The Secrets of Consulting

Highlights

• My definition of consulting is the art of influencing people at their request.
• Being called a consultant doesn’t make you a consultant, either. Many people are called consultants as a way of glorifying their dull jobs.
• By asking for the consultant’s help, the client is saying, sometimes nonverbally, “I need you. I can’t say so directly, so find a way to help me without destroying my sense of worth.” The wise consultant answers in a way that recognizes the client’s self-worth, but also doesn’t compromise his own.
• The First Law of Consulting: In spite of what your client may tell you, there’s always a problem.
• The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem.
• The Third Law of Consulting: Never forget they’re paying you by the hour, not by the solution.
• Once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion.
• Most people—that is, most groups of people—function quite logically most of the time. And most of the time they don’t need consultants. The time they do need a consultant is when logic isn’t working.
• Consultants are less adapted to the present situation, and therefore are potentially more adaptable. Their perception of now/then trade-offs is different from those close to the problem, which makes them a valuable source of ideas, as well as people not to be trusted.
• The toughest problems don’t come in neatly labeled packages. Or they come in packages with the wrong labels.
• Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can’t.***
• Make sure they pay you enough so they’ll do what you say. Another way to state this is The most important act in consulting is setting the right fee.
• The purpose of consulting is not to make me look smart, but it’s not to make me look dumb either.
• Most people instinctively apply The Inverse Gilded Rule to their consultants. If they catch you lying, they’ll figure out that you must have something to hide. Even if it merely sounds like you’re lying, you’re in trouble. We consultants ought to bend over backward to understate our qualifications, but insecurity makes us all victim to occasional exaggeration.
• Find out what you usually miss and design a tool to ensure that you don’t miss it again.
• If we can find other subcultures, we can use them as models to be compared with the culture under investigation.
• Over the years since that lesson, I’ve learned that the ability to sense incongruence is the consultant’s most powerful “What’s missing?” tool. I call this The Incongruence Insight: When words and music don’t go together, they point to a missing element.
• The music you hear from the client is only the external sound of an internal emotional state that you cannot, of course, know directly.
• Words are often useful, but it always pays to listen to the music (especially your own internal music).
• Which brings us full circle, back to knowing yourself, which is where all good consulting work originates.
• What you don’t know may not hurt you, but what you don’t remember always does.
• All the members need the same trigger, but at different times. So, if your entire client organization is comfortably cruising on one Titanic voyage to nowhere, it’s going to take someone from outside to shout “Iceberg!” And then, of course, your clients will say to the outsider, “What do you know about ocean liners?”
• Some outside agents enter organizations as part of the natural order of business. New workers can serve this role. So can new managers. Sometimes, a consultant working on one problem can accidentally touch another area in which the organization is unknowingly stuck.
• As a jiggler, my job is to get something started, to cause some changes that will ultimately get the system unstuck.
• For the professional jiggler, there is always one more question: Could the organization itself have generated the other questions? In other words, could it have jiggled itself?
• I’m seldom retained as a jiggler. Sometimes I’m engaged as a speaker, sometimes to perform a checkup, and other times as a consultant on a technical problem. But there are always opportunities to jiggle.
• Each person sees a part of the whole and identifies the whole with that part. Often, my biggest job is getting the client to accept that other views are possible.
• Before people can communicate effectively through words, they must have shared experiences.
• When consulting, I usually try to take a tour of the entire organization and, if possible, I get a person from one division to escort me to the next. Often, the escort remarks that the incidental trip to another division was the most significant part of my visit.
• If your clients want help in solving problems, you are able to say no. If you say yes but fail, you can live with that. If you succeed, the least satisfying approach is when you solve the problem for them. More satisfying is to help them solve their problems in such a way that they will be more likely to solve the next problem without help.
• Your ideal form of influence is first to help people see their world more clearly, and then to let them decide what to do next.
• Your primary tool is merely being the person you are, so your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.
• A small system that tries to change a big system through long and continued contact is more likely to be changed itself.
• Consultants seeking to preserve quality should first verify that the people responsible for quality are, in fact, downstream from that quality.
• Consultants are downstream from nobody. This gives them a difficult responsibility when instituting change for their clients. Clients realize that consultants are protected from the consequences of their own recommendations, which is one reason consultants are often the butt of nervous jokes.
• Nothing new ever works, but there’s always hope that this time will be different.
• You know no breakthrough ever works, but your clients seem to be suckers for every new fad. Rather than fight change, a more sensible approach is to learn to live with it. Or to make a living from it.
• If you must have something new, take one, not two.
• Whenever my clients struggle in the face of change, I can use that struggle to discover what they value most.
• Most real change is a slow process. Like aging. But when we build illusions to hide the change, we soon find ourselves spending all our energy maintaining the illusions. That keeps us from dealing with change while it’s still small. It’s the crash of illusions that makes us believe change happens as crises.”
• When you create an illusion, to prevent or soften change, the change becomes more likely—and harder to take.
• It’s frightening to encounter a client who doesn’t resist your ideas, because that places the full responsibility on you to be correct at all times. Since nobody’s perfect, we need resistance to test our ideas.
• Resistance is like fungus. It doesn’t thrive in daylight. Therefore, once you suspect that there is resistance, your next step is to get it out in the open, rather than let it fester in the dark.
• C >You can make buffalo go anywhere, just so long as they want to go there.” “And second, You can keep buffalo out of anywhere, just so long as they don’t want to go there.”
• People do things because they think they will gain more than they will lose. They resist when they perceive a negative balance.
• An excellent way to disclose the unconscious sources of resistance is by testing the attractiveness of alternative approaches. Typical probes might include “How would you feel if we stretched out the schedule by six months?” “Would this plan seem more attractive if we could somehow cut the cost by thirty percent?”
• In the end, the most important part of overcoming resistance is to prevent it from becoming frozen in place. That’s why I must always avoid “resisting the resistance.”
• Any time you’re afraid to say no to your client, you lose your effectiveness as a consultant. You also lose the client’s respect, which increases the chance that you’ll eventually lose the business.
• But as soon as you lock onto a single idea, your days as a consultant are numbered. Ideas are too easy to steal.
• The more they pay you, the more they love you.
• Within a certain range, the higher your price, the more business you get. Eventually, of course, too high a price will prevent clients from retaining you. Even though they’ll love you, you won’t get the business.
• The less they pay you, the less they respect you.
• Because such prospects don’t believe you’re worth your fee, they’ll fill every moment of your time with planned busywork. When you arrive, you’ll receive a bland reception that is disappointing in and of itself, but more important, it generally is an indicator that the client will never do anything you suggest. So, in a way, the prospects are right: You aren’t worth very much—to them. That’s why you shouldn’t work for clients who won’t pay your regular price.
• I look upon my consulting as a way of getting a paid education,
• Pricing is not a zero-sum game. In other words, my gains don’t have to be their losses. By searching for conditions that benefit us both, I can lower the effective price without lowering my image in their eyes, thus beating the law that says they’ll respect me less if I charge a lower price.
• If you need money badly, you may set your price too high in order to try to get solvent on this one job. Or, you may set your price too low, hoping to sell the job on the basis of price. Both of these occurrences destroy the usefulness of price as a tool in your consulting.
• Set the price so you won’t regret it either way.
• I may be a jerk, but I’m the only jerk I have. That’s why it’s so important to me to retain a favorable self-image, even at the expense of the truth. And that’s why whenever I let somebody down, I feel an urgent need to explain.
• Nobody but you cares about the reason you let another person down.
• Clients may lose their money, their jobs, or their reputation on the basis of the consultant’s behavior. The ease with which they stop trusting you is the clients’ instinctive way of increasing the consultant’s risk, so that it will be commensurate with their own.
• People don’t tell you when they stop trusting you.
• To a consultant, trust without a contract is infinitely better than a contract without trust,