The meeting that never happened
A while back, a client looked me in the eye and said, “You have to track me down and force me to meet with you. I’m giving you explicit permission to do so.”
I took him at his word. I called. His voicemail was full. I texted. Nothing. I emailed a scheduling link. It sat there. I tried again the next month, and the month after that.
Every time I did reach him, something was on fire. A staffing crisis, a vendor problem, a family thing, a deadline that had apparently snuck up on him despite being on the calendar for six weeks. Some of these emergencies were real. Some were the kind of emergency that exists mostly in the mind of the person having it. Either way, the result was the same. We never had the meeting.
Here’s the part that bothered me. He wasn’t lying. He genuinely believed a technical business review was important. He “knew” it the way we all know we should floss. But knowing something is important and committing to it are two very different things, and the gap between them is where most of our TBRs go to die.
He didn’t ask for a meeting. He asked to be chased.
At first glance this looks like a client requesting a TBR, which should be the good scenario. It isn’t. Look closely at what he actually said. He didn’t say “I want to meet quarterly.” He said, in effect, “Please make this your job, not mine.”
That distinction matters more than it seems. In 1967, researchers Linder, Cooper, and Jones built on Leon Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance and found that people only internalize a commitment when they feel they chose it. When participants were simply instructed, with no real option to decline, the effect disappeared. They had an external explanation for their behavior, so nothing took root internally.
My client handed himself that external explanation in advance. If the meeting happened, it was because I forced it. If it didn’t, well, I didn’t force hard enough. Either way, the commitment belonged to me. He outsourced it with a smile and a handshake.
Why the emergency always wins
Two other pieces of research explain why “important” kept losing to “urgent” in his world.
The first is what psychologists Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher Hsee called the mere urgency effect. In a 2018 study, they found people consistently choose tasks with short deadlines over tasks with bigger payoffs, even when the important task is objectively the better choice. Urgency hijacks attention. A TBR has no deadline. The server that’s acting weird today does.
The second comes from economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir, who studied what scarcity does to the brain. When people feel short on time, money, or calm, their focus narrows to whatever is immediately pressing. They call it tunneling. Everything outside the tunnel, including long-term planning, gets neglected.
A client living in a constant state of low-grade crisis is permanently in the tunnel. Planning next year’s technology budget doesn’t stand a chance against today’s fire, real or perceived.
So my client wasn’t lazy or disrespectful. He was doing exactly what human brains do under pressure. Which is precisely why a strategy that depends on me chasing him was never going to work.
Why most TBR programs fail the same way
My client was an extreme case, but he’s a concentrated version of what happens across most MSP client bases. We decide TBRs are important. We set the cadence. We send the invites. We build the deck. The client’s only job is to show up, and they often don’t.
The research on this is consistent. Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, shows that motivation which feels self-endorsed produces more persistence and follow-through than motivation that feels imposed. A TBR on my calendar is my motivation, not the client’s.
Psychologist Jack Brehm added the concept of reactance: when people feel their freedom is being restricted, they push back to reclaim it. In business, that pushback rarely looks like a confrontation. It looks like an unanswered email, a second reschedule, or a cheerful “let’s pick this up next quarter.”
Kurt Lewin’s studies in the 1940s put numbers to it. When people were lectured on what they should do, about 3% followed through. When they discussed it and reached their own decision, about 32% did. Tell someone a TBR is good for them and you’re running the lecture model. The results are about what you’d expect.
What would have been different
Imagine if that same client had said, “Yes, this matters to me. Let’s put it on the calendar every quarter. What do you need from me before we meet?”
Then imagine he showed up with his own list of questions, a note from his office manager about the printer that’s been jamming since March, and a rough idea of how many people he’s hiring next year.
That’s a different client. Not because he’s more organized or less stressed, but because the commitment is his. He chose the cadence. He did work leading up to it. He has something personal riding on the outcome.
How we’re rebuilding TBRs around how people actually work
Knowing all this, here’s how we’re changing our approach, and the psychology behind each piece.
The client picks the cadence. During onboarding, we ask how often they want to sit down with us, and we accept their answer. A quarterly review they selected is a fundamentally different commitment than one we assigned. This is the Linder, Cooper, and Jones finding put to work: choice is what turns attendance into ownership.
The client does homework. Before every review, we ask them for a few things: what’s changed in the business, what’s frustrating them, what’s coming up in the next six months. This isn’t busywork. In 1959, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills showed that people value what they put effort into. Robert Cialdini later summarized it: commitments stick best when they are active, public, effortful, and freely chosen. A client who spent twenty minutes preparing has invested in the meeting happening.
We get specific about when. “Let’s meet next quarter” is a wish. “Let’s meet the second Tuesday of January at 10” is a plan. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer’s research on implementation intentions shows that deciding in advance exactly when and where you’ll do something dramatically increases follow-through. It gives the brain a cue that doesn’t depend on remembering or feeling motivated.
We tie reviews to things the client already cares about. A contract renewal, a compliance audit, a hiring push, a new location. These have their own urgency, so the TBR gets pulled along by the client’s priorities instead of competing with them. We stop fighting the mere urgency effect and start using it.
We give people an easy out. Research by Nicolas Guéguen and Alexandre Pascual found that adding “but you’re free to say no” to a request actually increases compliance. It removes the feeling of being told. So our invitations now say something like, “If it’s useful, we can walk through this together. If the timing’s wrong, no pressure.” More clients say yes to that than to a firm push.
We stop chasing the ones who won’t commit. This one is hard for any service provider. But if a client won’t choose the meeting, won’t prepare for it, and won’t pick a time, chasing them harder just confirms that the commitment is ours. We’ll keep the door open. We just won’t keep pounding on it.
The honest takeaway
I don’t think I could have forced that client into a meeting, even with his explicit permission. Permission to chase someone isn’t a commitment. It’s a handoff.
The clients who get the most value from TBRs aren’t the ones we chase the hardest. They’re the ones who decided it mattered to them, put it on their own calendar, and showed up with something to talk about. Our job isn’t to drag people to the table. It’s to make it easy for them to choose to sit down.
Brian Largent
Father to five, husband to one, founder, CEO, and all around swell fella (or so I'm told)
