Plain English, on purpose
Every term, explained
Consulting has a vocabulary problem. This page fixes it: every term used across this site, defined the way I would explain it across a table, no jargon left standing.
LegendWorking togetherOperations and systemsChange and peopleLearning and knowledgeAI and automationContracts and buying
Working together
- Advisory
- A thinking-partner arrangement: regular sessions where you bring the hard questions and leave with clarity, options, and a recommendation.
- Deliverable
- A concrete thing you receive and keep: a playbook, a process map, a working system, a report. Not a slide deck that dies in a drawer.
- Discovery call
- A free thirty-minute conversation about what is happening in your organization and whether this practice is the right fit. No pitch, no obligation.
- Fractional leadership
- Hiring a senior leader for a fraction of their time instead of a full-time salary. You get executive-level judgment scaled to what your organization actually needs.
- Retainer
- An ongoing monthly engagement instead of a one-time project. You get a steady amount of senior attention each month, and the work compounds instead of starting over.
- Scope
- The written boundary of an engagement: what is included, what is not, and what done looks like. Clear scope is why projects here end on time.
- Systems and Automation Audit
- The two-week starting engagement: a close look at how your work actually flows, ending with your three highest-value fixes and a plan you keep whether or not we continue.
Operations and systems
- Bottleneck
- The one point in a process where work piles up and everything downstream waits. Finding the real bottleneck is half the fix.
- Decision rights
- Explicit agreement on who owns each kind of decision. Most slow organizations are not short on talent; they are short on named decision owners.
- Governance
- The agreed rules for how decisions get made: who decides, who is consulted, and how you avoid decisions stalling in endless meetings.
- Intake
- The single front door where requests enter a team, so work arrives in one predictable way instead of by ambush in five different inboxes.
- Operating model
- The blueprint for how your organization gets work done: who does what, how decisions get made, and how work travels from idea to finished.
- Operational backbone
- The connected set of processes, roles, and tools that quietly carries an organization's work, the way a spine carries a body. When it is strong, everything else moves better.
- RACI
- A simple chart that marks who is Responsible for doing the work, Accountable for the outcome, Consulted for input, and Informed of the result. One R and one A per task, so nothing falls in the cracks.
- SOP
- Standard operating procedure: the written, repeatable way to do a recurring task, so quality does not depend on one heroic person remembering everything.
- Workflow
- The step-by-step path a piece of work follows from request to done, including who touches it and what happens at each handoff.
Change and people
- ADKAR
- A widely used change model: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. It names the five things a person needs before a change sticks.
- Adoption
- The moment a new system or habit becomes the normal way of working. Adoption, not launch, is the finish line.
- Change management
- The discipline of helping real people move from the old way to the new way, so a good redesign actually gets used instead of becoming a binder on a shelf.
- Discovery and synthesis
- Structured listening: interviews and evidence-gathering across an organization, distilled into one honest picture of what is actually happening and what to do about it.
- Enablement
- Everything that equips people to succeed inside a new system: training, guides, examples, and support in the early weeks.
- Stakeholder
- Anyone with a real interest in the outcome of a piece of work: leaders, the people doing the work, and the people affected by it.
Learning and knowledge
- Institutional memory
- What your organization collectively knows: why past decisions were made, what was tried, what worked. Systems keep it; turnover without systems erases it.
- Instructional design
- The craft of building learning experiences that actually change what people can do, not just what they have sat through.
- Knowledge architecture
- The deliberate structure of where your organization's knowledge lives and how people find it, so expertise survives turnover and answers take minutes, not days.
- Learning operations
- The machinery behind an organization's training and development: how learning gets requested, built, launched, and measured, at scale.
- Single source of truth
- One agreed place where the current version of a document, number, or decision lives. The cure for seventeen conflicting spreadsheets.
AI and automation
- AI agent
- A software assistant powered by AI that can carry out a multi-step task, like drafting a first version, sorting requests, or answering questions from your own documents.
- AI strategy
- Deciding where AI genuinely helps your organization, in what order, with what guardrails. The opposite of buying tools first and asking questions later.
- Automation
- Handing a repetitive, rules-based task to software so people spend their time on judgment instead of copying and pasting.
- Prompt system
- A reusable, tested set of instructions that makes AI produce consistent, on-brand results for your team, instead of every person improvising alone.
Contracts and buying
- Certificate of insurance
- Proof from an insurer that a vendor carries liability coverage. Many organizations require it before work begins.
- MSA
- Master services agreement: the umbrella contract that sets the legal terms between your organization and a vendor, so each new project only needs a short add-on.
- NDA
- Non-disclosure agreement: a mutual promise of confidentiality, standard before sharing internal details.
- Statement of work
- The document that defines one specific project under a contract: scope, timeline, deliverables, and investment.
- Supplier diversity
- Corporate and government programs that intentionally buy from women-owned, minority-owned, and other certified businesses. Certifications like Texas HUB and MWBE make a vendor visible to these programs.
- W-9
- The one-page IRS form a US vendor gives a client so the client can report payments correctly. Standard vendor-onboarding paperwork.
A term missing? Ask me anything.
If something on this site still reads like consultant-speak, that is a bug. Tell me and I will translate it, here and in the work.