Tellspotting: A Framework for Detecting Professional Incongruence
You’ve felt it before.
Something’s off. The client is enthusiastic in every meeting and unreachable at invoice time. The colleague agrees to everything in the room and delivers nothing after. The project keeps “moving forward” without actually moving anywhere.
You feel something is “off” but you don’t have anything to prove it just yet. So you wait, and then it gets worse.
How do you fix this? One word: Tellspotting,
What is Tellspotting?
Tellspotting is a pattern recognition and diagnostic framework that teaches professionals how to detect incongruence in projects or people.
It’s designed to close the gap between what people say and what they actually do.
The framework gives high-integrity professionals permission to trust their instincts, challenge assumptions, and escalate without feeling guilty.
Why this matters
Most organizations manage financial risk with budget monitoring. They manage operational risk with timeline tracking.
But behavioural risk, the kind that derails projects, poisons client relationships, and costs real money, has been flying blind.
We don’t have a shared language for it. We second-guess ourselves instead of documenting the pattern. We give grace when we should be asking hard questions.
Tellspotting changes that.
Start with yourself
Before you can spot incongruence in others, you have to understand what you walk into rooms already believing. Your assumptions, your biases, your loyalties, your tendency to extend grace or benefit of the doubt to people or projects.
The framework starts here, with self-awareness, because that’s where the blind spots live.
The three patterns
Once you know your own priming, you can start reading what’s actually in front of you.
Tellspotting identifies three core patterns of professional incongruence.
The Gap is when words and actions don’t match. The enthusiastic client who ghosts at invoice time. The colleague who commits in every meeting and disappears after. Stated intent and actual behaviour are pulling in opposite directions.
The Shift is when someone’s baseline changes without explanation. The responsive stakeholder who suddenly goes cold. The engaged team member whose tone flattens overnight. Something changed. The question is what, and whether they’ll tell you.
The Blur is when language stays permanently vague. “Sounds great.” “Let’s circle back.” “I’ll think about it.” Lots of words, with zero commitment. The Blur isn’t always intentional, but it always has a cost.
Spotting the pattern is only the first move
Knowing what you’re looking at is step one. Tellspotting also gives you a way to respond, document, and act, without second-guessing yourself or waiting for a third data point that confirms what you already knew after the first one.
That part is coming. Stay tuned.
If this resonates, subscribe to PUNCHline, my weekly newsletter on LinkedIn, where I’ll be going deeper on each pattern, the self-awareness layer, and how to apply this in real professional situations.
And if you’ve lived any of these patterns, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
