Booking a workshop with us is cheap. Showing up unready is expensive — for you, mostly. So before you click the link, answer four questions honestly. If you can answer all four, the workshop will be worth your morning. If you cannot, the honest move is to spend a week getting one of them ready and come back.
The four questions
- Is the problem named?
- Is there an owner with authority to act on the answer?
- Can the relevant data be accessed in the room?
- Is there an exit condition — a written rule for when this engagement ends?
That's it. The rest of the intake is logistics. These four are the load-bearing ones. (Class C — pulled from the post-mortems on every workshop we have run where the buyer later said "we weren't ready.")
1. Is the problem named?
A named problem has a noun and a verb and a measurable bad outcome. "Our support team is drowning" is a feeling. "Our support team's median first- response time on tier-1 tickets has moved from 22 minutes to 71 minutes since March, and the CSAT trailing-30 has dropped from 4.4 to 3.8" is a problem. We can work with the second sentence. We cannot work with the first one without spending the morning naming it for you, which is fine, but is a different workshop.
The simplest test: write the problem on one line, with a number in it. If you can do that, you're ready on question one.
2. Is there an owner with authority to act on the answer?
Workshops where the decider is not in the room produce two artifacts: a nice document, and a second meeting. We will run the workshop either way, but if the person who can say "yes, do that" or "no, kill it" is not at the table, what you are buying is preparation for a later conversation, not the conversation itself.
The owner does not need to be the CEO. They need exactly one thing: the authority to commit budget and headcount to whatever the workshop concludes, without escalating. If that authority lives three desks over, bring three desks over.
3. Can the relevant data be accessed in the room?
Most of our workshops involve looking at numbers. Numbers that nobody can pull up are stories. We can work with stories for an hour, but the second hour is where the work happens, and the work needs the spreadsheet open.
Before the call, check: can someone in the room pull the support ticket export, the funnel report, the cost-per-task line, the vendor's last quarterly delivery file? If the answer is "we'd have to file a request and wait three days," file the request before the workshop, not during it. (Class C.)
4. Is there an exit condition?
This is the one buyers skip and later wish they hadn't. An exit condition is a written rule that says "this engagement is over when X is true." X is specific. X is measurable. X is not "when we're happy." It is "when the override rate is below 8 percent for two consecutive months" or "when the contract with vendor Y is migrated and the dashboards are owned by our team."
The exit condition protects you from us. It protects you from any vendor. It is the single most important sentence on the engagement page and the one most likely to be missing on day one. (Class E — exit criteria are standard practice in any honest project methodology; we did not invent this, we just refuse to start without one.)
If you do not have an exit condition yet, that is fine. You probably cannot write it before the workshop. But you should know, going in, that the workshop's job is partly to author it with you.
What "not yet ready" looks like
Three "yes" and one "no" — almost everyone is here. Book the workshop and tell us which one is the "no." We'll spend the first thirty minutes on that question and the rest on the other three.
Two or more "no" — spend the week getting one of them to "yes." Pick the easiest. Then book. That week's work is worth more than the workshop would have been on top of two "no"s.
Four "no" — you are not ready for a workshop. You are ready for a conversation. Email us and say so; we will not bill you for a conversation.
The reason for the bar
We hold the bar because we have watched the alternative. A workshop on top of four "sort-ofs" produces a deliverable nobody can act on, which becomes the reason for a follow-up engagement — exactly the retainer- treadmill failure mode we wrote the rest of this site to avoid. The four questions are the cheapest filter we know for keeping our own incentives clean. (Class C.)
If you want a longer walkthrough of how the workshop is structured once you've cleared the four questions, see the workshop-readiness buyer's guide. If you want the specific questions we'll ask in the room, see the intake questions we send before every call. When you're ready, book the workshop.