Most of the work I am hired for has already been described to me before I arrive, usually more than once and usually differently each time. There is the internal version, the version for the board, and the version the people affected would give if you asked them. The last one is the one that decides how everything goes, and it is the one nobody has.
So I go and get it. Then everything else follows from what I find.
Listen is field discovery: interviews with people whose account of the situation you do not control, in the places where the situation actually is.
Diagnose tests every claim against independent sources and gives it a verdict: supported, contested, unverified, or misframed.
Position settles what can be said honestly, in what order, and what each thing costs to say.
Activate is the counsel and the content: briefings, films, profiles, whatever the audience in question actually needs.
Measure asks whether it moved, against a metric set agreed at the start rather than assembled afterward.
Codify hands the method over, so you can run it again in the next market without me.
Every situation offers more information than it does insight. Four questions do the sorting.
Relevance asks whether this matters to the people who have to decide, or only to the people who raised it. A loud objection and a decisive one are different objects.
Commonality asks what turns up in more than one place, from more than one kind of person. One articulate voice is a quote. A pattern across unconnected sources is a finding.
Applicability asks whether this survives contact with the situation in front of us, or only the one it came from. Most borrowed playbooks fail here and nobody checks.
Sensitivity asks what saying this costs, and to whom. Some true things are not sayable yet, and knowing which is a service in itself.
Every figure carries its source. A number I cannot trace does not go in the deliverable, and honest negatives stay in the record. This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is the whole difference between a document that survives a curious reporter and one that does not.
If you have something complicated in front of you and you are not certain what is actually going on inside it, that is the conversation I want to have.
The verdicts are defined in the standard · jonathan@jmkay.com