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 check-in 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 comes straight out of the weekly outcome check-in, and scores count only after a lead approves them.

Next essay: Blockers age like milk. Retros treat them like wine.