What does this article cover?
- Why does scope language read like this?
- The decoder
- The small words doing the most work
- What does good scope language look like?
- What about the rest of the document?
- How do you rewrite a proposal before signing?
- Who should this article send away?
- Where does this break down?
- People also ask
- What I sell, and what I don’t
- About the Stagnation Assassin
A consulting proposal is a legal document written to look like a description of work. Most of its phrases commit the firm to activity rather than to outcome, and the distinction is nearly invisible at reading speed because the language was drafted by people who understand exactly where that line sits. This is a phrase-by-phrase translation: what each one commits to, what it does not, and the single question that makes the difference visible before you sign rather than in month four.
Why does scope language read like this?
Partly for a legitimate reason and partly not. A firm cannot guarantee an outcome that depends on your people, your data and your decisions, so it commits to what it controls. And the people drafting know precisely which side of that line each phrase sits on, and choose the side that protects them.
Both halves are true and the first one deserves genuine weight. If a firm promised you fifteen per cent cost reduction and your organisation failed to supply the data, failed to free the people, and overruled the recommendations, the firm would be liable for a result it was never in a position to deliver alone. Commitment to activity is the honest response to shared dependency.
The second half is why this article exists. Given a choice between two phrasings that describe the same work, one committing to an output and one to an effort, proposals reliably choose the effort. That is not an accident of drafting. It is the accumulated result of every previous engagement where a firm was held to something, and the language has been refined across decades of those conversations.
The buyer’s position is not to be outraged by this. It is to know which kind of commitment each sentence contains, and to ask for outcome language on the two or three points that actually matter.
The decoder
Twelve phrases you will find in almost any proposal, with what each commits the firm to, what it leaves out, and the question that surfaces the difference. Scan for the ones in your document, and note how many describe work rather than results.
| The phrase | What it commits to | The question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Assess the current state | A description of what exists. No finding, no judgment, no recommendation | What conclusion will the assessment reach that we could act on? |
| Facilitate alignment | Running the meetings. Not to anybody agreeing at the end of them | What happens if the team does not align? |
| Provide recommendations | A document. Nothing about whether the recommendations work or get adopted | Who decides whether the recommendations are good enough to act on? |
| Develop a roadmap | A plan. Not the execution of it, and not its accuracy | Does the roadmap commit you to any dates you will be held to? |
| Support implementation | Presence during the work. Not delivery of it | If implementation fails, what were you responsible for? |
| Identify opportunities | A list. Not that the opportunities are real or capturable | Will the list be quantified, and by whom? |
| Apply best practices | Describing what other organisations do | Which of these have you seen fail, and in what conditions? |
| Knowledge transfer | Usually a handover of documents at the end | Which named person will be able to run this alone, and how will we know? |
| Stakeholder engagement | Interviews being conducted | What changes as a result of the interviews? |
| Quick wins | Visible early activity | Will the wins appear in the financial statements, and where? |
| Deliverables will include | The listed items, and nothing about them being sufficient | Can we change “include” to “comprise”? |
| Scope subject to refinement based on findings | Nothing. This is the clause that reopens everything | What is the process and cost ceiling for a scope change? |
Run your own proposal against that table and count. In most documents ten of the twelve appear, and the total number of sentences committing to a result somebody could fail to produce is zero or one.
Given two phrasings that describe the same work, one committing to an output and one to an effort, proposals reliably choose the effort. That is the accumulated result of every previous engagement where a firm was held to something.
The small words doing the most work
The phrases above are visible once you look for them. The modal verbs and qualifiers are not, and they carry more weight per character than anything else in the document. Six of them account for most of the distance between what a proposal appears to promise and what it actually does.
Include. Non-exhaustive. “Deliverables will include A, B and C” promises A, B and C and reserves the right to consider the list complete at A. Replace with “comprise” and watch whether anyone objects.
Support, help, assist, enable. All four mean the firm is adjacent to the work rather than accountable for it. A sentence containing any of them has told you who is responsible, and it is you.
Could, may, can. Capability, not commitment. “This approach could reduce cycle time by thirty per cent” is a true statement about what is possible and commits to nothing. The test: replace with “will” and see whether the firm accepts the edit.
Designed to, aims to, intended to. These describe the purpose of the activity rather than its effect. A programme designed to improve alignment has fulfilled its description the moment it is designed, regardless of whether alignment improves.
Estimated, anticipated, targeted, up to. Numbers wearing these words are illustrations. “Savings of up to two million” is satisfied by savings of nothing, because nothing is up to two million.
Work with the client team to. This one transfers the delivery dependency to you in six words and reads as collaborative. If the outcome does not arrive, the shared construction means the failure is shared, which in practice means it is yours.
What does good scope language look like?
A sentence somebody could fail. That is the entire test, and it separates an outcome from an activity more reliably than any list of words. If every plausible version of the engagement satisfies the sentence, the sentence commits to nothing.
Three worked conversions.
Weak: “Assess the current state of the order-to-cash process and provide recommendations for improvement.” Stronger: “Deliver a written finding identifying the three largest causes of days-sales-outstanding above sixty days, each quantified in dollars, by 30 April.” The second can be judged. Somebody could read it and say the causes were not identified or not quantified.
Weak: “Facilitate alignment of the leadership team around the transformation priorities.” Stronger: “Produce a written statement of three priorities, signed by all six members of the leadership team, by the end of week four.” Alignment is a feeling. A signed document is an artefact.
Weak: “Support implementation and transfer knowledge to the client team.” Stronger: “Two named client staff will independently run the weekly planning cycle for four consecutive weeks before the final invoice, with the fourth week observed and signed off.” That converts knowledge transfer from a document handover into a demonstrated competence, which is what you wanted.
Notice what the stronger versions share. A named artefact, a named date, a named person, and a stated threshold. Any sentence missing all four is describing work.
What about the rest of the document?
Four clauses outside the scope section decide more than the scope does, and they sit in the parts most buyers skim: the fee basis, the change-control mechanism, the staffing language, and the termination terms. Each is short, each is negotiable, and none of them reads as important.
The fee basis. Look for whether you are buying time or output. “Level of effort” and “time and materials” mean you are buying hours and the firm has no exposure to how many it takes. A fixed fee against a defined deliverable transfers that risk to them, which is why it costs more and why the premium is frequently worth paying. Ask which basis applies and what happens if the work takes twice as long.
Change control. The scope-refinement clause from the table above is only half of it. The other half is the process: who may authorise a change, what it costs, and whether there is any ceiling. A change-control clause with no ceiling converts a fixed fee into a time-and-materials engagement at the firm’s discretion, and it does so in language that sounds like flexibility.
Staffing. Almost every proposal names people in the team section and commits to none of them in the terms. The question is whether the individuals who presented can be replaced without your agreement, and the answer in an unamended document is yes. Ask for names and committed percentages in the contract rather than the pitch deck.
Termination. Read what happens if you stop. Notice periods, minimum fees, and payment for work in progress determine whether an engagement that is failing can be ended in weeks or only at the end of its term. This is the clause you will care most about if things go wrong, and the only time you can influence it is before anything has.
None of these four requires a lawyer to spot, though all four are worth a lawyer’s eye if the value is material. What they require is reading past the section that describes the work, which is the section designed to hold your attention.
How do you rewrite a proposal before signing?
Pick two or three points, not all of them. A buyer who demands outcome language on every line gets a longer proposal at a higher price with the same commitments, because the firm prices the risk it is being asked to absorb. Concentrating the demand is what makes it work.
Four steps, and the whole exercise takes an afternoon.
Mark every sentence that cannot fail. Read the scope section with a pen and underline anything satisfied by the work merely happening. In most proposals that is eighty to ninety per cent of the text, and seeing the ratio is more persuasive than any argument you could make about it.
Choose the two or three that matter. Which unfailable sentences describe the thing you are actually buying? Those are your conversion targets. Everything else can stay as activity language, because most of it genuinely is activity and pretending otherwise wastes your leverage.
Propose the replacement wording yourself. Do not ask the firm to strengthen the language; they will return something that reads stronger and commits identically. Write the sentence you want, with the artefact, the date, the person and the threshold, and send it as a redline.
Read the response as data. A firm that accepts your wording has told you it believes it can deliver. A firm that counters with a different formulation is negotiating, which is normal. A firm that explains at length why outcome language is inappropriate in professional services has told you what the engagement will be like.
Do all of this before signature. The audit office’s central lesson to buyers is that roles, targets and timelines should be defined before the contract is signed, and the reason that lesson needs stating is how often it is not.
Who should this article send away?
Anyone who will not renegotiate the language. Decoding a proposal you intend to sign unchanged produces an informed purchase of exactly the same thing, and the entire value here is in what you ask to be rewritten before you commit.
That rules out more buyers than it should, usually for a procedural reason rather than a considered one: the proposal arrives late, the start date is fixed, and the redline feels like it would delay everything. It would delay things by about a week, and the alternative is discovering in month four that nothing in the document could have been breached.
A second group: anyone hoping to make a firm guarantee an outcome it genuinely cannot control. If the result depends on your data, your people and your decisions, no honest firm will sign for it, and pushing until somebody does means you have found a firm that will sign anything.
Where to go instead, and both are better than my table. Australia’s finance ministry publishes model knowledge-transfer clauses that departments paste directly into consultancy contracts, drafted by government lawyers and available free, and they are better wording than I would write for the same purpose. And the United Kingdom’s National Audit Office publishes a good-practice guide aimed at buyers rather than commentators, covering the whole commercial lifecycle, which is more thorough than anything on this page.
Where does this break down?
My own marketing uses these constructions. The promise on my speaking page is two or three frameworks that could move a business inside six months, and “could” is on the list above as capability rather than commitment. The sentence is accurate and it is also not a thing I could fail.
I have flagged that on the page itself rather than only here, and the honest position is that the construction is appropriate there for exactly the reason the article gives at the top: whether anything moves depends on the room and on what happens afterwards, neither of which I control. That is the legitimate half of the argument, applied to me. A reader entitled to use it against a consulting firm is entitled to use it against a speaker.
Three further limits. The twelve phrases are the ones I see most and the list is not exhaustive; a proposal in a sector I do not know will have its own vocabulary. The translations are mine rather than legal analysis, and a contract lawyer reading the same phrases would give you a more precise account of what each commits to in your jurisdiction. And the rewrite method assumes you have leverage, which a buyer under time pressure with one bidder does not, and no amount of decoding creates leverage that procurement did not.
The one claim I would keep: a sentence that cannot fail is not a commitment, and counting how many of those are in a document takes twenty minutes and changes what you know about the purchase.
A firm that explains at length why outcome language is inappropriate in professional services has told you what the engagement will be like.
People also ask
What does “assess the current state” commit a consultant to? A description of what exists. It contains no commitment to reach a conclusion, make a judgment, or produce anything you could act on. Ask what conclusion the assessment will reach.
How do I tell activity language from outcome language? Ask whether the sentence could be judged to have failed. If every plausible version of the engagement satisfies it, it commits to activity. Outcome language names an artefact, a date, a person and a threshold.
Which words matter most in a proposal? Include, support, could, designed to, estimated, and “work with the client team to.” Each shifts responsibility or converts a commitment into a possibility, and all six are easy to miss at reading speed.
Should I ask for outcome language throughout? No. Pick two or three points that describe what you are actually buying. Demanding it everywhere produces a longer proposal at a higher price with the same commitments, because the firm prices the risk.
What if the firm refuses to change the wording? That is information rather than an obstacle. A firm that counters is negotiating; a firm that explains why outcome language is inappropriate in professional services has described how the engagement will run.
What I sell, and what I don’t
I don’t sell consulting. My employment contract doesn’t allow it, so there is no engagement waiting at the end of this article and no proposal coming. Two things here are commercial: I speak for a fee, and I sell books. Everything else, including the audit, is free, and it stays free because it has to be. If you have a proposal on the desk and want a second read on which sentences could fail, send the scope section to my contact page.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as Global VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books, The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
The talk version reads one real proposal aloud, sentence by sentence, and asks the room to raise a hand at anything that could be breached. Most rooms get through the whole scope section without a hand going up. Formats and fee are on my speaking page.