We have a question we ask near the end of most discovery calls. It is short. It is not in any deck. The answer, more often than not, decides whether we take the work.
The question is this. Tell me about the last time something hard changed in your organization and it stuck. Not a launch. A change. Tell me what made it stick.
The answers fall into two groups.
The first group describes the conditions. Sponsorship from the CEO. Budget that did not get cut. A clear deadline. Communications that were repeated more times than felt necessary.
The second group describes a person. A specific human being who carried the change in a way that was, on reflection, the entire reason it stuck. Sometimes that person had a title. More often they did not. They were the one nobody noticed at the time and everybody points to now.
If the answer is the first kind, we listen and we keep going. If the answer is the second kind, we know the call is going somewhere. Because the second answer is the one that maps to the actual mechanism by which organizations change. It is also the one that consultancies usually overlook, because it does not appear on a Gantt chart.
The follow-up question is the one that decides the engagement. Have you told them?