The meeting had eleven people. Nobody owned the decision

[Junaid Tahir]

Exceediance · The Pattern Breaker

The meeting had eleven people in it. Nobody owned the decision.

Amina ran the weekly status call for a national billing-system rollout. Every week, the same slide came back: "On Track, Minor Risks." Every week, the go-live date quietly moved. She wasn't hiding anything. She just kept asking the same question — "are we on track?" — and getting the same answer, because it was the only question anyone had trained her to ask. It took a new PMO lead, brought in for the last stretch, to change the question. Not "are we on track," but "who is accountable for the data migration sign-off, and what evidence have they seen?" Silence. Nobody could answer. The sign-off owner had been assumed, never assigned. That one question surfaced in an afternoon what six weeks of status decks had buried: a root cause, not a symptom.

Most consulting and project work doesn't fail from lack of effort. It fails from asking the same questions everyone else asks, and stopping there.

The Pattern Breaker How Consultants See What Others Miss and Fix What Others Avoid 29 chapters. 29 proprietary frameworks for asking the question that finds the root cause — before the recommendation goes out.

Written by Junaid Tahir, drawing on 15+ years of enterprise PMO work including McKinsey-led transformation programs. Every chapter follows the same 12-part structure — real scenario, mindset shift, framework, diagnostic questions, red flags, tools, case study — so you always know where the answer lives.

Get the Book — $9.99

Not ready yet? Read Chapter 2 free, plus five real scenes from the book.

Junaid Tahir

Founder, Exceediance  |  Author

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