The Distance Between the Plan and the Work

I used to believe twenty years in marketing gave me instincts worth trusting on sight.

The record I kept says otherwise.

The Record

You've said "I'm pretty sure about this" in a planning meeting, and the room moved on. So have I, for years.

For six months I wrote my calls down. Each time, I noted what I decided, how confident I felt, and what I expected to happen. Then I went back and checked.

Sixty-five of those calls I'd marked ninety percent sure. Thirty-eight of them were right, fifty-eight percent.

Nothing felt off while it was happening. I was just as sure on the calls that failed as on the ones that landed. The journal showed what I couldn't see from inside: I was overconfident on decisions about people but underconfident on technical ones. I rushed the choices I could have undone, yet agonized over the ones that barely mattered. Twenty years hadn't fixed any of that.

The Audit

You've probably pulled a framework into a deck because it came with a number attached. If my own confidence needed checking, so did the ten frameworks I'd written up for my own work, so I ran the same check on them.

Nine of the ten leaned on numbers nobody could check: a 91.8% here, a 97.1% there, 169 out of 184 somewhere else. None had a log behind it, a scoring rule, or a second person looking.

I hadn't set out to invent anything. I wrote down what sounded right, and after a while I trusted it because it was written down. I took those numbers out.

The Practice

You've sat in the room where a plan gets approved. The deck is clean, the logic holds, and everyone agrees.

But the plan still has to travel through a brief, a handoff, and a form a customer fills in, so it loses something at every step. In the rooms I've been in, almost nobody went back six months later to see what happened to the person on the other end.

I started doing it with my own campaign. Its numbers looked strong while sales saw noise. So I read the CRM audit logs and wrote SQL against the raw tables, to see what happened to a lead after we handed it over.

My journal caught me making unchecked calls. An approved plan makes the same call, only with more people agreeing to it.

I can ask Claude for a plausible plan and have one in seconds. The plans got cheap, but checking them didn't, which is why what I build is meant to be checked against a record someone else keeps.

Where I Draw the Line

You've probably trusted someone because they had been doing the job for twenty years. I trust a documented track record over a confident veteran now, including when the veteran is me. A long career can build real skill. Without a record, it also builds confidence faster than it builds accuracy, but from the inside the two feel the same.

If you want to be trusted on tenure alone, this isn't the place.

If you want your own calls held to a record, start with The Values: the six things I hold my own work to, and what each one cost me.