaps at once: the strategic thinking that didn’t happen, and the strategic operating system that was never built.

Why “Smart” is a Desecration

If you want to save democracy, start by banning the word smart from organizational vocabulary. (And the full set of words at the end of this article.)

You’ve heard it. You’ve said it:

• “She’s so smart about this stuff.”

• “He’s one of the smartest (fill in role) I’ve ever worked with.”

• “That was a really smart call.”

• “We need smarter people in the room.”

When you say it, you don’t sound it.

People mean one of three things when they use the word “smart”:

1. It aligns with my beliefs. The position matches my values, so it must be the right call. This isn’t strategy. It’s ideological agreement dressed up as analysis.

2. It sounds good. Based on assumptions, gut, pattern-matching to something that worked before (or that we think worked before). This isn’t strategy either. It’s preference.

3. Strategic thinking. They saw the whole board. Anticipated second and third-order effects. Made a choice that serves the longer game, not just the immediate pressure. Didn’t just react—chose.

None of these are compliments. #3 would be if the person saying it cared enough to actually describe what you did so that you could do it again.

Burying strategic thinking under the word smart, is a desecration.

“It aligns with my beliefs”

• It stops inquiry. Once something’s labeled “smart,” we stop pressure-testing it. It becomes settled.

• It flatters the speaker. Calling something “smart” positions you as someone who can recognize smartness. It’s self-credentialing.

“It sounds good”

• Outcome-agnostic; a prediction dressed as an assessment, rewarding performance over substance.

• Credentialist. Used this way, “smart,” codes for educational background, who speaks a certain way. Excludes people who think strategically but don’t perform according to some code that has nothing to do with the quality of strategic thinking and works to stand in the way.

• Unfalsifiable. If it works, it was smart. If it fails, “well, circumstances changed.” No accountability.

“Strategic thinking”

• Frames this as trait alone, rather than a buildable capacity.

• Lets leadership off the hook for developing it in others.

• Is lazy.

Leadership Imperative

If you hold a leadership position in this movement, you have exactly three jobs: Think strategically. Build strategic thinking capacity in the people and systems around you. And measure whether it’s actually happening—not activity, not output, not effort, but whether leaders are thinking strategically and developing it in others.

If we mean what we say about winning, this is the work.

The Tuesday Alternative

It’s 2pm on a Tuesday. Same conference table. Same three options. But this time, when someone says “Option B feels smart,” the Big Boss leans forward instead of back.

“What has to be true for that to work? And how will we know if we’re wrong?”

The room gets uncomfortable. Then it gets productive. Assumptions surface. Someone admits they’ve been pattern-matching to a situation from three years ago that isn’t actually analogous. The CFO points out a dependency no one had named. They build trigger points into the timeline—moments where they’ll check whether their theory is holding.

When they leave at 4:30, no one calls the final choice “smart.” They call it pressure-tested. They call it strategic. They know what they’re betting on. They know what would prove them wrong. They know when they’ll look.

Nine months later, the initial problem isn’t solved—but they caught the misfire at month three and pivoted. They’re ahead of where they started.

This isn’t genius. It’s not even rare talent. It’s a practice. Learnable. Teachable. Buildable.

But only if we stop letting “smart” end the conversation before the real thinking begins.

The Strategy Lexicon

Your moves this week:

(1) Review the list of other useless words and phrases below and start to notice when and why you use them. Get uncomfortable when you do.

• “She just gets it” — trait, not teachable

• “Great instincts” — unfalsifiable

• “Natural leader” — born, not built

• “Savvy” — same energy, same emptiness

• “No-brainer” — conversation-ender disguised as clarity

• “Solid” — sounds like assessment, isn’t

• “The right call” — outcome-agnostic approval

• “Realistic” — shuts down ambition without analysis

Any word that lets the room skip the work of articulating why—what criteria, what assumptions, what would prove it wrong—is doing what “smart” does.

(2) Practice the better alternatives.

What to say instead of “smart”: If you actually mean it as a compliment, make it one. Name what they did so they can do it again:

• “That accounts for how they’ll respond” — names the second-order thinking

• “That gives us options if we’re wrong” — names the risk management

• “That serves the two-year goal, not just the immediate win” — names the time horizon

• “That’s a clear theory of change” — names what’s actually good about it

• “You saw something the rest of us missed—what tipped you off?”

If you’re not sure why it feels right, say that:

• “Something about this feels right to me but I can’t name it yet. Can we pressure-test it before we commit?”

• “I’m drawn to this option. Help me figure out if that’s strategy or preference.”

If you want to open inquiry instead of closing it:

• “Walk me through how you got there.”

• “What has to be true for this to work?”

• “How will we know if we’re wrong?”

• “Say more about the second-order effects.”

The goal isn’t nicer words. It’s words that open the next conversation instead of closing it.

(3) Check out the 2 part series on how to train strategic thinking in others.

Part 1:

Part 2:

And we want to hear from you. Really we do.

If any of this landed with you—whether you’re in the thick of these challenges or you’ve developed strategies that work—we want to hear about it. We’re scheduling 20 minute conversations with leaders to understand what’s helping you stay grounded as a strategic operator and where you’re struggling. Your insights will shape how we build this series and similar future projects. Send us an email at Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com to get on the books.