What’s wrong with wasting time?

Nothing.

Unless your client is paying you for your time.

If you charge your clients hourly or weekly or monthly or for any interval of time, you’re incentivized to reduce being wrong as much as possible, because every hour you spend chasing a dead end is an hour you either eat or bill for work that didn’t move the needle. So you protect against it. You front-load a discovery phase to make sure you don’t waste those hours. And because the client is paying by the hour anyway, you bill them for the protection too.

There’s a fancy word for this move: eisegesis. It means reading your meaning into something rather than drawing it out. You arrive with a conclusion and conveniently find it wherever you’re looking.

“Wasting time costs the client money” is eisegesis. It’s true only if you’ve already decided that time is what you sell. You brought the constraint, read the situation through it, and concluded that the constraint was in the situation. Then you built a process to manage it.

Time-based billing changes the primary objective for an agency. It doesn’t incentivize you to get the best result. It incentivizes you to be right quickly. You are, structurally, incentivized to be efficient rather than effective. Those aren’t the same thing. Clients want the latter, but we often try to steer them toward the former, not because it’s better for them, but because it’s better for us.

Research can’t make you correct

Contrast that with how scientists operate. A scientist doesn’t withhold a claim until they’re certain. They state a hypothesis, test it, and let the result answer. When it comes back wrong, that’s not a wasted cycle. They now know one thing that isn’t true, which narrows what might be. Ruling something out is progress.

But notice how the ruling-out happens. Not by reading more or gathering more background. The hypothesis has to actually meet reality before it can be disproven, and reality is the only thing that can disprove it. Research can make you more confident. It can’t make you more correct. Only contact with the real thing does that.

That’s the problem with most discovery projects. They’re an attempt to get the benefit of a test without running one, to arrive at the knowledge that only doing produces by studying instead. You can interview every stakeholder and audit every page and still not know whether your recommendation works, because nothing has been tried. You bought information, not confidence.

Philosopher Karl Popper made this the dividing line for what counts as a real claim at all. He called it falsifiability. If there’s no result that could prove you wrong, you haven’t actually said anything. “We’ll do a thorough discovery process and find out what you need” can never be wrong. There’s no outcome that contradicts it. “I think this change gets you a 1% lift in conversion” can absolutely be wrong. And that’s precisely what makes it worth paying for. You’re taking on the risk of a real claim.

Researchers have a name for the alternative. They call it HARKing: Hypothesizing After Results are Known. You run the study, look at the data, then write up a hypothesis you already know the data supports. It reads as rigor, but it’s really the opposite. You’ve eliminated the possibility of being wrong by waiting until being wrong was no longer available.

Too many discovery projects start by gathering the data first so that the “hypothesis” you present is one you already know holds. It’s about producing a document that can’t be contradicted and calling it “diligence.”

The cost of testing determines how much you’re willing to test. If every attempt is metered on a client invoice, wrong turns are expensive, so you stop testing and start pre-verifying. You build certainty up front because you can’t afford to actually discover it along the way. If you charge for the outcome instead and a missed hypothesis costs you a few hours of your own time, you can afford to be wrong many times on the way to a good outcome.

I don’t know

There’s something deeper than the billing that’s worth naming, because it blocks agency owners constantly.

It’s the phrase, “I don’t know.”

I don’t know what they need. I don’t know if this is the right offer. I don’t know enough about their situation yet. Every time that phrase comes out, it functions as a wall. You can’t proceed until the not-knowing gets resolved.

I give you permission to not know and still move forward.

This isn’t some “the negative is secretly a positive” turn of phrase. Sometimes, you genuinely don’t know if something is going to work, and you can go anyway. You’re not being reckless. It’s the normal condition of doing high-stakes, important, and valuable expert work. There will always be more unknown than known, in every engagement you will ever run. If proceeding requires closing that gap, you never proceed. You just find increasingly expensive ways to wait.

Most discovery projects don’t produce knowledge. They produce the feeling of knowledge. That’s theater. Typical discovery deliverables contain recommendations, projections, and a point of view about what to do next. Those are all hypotheses. Nothing has been proven yet, because nothing has been tested. If nothing has been tested, you’re not any more certain than when you began. The document says “here’s what we think you should do,” and everyone in the room agrees to treat it as though it says “here’s what is true.”

When you first start a project, before you do any work, you probably have some guesses about what will work. After discovery, you still have some guesses about what will work. But somehow, a document made guessing feel like knowing.

I suggest you skip the document and go straight to the guess.

The magic words are, “I think.”

Say it out loud to the prospect before any paid work has happened: I think your problem is this. I think if you fix it, this happens. I could be wrong, and here’s how we’d find out.

Those sentences feel like weakness. But they’re actually the opposite; it’s the only version of the conversation where you’ve committed to something.

Clients hire you for your opinion; that’s the job. A strategy nobody could reasonably disagree with isn’t a strategy. It’s a fact, and facts are free. “You should improve conversion” is a sentence no one would pay for. The moment your recommendation becomes arguable is the moment it becomes worth something. It’s the same moment it becomes possible for you to be wrong. Those two arrive together; you don’t get one without the other.

If you’ve done this work for years, you probably already have opinions anyway. You have them before the first call. You look at a prospect’s category, their site, their positioning, and you’ve got a read within minutes, because you’ve seen this shape dozens of times. Pretending otherwise, then running a formal process to “discover” what you suspected on day one, isn’t science. It’s performance art.

Are you willing to say what you think, put it on the table, and let it be tested, even—especially—if you don’t know it for sure?

As long as agencies bill for time, discovery is a rational move. It’s an understandable response to a bad incentive. But change what you sell and how you charge for it and suddenly there’s no penalty to being wrong.

Being wrong is how real expertise is made. Physicist Niels Bohr reportedly said, “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Discovery is often set up to reduce and even eliminate mistakes. How does one ever become an expert? We need processes that allow for and encourage mistakes and failure in the spirit of learning and improvement without penalty.

In the next post, we’ll wrap up this series by talking about when and how to make enough mistakes to become an expert in a way that benefits both you and all your clients.