The most important meeting I run has no dashboard, no deck, and no agenda item beyond one sentence:
Describe the process.
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A PBJ Session™ is a structured conversation with two descriptions in it. Leadership describes the process they believe exists — the one in the flowchart, the one the onboarding deck was built on, the one the forecast quietly assumes. Then the team describes the process they actually use. The one with the workaround in step three, the personal spreadsheet in step five, and the part where you message Priya, because everything eventually involves messaging Priya.
(Yes, the name sounds like a sandwich. The origin story lives elsewhere. It’s not the point today.)
What happens next is the same in almost every room, and it’s the reason I keep running them.
The two descriptions don’t match.
Not at the edges — at the load-bearing center. Leadership describes a handoff; the team describes a negotiation. Leadership describes a qualification step; the team describes a formality everyone clicks through. I’ve watched a single sentence in an official process — one step, eleven words — turn out to contain five sincere, mutually incompatible procedures, one per person performing it. Each of them was following the process. There was no process. There was a sentence.
And here’s the moment the whole method exists for. Somewhere in the middle of the session, usually after a specific, glorious silence, everyone in the room arrives at the same three realizations, in the same order:
The gap is enormous.
Nobody lied.
Both versions are true.
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Sit with the second one, because it’s the hinge.
Leadership wasn’t describing a fantasy. They were describing the process as it was designed, as it was documented, as it was reported to them in every status update — status updates that were themselves sincere. The team wasn’t confessing to deviance. They were describing what it actually takes to get the work done, including every compensation for every place the official process doesn’t survive contact with a real customer, a real Tuesday, a real exception.
Both descriptions are accurate — from where each person is standing. The organization doesn’t have a liar problem. It has a parallax problem. Two honest observers, two vantage points, one object that looks completely different from each.
The failure isn’t that two versions exist. Two versions always exist. Every company that has ever had both a flowchart and an employee has two versions. The failure is that the organization was only ever looking at one of them — building forecasts on it, buying software for it, hiring against it, diagnosing problems inside it — while the other version, the one that actually touches customers and produces the revenue, ran unexamined in the dark.
Every system in the previous chapter — positioning, authority, conversion, lifecycle, visibility — gets designed against *some* description of how work happens. If it’s the wrong description, the design is fiction with a budget.
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People expect these sessions to be tense. They’re usually the opposite, and it took me a while to understand why.
Relief.
The team has been carrying the real version alone, half-suspecting they’d be blamed for it if anyone looked closely. Leadership has been managing a version that kept not quite explaining the results, half-suspecting the reports were too smooth. Both parties have been privately confused for months, in opposite directions. The session doesn’t create the gap. It just stops everyone pretending it isn’t there — and names it as a property of the system instead of a failure of the people.
Nobody lied. Everybody’s been translating.
The room is where the organization finally reads both versions at once — and where the revenue leak stops being a mystery and starts being an address.