The say/do ratio: the one number standups never gave you

Most delivery metrics measure motion: tickets closed, points burned, commits pushed. None of them answer the question leadership actually asks: when this team says something will happen, does it happen?

That's the say/do ratio: commitments made against commitments kept, per person or per team, per week. A team at 85% is a team whose Monday sentences mean something. A team at 33% isn't lazy; it's over-committing, under-resourced, or blocked, and each of those has a different fix. The number doesn't judge; it locates.

Why standups never produced it

A say/do ratio needs two captured moments: the commitment ("this is the outcome I'm shipping this week; here's what done looks like by Friday") and the close-out ("here's what actually happened"). Live standups capture neither; words evaporate in the meeting. Trackers capture fragments, but only from people who maintain tickets, and in most companies roughly 80% of people never touch one.

A conversational check-in captures both moments by design: the weekly outcome agent asks for the plan on Monday and follows up on the same outcome on Friday, so plan and result sit side by side, per person, in their own words, on a permanent record.

How to read it

Falling ratio, high reply rate: the team is honest and drowning; look at the blocker feed. High ratio, trivial commitments: sandbagging; raise the bar in the plan conversation. Ratio you can't compute because nobody replied: that's your real problem, and it was invisible until you measured.

In Efforti, the say/do ratio falls out of the Weekly outcome & score agent automatically, and scores publish only after a human approves them.