Creation safety
Your best material lives behind this skill
How to publish client stories, real numbers and hard lessons without breaching a confidence. Facts removed, never invented. Most people assume far more of their work is unpublishable than genuinely is.
11 pages · 5 transformations · free · not legal advice
Worked live · no email required
One story, five transformations, nothing invented
Below is a story nobody could publish. Apply the transformations one at a time and watch the identifying details come out while the lesson stays entirely intact. Every version is true at every stage, which is the whole point.
Last March I started with Acme Foods, the bakery group in Milwaukee. Their CFO, Dana, who had been there nineteen years, blocked the whole thing for six weeks. We went live on 4 September and on-time delivery went from 71 percent to 94 percent, on revenue of $6.8 million.
Ten identifying details. Any one of the first four identifies the client outright. Apply the transformations in order and watch what survives.
The rule everything else follows from
Remove detail. Never invent it.
The instinct when protecting a client is to change the details rather than remove them: swap the industry, adjust the number, move the city. That instinct is wrong, and it creates a worse problem than the one it solves. Invent a figure and you have published a false claim under your own name. You have also removed your own defence, because anonymized truth is defensible and altered facts are not defensible in either direction.
Invented
A retail client in Chicago cut delivery times by 40 percent.
Actually a manufacturer in Ohio, and it was 23 percent. Three false statements.
Removed
A mid-sized manufacturer cut delivery times by roughly a quarter.
True in every respect. Identifies nobody. Teaches the same thing.
Inside the guide
Five transformations, each with its own rule
Named here. The guide carries the rule for each, a worked before and after, and the failure mode that makes each one go wrong.
Names become categories
Replace the organization with the smallest category that still contains it. The common mistake is abstracting too far, which protects the client and destroys the story at the same time.
Figures become ranges
Exact figures are frequently the most identifying element and almost never the most useful one. Convert to a range, a ratio, or an order of magnitude.
Time blurs
Dates place an engagement precisely, and combined with an industry they frequently identify it outright. The sequence carries the lesson. The calendar never does.
People become functions
Keep the role because it explains the dynamic. Drop everything else. Be most careful here, because an organization has one finance lead and everybody there knows who it is.
Several engagements become one case
The most powerful technique here and the only one with a condition attached. Combining three engagements into one teaching case is safer than describing one in detail, and it is only legitimate if you say that is what you did.
The thing almost nobody checks
Each detail is safe. The combination is not.
This is the failure that catches careful people. Industry alone is safe. Region alone is safe. Company size alone is safe. Approximate timing alone is safe. All four together frequently describe exactly one organization, and you have anonymized nothing while believing you anonymized everything.
Count the identifying dimensions in your draft and remove until you are down to two. The guide has the full five-question re-identification check, including the other one people miss: whether somebody who knows your client list could identify them by elimination, which gets harder to avoid the smaller your practice is.
Get the guide
Eleven pages, and one page of honest limits
- All five transformations with the rule for each, a worked pair, and the failure mode
- The full five-question re-identification check, including the one people miss
- The share test: what is green, what needs work, and what stays private permanently
- When not to publish at all, which is the correct answer more often than the techniques are
- The one-line message for asking a client, and what makes it easy to say yes to
Get the playbook
Where should we send it?
How to publish client stories, real numbers and hard lessons without breaching a confidence. Facts removed, never invented.
One email with the download, and whatever you choose to receive after that. No sequence starts without you opting into it.
This is not legal advice and we are not lawyers. Confidentiality agreements vary, and some prohibit disclosing that an engagement exists at all regardless of how well it is anonymized. These techniques reduce the risk of identification. They do not create permission where permission was withheld, and nothing here overrides a contract you signed.
Agent Craft
The stories get told. The confidences stay kept.
Everything in the guide works by hand and the method is complete without us. What Agent Craft removes is the failure mode above: a check that only matters on the night you were most likely to skip it.
- Your off-limits list and your share-test marks go in once, and nothing marked red is ever drafted
- Names become categories, figures become ranges, dates blur and people become functions, all before the draft reaches you
- Detail is removed and never invented, because a system that fabricates a protective number has created a worse problem than the one it solved
- Composites are labelled as composites, so an assembled case never reaches the page presented as a single event
- You approve every piece before it ships, because the judgment about what is safe to say about your own clients belongs to the only person who can make it
30-day free trial · no credit card required
Before you ask
Reasonable questions
Is this legal advice?
No, and the guide says so on its second page. We are not lawyers. Confidentiality agreements vary enormously and some prohibit disclosing that the engagement exists at all, regardless of how well it is anonymized. These techniques reduce the risk of identification. They do not create permission where permission was withheld, and nothing here overrides a contract you signed.
Why not just change the details instead of removing them?
Because then you have published something false under your own name, and you have lost the ability to defend it in either direction. Anonymized truth is defensible: the facts are accurate and the identity is protected. Altered facts cannot be argued as true and cannot be argued as fiction, and the credibility problem outlives the confidentiality one.
What about composite cases?
Legitimate, useful, and the safest technique in the guide, with one condition: say that it is a composite. One line does it. Without that line you are presenting an assembled account as a single true event, which is exactly the invention the rest of the method exists to prevent. With it, readers trust you more rather than less.
Should I just ask the client?
Far more often than people do. Clients say yes more readily than expected and frequently offer to be named, which gets you a stronger story than any anonymized version. The guide has the one-line message, and the part that makes it easy to say yes to is offering to send the draft first.
Who is this not for?
Anyone whose work does not involve other people's confidential situations, since there is nothing to protect. And anyone hoping for permission rather than a method: several sections of this guide are about deciding not to publish, and that is the correct answer more often than the techniques are.