C16 · proof of concept
One hour in, seven hours out.
A sixty-minute interview is the visible part of a longer process. By the time the material is in a form a listening engagement can use, the interview has accumulated about seven hours of downstream work behind it. Make a guess first, then the breakdown will appear — and then the arithmetic at fifteen, fifty-eight, and a hundred interviews.
Your estimate: how many total project hours does one sixty-minute interview produce?
What that looks like at scale
- 15 105 hrs ≈ 3 working weeks Standard listening engagement
- 58 406 hrs ≈ 10 working weeks National sector listening
- 100 700 hrs ≈ 18 working weeks UN-scale brief
The interview itself is roughly a seventh of the work. The rest is invisible — to the interviewee, to most clients, often to the consultant pricing the engagement. That ratio is the structural reason listening at scale is rare in the consulting industry: a firm built around hourly billing for the visible part of the work cannot run sixty interviews on a fixed-fee scope without accepting that the price quoted is roughly one-seventh of what the work will actually cost in hours.
Engagements that try to listen at scale on a typical strategy-deck budget produce one of two outputs: a much smaller interview set than was promised, or a much shallower coding pass than the synthesis can defend. The arithmetic above is what forces the choice.