FDE Times: When data shows the client’s process is broken — facts first, then a small trial with the process owner
A 5 November FDE Times guide gives FDEs a script for the meeting nobody wants: lead with verifiable facts, frame the reading as a hypothesis, invite pushback, and propose a narrow trial—without opening on “your process is wrong.”
Three weeks into a deployment, the logs often point at an approval or sequencing step the client asked you to automate around—not past. Automate the broken step as-is and exceptions just happen faster. FDE Times’ 5 November guide argues the soft skill of telling the process owner is what decides whether the finding becomes change or a dashboard nobody opens.
Drawing on Crucial Conversations’ STATE sequence and guidance from Quirk’s on delivering bad news with sound method, the piece walks a five-sentence script for a hypothetical invoice–PO reconciliation: state counts and ten concrete invoices; say what is working; offer a hypothesis (“raising POs late may be why manual volume isn’t falling”); ask how they read the numbers; propose a two-week trial with a comparable metric. Mistakes called out include opening with a verdict, spending trust you have not earned, springing the finding in front of their boss, and bringing a chart with no action.
For FDE interviews and CVs, the article maps this to the classic “tell me about bad news to a client” prompt: data found, how verified, who persuaded, measurable change that followed—and to job-ad lines about stakeholders and operational processes.
Source: fdetimes.net