He thanked me for the wrong thing

There’s a moment in most client conversations that I’ve come to recognise.

It’s the moment when the person across from me realises we’ve been talking about something completely different from what they thought we were there to discuss.

Last week I had a meeting with a C-suite executive running a genuinely busy company. We had a lunch meeting scheduled. He needed 10 minutes of silence to eat — just eat, without talking.

You could see it on him. The tiredness was surface level and beneath the surface at the same time. (It’s one of those ‘takes one to know one looks’.)

The meeting was interrupted twice by urgent things that needed his immediate attention. Both times he handled them and came back. Both times it took him a moment to find his place again.

We were there to talk about communications advisory — what branch of the company needed it most, where the tension was real, where I could add value. And we did get there. But somewhere in the middle of that conversation, something else happened.

We mapped the if-then structure of the decisions in front of his company. If they grow in this direction, these are the communication tensions they’ll face. If they go another way, here are the ones that follow. In each scenario — where does the friction live? What would need to change?

By the time we wrapped up, we’d answered the original question. But his thank-you wasn’t for the communications advisory. It was for helping him make a decision he didn’t even realise was weighing him down.

That’s the thing I keep seeing.

The exhausted leader is often not the leader who is doing too much. It’s the leader who is deciding too much. In an environment of constant interruptions, without the time or space to reach the kind of clarity that good decisions actually require.

Decision fatigue is a communications problem.

I know that sounds like a stretch. Bear with me.

When there’s no documented standard for what “good” looks like inside an organisation — no Brief, no clear mandate, no North Star to return to — every decision gets made from scratch. Every piece of communication that goes out gets pulled back to the top for review. The team isn’t the problem. The missing standard is.

I watched this play out with a company running a marketing retainer with a social media firm. The firm was producing warm, culture-focused work — genuinely well-made, completely disconnected from what the brand actually needed. Which was a shorter sales cycle and higher cart value for a high-ticket product. Months of budget out the door, no movement in the right direction.

Everyone could see the problem. The meetings mentioned it. The retainer kept getting paid.

When I asked why they hadn’t ended the relationship, the answer was honest: “We didn’t know what we’d replace it with.”

Without a core Brief — a documented answer to what they were communicating, to whom, and what needed to shift in the buyer’s mind before they act — there was no foundation to evaluate whether the work was right, no standard to hand a new firm, and no way to feel confident enough to make the call.

That’s not a marketing failure. That’s a clarity failure that looks like a marketing failure.

Axios research puts the cost of poor communications infrastructure at roughly $10,000 per month per person at VP level or below. That cost doesn’t show up on your balance sheet. It shows up as the leader who couldn’t eat his lunch.

This is why the first six to eight weeks of any engagement I take on is structured around building the that clarity before anything else. Because that North Star is what you return to when the decisions pile up. It’s the thing that makes the decision weighing your executive down on Thursday suddenly manageable on Friday.

If any of this sounds familiar, drop me a note. I’d genuinely like to hear your experiences with this.