There is a particular kind of meeting where somebody arrives with a long list of everything they are going to do.
The list is ambitious. It is neatly categorised. There may even be dates beside it referred to as “deadlines” for the confident or “false hope” for the realists.
Everyone leaves with more expectations than they arrived with—and, usually, a little more anxiety.
I prefer a different stakeholder-management principle: bring receipts, not shopping lists.
Come with what you have done as often as possible. Give people something real to work with.
A shopping list is a collection of promises. It invites people to imagine the finished result before the work has met reality. Every item creates a new dependency, a new expectation and another quiet question about whether it will actually happen.
A receipt is evidence. It might be a working draft, a tested assumption, a conversation completed, a decision made or a tiny prototype somebody can touch. It gives the room something real to react to.
I have found that bringing receipts changes the conversation almost immediately.
With something on the table, stakeholders can mould what exists. They can point at the bit that is wrong, protect the bit that is valuable and help decide what should happen next. Feedback becomes specific because the work is specific. People are much more amenable to making corrects to past work than hypothesising about the unknown. It is better to be iterative working against something known than speculative against what something could be.
There is an obvious trap here: disappearing for six months and unveiling something nobody asked for. Stakeholders still need visibility, choices and the opportunity to redirect the work. The useful habit is to make each conversation evidence-led wherever possible.
Say less about the ten things you hope to build. Bring the one thing you tried, what happened and what you learned.
Plans have their place and deadlines do matter. Anchored with MVPs or deliverables “we unlock this capability when this ships”, plans can be great. I think this reveals I prefer Agile methodologies rather than Waterfall methodlogies (if such things still matter). Progress feels calmer when people have seen enough evidence to believe that ambition can be delivered and they have something that adds value today.