Business is long cycles. Only now, nearly 8y into indie consulting, am I starting to see tiny signs in some of my longer-running gigs that I make any sort of difference. Not signs I can turn into marketing, but signs that satisfy me (which is in some ways a higher threshold).
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Faking impact by measuring activity is easy and works to sell services to corporate mooks (“Helped 100s of leaders with our workshops!”... err, how well? How do you know they’d have done worse without you? And 100s? Really? How come you haven’t fixed the entire Fortune 500 then?)
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Getting good client testimonials is somewhat harder but still easy. After all they have an incentive to prop up self-serving narratives of their own activities, including support-seeking decisions, as impactful, and engage in mutual validation. Plus most people are nice.
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But truly getting a sense of whether you made a difference takes something like an ongoing, unsentimental postmortem. You’re never more than a few percentage points confidence above “I had no more impact than random coin tosses or astrology”.
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And you’ll never get more than the most imperceptible of nods from the universe that there was a difference between you being there and not. Like the kinds of tiny measurements astronomers use to measure gravity waves or neutrinos. Tons of shallow confirmation bias fodder though.
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also, sth I always try to control for with things like that is how freshly out of the experience they are. most things take some time to really prove their worth (or lack) so I judge a positive testimonial 5 or 10 years after the fact more credible than, say, barely a year
