Pre-call recon: what to know before a first client call

Most first calls are spent catching up. The client explains who they are, you nod, and the genuinely useful questions only arrive once the hour is nearly gone. The alternative isn't working harder the night before — it's arriving with a read of the external landscape already in hand.

What "recon" means here

Reconnaissance is not assessment. You are not deciding what the organisation should do; you are establishing what is pressing on it from the outside, so that your questions land on the things that actually matter. Explore first. Assess later.

In practice that means a structured sweep across the seven STEEPLE dimensions — social, technological, economic, environmental, political, legal and ethical — with a source behind each observation, so nothing you raise in the room is something you can't stand behind.

A workable pre-call routine

• Start from the organisation, not the sector. Sector commentary is easy to find and rarely tells you anything specific. Begin with the organisation's own footprint and work outwards.
• Separate observation from judgement. Keep a list of what is happening around them, distinct from any view on what it means. Your first call is for testing the first list.
• Score for severity, not volume. Twenty findings you can't rank is noise. A handful of clearly weighted pressures gives you an agenda.
• Keep citations attached. If a client challenges a point — and they should — being able to open the source immediately changes the tone of the conversation.
• Turn each pressure into one question. Arrive with the questions, not the conclusions.

What it buys you in the room

You stop asking the client to brief you and start asking them to react. That shift is what makes a first call feel like the second one — you're testing hypotheses rather than gathering background, and the client hears someone who has already done work on their behalf.

It also protects the proposal that follows. Scope written on top of a sourced view of external pressure is much harder to argue with than scope written on top of a conversation.

Doing it in minutes rather than a day

This is exactly what SteepleTool was built for: one URL in, and a sourced, deduplicated, severity-scored STEEPLE and risk read out — a consultant-ready first pass, with a citation on every finding. You still do the thinking; you just don't spend the day assembling the raw material.

If you'd rather see the output before anything else, the sample reports on the home page show the full structure, or you can run one on your next client.