I want to write this one carefully, because it's easy to turn a story about failure into a story about growth, and that's not quite what happened here. What happened was simpler and more uncomfortable than that.
I showed up to a meeting with Joseph having completed exactly zero of the tasks we'd agreed on the week before.
Not delayed. Not partially done. Zero.
What I was doing instead
I'd spent the week building a spreadsheet nobody asked for.
Joseph had given me a list of things to do: add new businesses to the investor acquisition sheet, follow up on specific deals in the pipeline, move certain things forward. These were the tasks. They were clear.
Instead, I spent the week building a tracking system that I thought would be useful. It was detailed. It was well-structured. It would have been genuinely helpful at some point. It was also completely disconnected from what Joseph had actually asked me to do, and by the time the meeting came around, the deal pipeline had sat untouched for a week, investor sheet entries had no new dates, and multiple follow-ups hadn't happened.
I walked into that meeting with a spreadsheet and nothing on the list.
The conversation that followed
Joseph didn't yell. It was worse than that. He was direct. He asked what had been accomplished on the tasks from last week. I told him what I'd built instead. He let that sit for a moment.
Then he said something that reframed the entire engagement. He said: I don't need better systems right now. I need hours back.
That was the first time the WIG, the Wildly Important Goal, was articulated clearly. It had existed implicitly before. After that meeting, it was explicit: remove 20 hours per week from Joseph's workload. Not "improve operations." Not "build better processes." Twenty hours. Per week. Off Joseph's plate.
That's a different brief than what I'd been operating under.
What the WIG framework actually does
The WIG is a concept from execution methodology, one goal defined so specifically that every other task can be evaluated against it. The test isn't "is this useful?" It's: does this directly reduce Joseph's hours? If it doesn't, it's not the priority.
The spreadsheet I built that week? Genuinely useful, honestly. Also not the priority, because it didn't reduce a single hour of Joseph's time. I was optimizing for visible, interesting work when the actual measure was hours saved.
Once the WIG was explicit, every decision in the engagement changed.
The email automation project (50 automations identified for Joseph's inbox, covering routing, task creation, and triage) is a WIG-aligned project. Estimated 5 to 10 hours per week off Joseph's calendar once implemented. Fully justified.
The Asana workflow design for escalating admin tasks through Gail and Kathy before they reached Joseph: WIG-aligned. Reduces the number of low-level decisions that land on his desk.
The acquisition pipeline follow-up system, where Joseph was personally chasing deals that could have been handled at a lower level: WIG-aligned.
The beautiful spreadsheet I built the week I missed everything? There might be a version of it that reduces Joseph's hours. That version needed to be built with that goal in mind from the start, not built first and justified later.
What changed in the engagement after
Joseph also established a communication protocol after that meeting. For any task past its due date, I had to answer three questions before requesting a new deadline: What has been accomplished? What are the next steps? When will it be done?
No grace period. No "I'll have an update soon." Three specific answers, in writing, before the conversation about timeline could happen.
That protocol sounds like it would feel punitive. In practice, it was the opposite. It forced me to have a clear picture of my own work before I communicated about it, which meant fewer vague updates and more honest assessments of what was actually stuck versus what was just behind.
The pattern I'd fallen into, working on interesting adjacent things and underreporting on the actual commitments, is common in consulting. It happens when the scope is fuzzy enough that the consultant self-selects which work to do. The WIG closed that gap.
The honest conclusion
I don't want to wrap this in a lesson about how the failure led to better outcomes, because that framing makes the failure sound useful in retrospect. It wasn't useful. It was a wasted week and a trust problem that took time to rebuild.
What the failure produced wasn't a lesson I couldn't have learned another way. It produced a conversation that should have happened at the start of the engagement: what does success look like, in one number, that I can evaluate every decision against?
Define the WIG before the work starts. Don't wait for a missed week to force the conversation.
