Standing Orders
General Strategic · Internal
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Find the yes.

The default answer is yes. The work is finding which yes.

"No" in our world rarely sounds like no. It sounds like "outside scope" or "let me check with the team." The client feels every one.

There are three legitimate yeses: absorbed (small gesture, we eat it), chargeable (new scope, clean conversation), reworked (in a different form than expected). The default is "let's figure out how", not "that's not our problem". There are still the right kind of “no” but our default posture is “yes, and”.

  1. 01Before any no, run the three yeses: absorbed, chargeable, reworked.
  2. 02If the answer is no, also offer a yes from someone else, or a smaller yes from us.
  3. 03Notice end-of-day defensiveness. It's a real bias.
  4. 04‘Let me come back to you’ is a no in a fig leaf. Use it sparingly.