The call came from a Product Owner I had worked with before. Global rollout, third-party vendor, big program. She said, "The vendor said they had change management covered. They don't. Can you come in and assess?"
I said yes. Before the kickoff call, I already knew most of what I was going to find.
That is the thing I want to write about. Not the assessment itself. The part before the assessment. The knowing.
Last week I had an article in the ACMP newsletter, which goes out to 33,000 change practitioners. If you saw it, this line will be familiar. If you did not, here it is: "A practitioner using them walks into a steering committee already knowing what's about to wobble. They look like a psychic. They are operating from expertise that finally lives outside one person's head."
That is the sentence I want to unpack. Because "look like a psychic" is a strong claim, and I do not want it to sound like a party trick. It isn't. It is what pattern recognition looks like after you have been in enough rooms.
Here is what I mean.
When the Product Owner called, she gave me two facts. The third-party vendor was hired to run all the change management for the project. She had stopped tracking their progress because they had assured her they had it.
Two facts. From those two facts alone, I could predict most of what was wrong before I met anyone or opened a single document.
I knew the vendor had focused on the technical layer. The tool. The keystrokes. The training modules that walk someone through how to click through the new system. That is what vendors default to when nobody is steering them toward the harder work. It is visible, it is completable, it makes them look busy in status updates. It also happens to be the part that matters least.
I knew they had not touched the new business processes. Every rollout of this size changes how work gets done, not just what button gets pressed. Whole workflows shift. Approval chains change. Handoffs move. Vendors avoid this work because it requires long, uncomfortable conversations with process owners who resent being interrupted by an outsider. That work is exactly where adoption is won or lost.
I knew there was going to be relationship debt. The previous vendor had been embedded in this organization for at least eight years. Hiring managers had built trust with a person, not a firm. A new vendor walking in cold, without warmth from leadership, without a formal handoff of relationships, was going to hit a wall of polite resistance that would look like scheduling problems and slow responses. It would not be scheduling. It would be grief for the previous vendor, wrapped in professionalism.
I had not met a single person on the project yet. I already knew where the wobble was.
When I ran the assessment, it played out exactly the way I expected.
There were templates. There were decks. There were stakeholder maps that had not been touched in six months. Impact assessments existed, but they stopped at the tool level. Nothing on the business processes. Nothing on the workflow changes. Not one hiring manager had been engaged past the initial "hello, we're taking over" call.
This is what surface work looks like. It is not that nothing was done. It is that everything that was done sat above the waterline. The parts of change work that decide whether adoption holds live below. The vendor never went there. The PO did not know to ask. By the time I started, the gap was six months wide.
Here is the thing I want practitioners reading this to sit with.
I did not know any of this because I have some rare gift. I knew it because I have been in this exact situation, or a close cousin of it, so many times that the pattern is now something I carry in with me. I do not have to work to see it. It arrives with me.
That is the expertise I could not hand off to a template. For a long time I could not hand it off to anything. The best I could do was let a junior consultant shadow me for a year and hope some of it soaked in. Most of the time it did not, because the pattern only fires when you meet the same shape enough times.
The skills I built change that. They give a practitioner the questions I ask on day one. They flag the below-the-waterline work that a surface assessment will miss. They know that a vendor replaced after eight years is going to leave relationship debt that needs paying before anyone opens their calendar. They know that "no CM problems reported" from a Product Owner who stopped tracking is not a data point. It is a warning.
A practitioner using the skills does not become me. They walk into that same assessment already carrying a set of questions that would have taken years to build on their own. They can spot the wobble before it wobbles.
That is what expertise living outside one person's head actually means. Not that the expertise is gone from my head. It is still there. It just does not need to be there for a good practitioner to find the wobble. It can travel with them.
The ACMP article said the skills produce elevation, not preservation. This is what I meant. Preservation would be locking my templates in a vault. Elevation is putting the questions in a practitioner's hands so they show up on day one already knowing what to look for.
If you have ever been called in after a vendor said they had it, and known within the first hour that they did not, you already have the reflex.