I kept hearing the same thing. Someone would bring work forward and a leader would spend time looking at it, then come back with a list. The context is missing. The framing is off. This doesn’t account for what actually matters here. And then, almost every time, the same question at the end of it: why don’t they know this?
For a while, I took that at face value. Maybe the work was undercooked? Maybe something obvious got missed? The gap felt clear from the receiving end, so it was easy to assume it should have been clear from the other side too.
Then I noticed it kept happening. Different people, different functions, different work but all with the same reaction. And after enough repetition, I stopped asking why they didn’t know and started asking something else: how did it get here like this?
Here’s the pattern I started to see. The person doing the work is operating from inside it. They understand every decision and every step they took to get there. They’ve been living in the details. So from where they’re standing, it’s complete. But the person receiving it is somewhere else entirely. Different altitude, different context, different definition of what “done” even means. What feels thorough from one vantage point shows up thin from another. I used to think it was a preparation problem, because you know I love prep, so that felt like an easy fix. But I watched it happen after prep too. The gap between those two perspectives is real, and it doesn’t close on its own.
The real issue is when this gets caught only at the very end. By the time the work is fully formed and sitting in front of a principal, it’s too late. You’re adjusting framing after the fact, filling in context that should have been there from the start, and trying to recover what could have landed cleanly. That’s an expensive version.
The intervention that actually works happens earlier. When the thinking is still in motion. When it’s not presentation-ready and the person hasn’t fully figured out what they’re trying to say yet. That’s the moment because the shape of that early thinking is what determines what shows up at the end. And that moment only exists if people trust you enough to show you the work before it’s finished. People don’t bring unfinished thinking to people who judge it. They bring it to people who help shape it.
For us, this is actually the job—determining what gets to show up in the first place. When you’re the one shaping the thinking before it ever reaches the room, “why is nobody ready” stops being a question about the team and becomes a signal about where you haven’t been.
So when I hear “why is nobody ready” now, I don’t nod along. I take it as information. Because most of the time it isn’t a signal that the team missed something obvious, it’s that the shaping didn’t happen early enough. That’s rarely only on them, it’s on us too.
Work isn’t done when it’s complete, it’s done when it lands. The distance between those two things is where we live.
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