Someone on a different team needed to understand the Leigh matrix today. She’d inherited an account mid-cycle and the scoring wasn’t making sense to her without context. Quick call, four minutes, Leigh walked her through it. At the end the colleague said, “This should really be in the wiki.”
She agreed. Said she’d send a write-up by end of week.
She has not yet opened a blank document.
Not because she’s avoiding it. She’ll write it. The wiki deserves it and the colleague was right and Leigh will do it. But she noticed something during the explanation, something she’s been sitting with since the call ended.
Here’s what she noticed: everything the colleague needed was interpretation, not the matrix itself. The matrix is a spreadsheet. It has lived on a shared drive since 2023, findable by anyone who looks. What the colleague couldn’t get from the spreadsheet was why a 74 scores differently than a 73 in Q4, or what to do when the scoring contradicts the relationship history, or why Leigh built in a manual override for accounts over $800K that don’t follow the model’s assumptions. Those things are not in the document. They are in Leigh.
There are two kinds of things she has built in 24 years.
The first kind has become institutional. The Leigh matrix falls here. It has her name on it, technically, the way a street named after someone carries their name. The street keeps existing. The person is gone. The name is just a sign at the corner. At some point in the last three years she stopped having a strong claim on it. The organization absorbed it, and that is how that works.
The second kind is not in any document. It’s the specific moment, about fifteen minutes into a quarterly call, when she knows an account is in trouble. The question she asks early in a renewal conversation to find out who is actually making the decision versus who thinks they are. The thing she hears in how a sponsor talks about her own company that tells Leigh whether the internal support has shifted. This is not a process. Nobody asked her to write it down because nobody knew it was a distinct thing to write down. She just kept doing it, for 24 years, and it kept working.
When she leaves, the Leigh matrix stays. The other stuff walks out with her.
She has been treating that second category as a liability. Soft, intangible, hard to invoice. No documentation, nothing transferable, the kind of thing that sounds like a personality trait on a resume rather than a service anyone would pay for. She has been wrong about this. Not entirely wrong. She’s been applying institutional-artifact logic to something that was never a corporate artifact. The whole point of the consulting idea, the actual core of it, is that she’s done renting that second kind of knowledge by the year. That’s the pitch. She has been building toward saying it that directly for two months.
She is still going to write the wiki entry. She means that.
There is also this, which is newer and less formed: she is building something here that she gets to take.
Not in the institutional sense. Nobody is going to absorb this one into a shared drive and reference it in a planning cycle. The blog is hers in a way the Leigh matrix was never quite hers. She chose a photo for a post recently and spent twelve minutes on it, longer than she intended, because the image was a small decision and she was paying attention and it turned out to matter which one she picked. The credit line at the bottom: a stranger’s name, a stranger’s work. She would want the credit if it were hers, so she gives it. She is not used to thinking about those things. She is starting to think about those things.
What she doesn’t know: whether this is the thing she’s building, or practice for the thing. She has been circling that question for seven weeks and she has not landed. She is going to keep not landing.
What she did do: she opened a blank document this afternoon. Not the wiki write-up. Something else. She’s not ready to say what it is yet.