Adam Bager

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent

The Art of Consulting – Representation and Analysis

The Art of Consulting – Designing (Completeness & Simplicity)

The Art of Consulting – Designing (Affordability, Flexibility, Maintainability, Elegance)

The Art of Consulting – Judgement

The Art of Consulting – Presenting

The Art of Consulting – The Final Report

The Art of Consulting – Presenting

As consultants we spend much of our time thinking, researching, calculating, designing, devising, writing, and doing other tremendously serious, but usually solitary, things. There comes a time, though, when we must present our findings to our clients and make our case. We sometimes do this through a report (which I’ll blog about separately) but very often we must present our findings in person, at a meeting, either through informal discussion, or formally using a ‘presentation’, often a PowerPoint presentation, full of bullet points, graphics and other tricks of the trade.

A presentation must:

Inform as to facts
Advance an argument (with stated assumptions)
Persuade as to a course of action, or clearly lay out choices

It’s not so different from selling, in that whilst serious substance is undoubtedly necessary it is almost never sufficient. People buy from people they like. Similarly, people are persuaded by people they like.

Oddly, this is true also of musical performance. LLP Group used to sponsor an instrumental competition (I am an oboist myself) and I attended every competitor’s performance. After a while I could predict an interesting and successful performance before the music even began. It was a matter of how the musician moved, engaged with the audience, and so on. There are, of course, some notable exceptions to this rule, not least Susan Boyle, whose dowdiness gave no hint of her glorious voice. But the point is that presentation isn’t just about substance, it’s also about style.

As for PowerPoint presentations, I am one of the world’s worst audiences. PowerPoint has made us all dull. It fools us into thinking that it’s what’s on the screen that matters, not how we present ourselves.

I attend software conventions all over the world and after more than thirty years in the business I feel almost physically sick when the lights go down and the bullet points start rolling. If I can, I sneak out of the auditorium and fortunately I’ve never had to sit an examination on the content.

So, whilst cogent argument and succinct presentation of the salient facts are essential, you must also entertain. Never be dull. Presentations are a performance and must be approached as such. This doesn’t mean knock-about humour. Rather, it means being brief, being personal, being enthusiastic, being yourself and above all it means engaging with the audience.

Not everyone is initially good at this, but these skills can be acquired, and practised, and perfected.

I’ve often suggested that a PowerPoint presentation should never be longer than ten minutes, but I regularly exceed this limit myself. The important thing is to try to make it as short as possible and keep it simple.

What are the important questions to ask yourself and things to think about when preparing and presenting a PowerPoint presentation?

Who are your audience? What are their expectations? What style do they expect (in Zurich they’re formal, in Naples they’re not)?
Who are the most important members of your audience?
How much time do you have? Always check with the audience before you start.
Adopt a simple structure that reflects the logical structure of your argument (for example, scope, assumptions, facts, options, priorities, recommendations).
Start your presentation by saying what you’re going to present (so that the audience knows your direction of travel), present your case, and then end your presentation by saying what you’ve said. People remember structures and shapes more easily than facts, so if you make the shape of your presentation clear, they might even remember some of the detail that hangs off it.
Don’t present detail if it can’t be grasped immediately. You can always provide detail separately, later.
Don’t be repetitive.
Never write long sentences on your slides
Never read what’s on the slide, especially if you’re presenting detail. Your audience is probably literate and can read for itself. For example, you can just say, ‘Here are some facts relevant to my argument,’ and then leave a few seconds for the audience to read them. Your bullet points are for talking around, not for reading verbatim. How often I’m in an agony of boredom whilst a presenter laboriously drones through bullet point after bullet point when I’ve already read them.
Use simple graphics where possible but don’t cram them with detail. They must make sense from the back of the room.
Be consistent in your use of fonts and styles, and make sure everything is visible to everyone in the room.
Don’t be tempted to use too many clever effects – bullet points that bounce, screen transitions that resemble shutters, etc. Such things were fun fifteen years ago, but nowadays they are tedious.
Never turn to look at the screen. Check that the technology is working when you’re setting up, but then trust it. Better to look at your audience if you can see them, and, when you need to, at the notebook in front of you that’s running your presentation.
Communicate with your audience. Force reaction to your most important points by looking your audience in the eye, and even asking for feedback. Ask, ‘Is that clear?’ from time to time before moving on from one point to another.
Don’t be derailed, if you can avoid it. If there’s interruption or heckling from the audience, then engage with the speaker briefly and then ask that discussion be postponed until you’ve finished. ‘Let me just get through what I wanted to say, and then I’ll happily discuss what you’ve said in more detail.’ Or, ‘I’ll get to that in a few minutes, so please just bear with me for a while.’
Talk simply and as if you’re talking one-to-one, as if it’s a conversation. Leave pauses, when you must. Rapid panicky patter is disastrous.
Be amusing if that comes naturally to you, but don’t tell jokes if that’s not something you naturally do well. Be yourself.
Reinforce your company branding, values and guidelines, or, at least, don’t breach them.
BE BRIEF
BE CLEAR
DO NOT BE DULL

If you follow some of these guidelines there’s a chance that something from your presentation will stay in the minds of your audience.

See also:

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent

The Art of Consulting – Representation and Analysis

The Art of Consulting – Designing (Completeness & Simplicity)

The Art of Consulting – Designing (Affordability, Flexibility, Maintainability, Elegance)

The Art of Consulting – Judgement

If it didn’t sound bossy I would have adopted a strapline such as ‘We tell our customers what to do’ for LLP Group. It reflects our inescapable responsibility as consultants, our duty to advise. When we’ve collated the evidence, evaluated the objectives, determined the priorities and analysed the constraints, we must make a judgement as to the best course for our client.

As I wrote in my first post on The Art of Consulting:

A consultant uses his knowledge, experience, intelligence and imagination to investigate, understand, and advise on the resolution of problems brought to him by a client.

The art of good judgement is probably the most difficult we must acquire. It certainly isn’t acquired in the classroom, but rather through years of experience, and, sad to say, through our mistakes as well as through our successes.

As young consultants we’re usually too obsessed by theory or by technology, too willing to take a risk on unproven solutions, and we overestimate the capabilities of our clients and their eagerness to embrace new ideas.

As we age we get better at balancing perfection and pragmatism, at aiming for the achievable rather than the ideal, and in understanding the limitations of our clients and ourselves.

A junior consultant can be trusted to:

Solve a technical problem
Provide important research

An intermediate consultant can be trusted to:

Determine what a client wants or needs
Devise the most expedient solution
Divine or determine priorities
Perceive dependencies
Calculate the risks
Estimate effort
Judge whether the client is right or wrong

A mature consultant can:

Judge what is really in the client’s best interests
Advise on what is practically achievable
Decide whether it is in the consultants’ interest to deliver the project
Determine if a client is ready for the solution
Determine if the consultants can do a good enough job
Motivate the client and the consultants involved

When we advise, our judgements must be:

Reasoned
Discussed
Documented

And, like it or hate it, with judgement comes responsibility, and often, indeed, legal liability (whether limited to a large number or unlimited). This is why consultants often obtain professional indemnity insurance as protection, and this is why we reserve the right to refuse, to say no, to withdraw in some circumstances, if our advice is ignored.

It’s important we remember that a consultant is responsible for his or her advice in the circumstances. We cannot take responsibility for issues over which we have no control.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we should always insist that our advice be followed to the letter. We must often make compromises. After all, we are sometimes wrong in some particulars.

But if we feel that an important aspect of our advice is ignored in a way that we cannot mitigate, then, if we do continue to work with our client, we must document our misgivings and advise our client on how we believe the outcome will be affected.

We must also always be willing to admit that we are wrong or have made mistakes. Even our clients might admit that it is human to err. Admitting mistakes as early as possible, however awkward, reduces the risk of failure, and on occasion, might even earn you some respect.

I remember many occasions in my work as an IT consultant where things went wrong because I made a mistake (it is actually quite impossible to get complex business systems to work perfectly the first time). I’ve learned to avoid being defensive. It’s always better to say, ‘Sorry, I made a mistake.’ In most circumstances clients accept that this is inevitable and that they, too, are not immune to error. In most cases they are sympathetic, forgiving and supportive.

On the other hand, if you are evasive and concealing, trust might be forever lost. We can also avoid mistakes by admitting our limitations. Our clients must know what we know and what we don’t know. If you’re not sure of something – say so, and say why. Never lie – you’ll be caught out sooner or later – and don’t hide something that you think might hurt you later.

But, even so, remember you’re always, at least partly, a salesperson. Make the best of the circumstances you’re in. See the glass as half full, not half empty and don’t advertise problems if you can solve them quietly. We also have a responsibility to put the best gloss on things that we can.

See also:

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent

The Art of Consulting – Representation and Analysis

The Art of Consulting – Designing (Completeness & Simplicity)

The Art of Consulting – Designing (Affordability, Flexibility, Maintainability, Elegance)

Designing well means designing something that does the job as simply as possible and is also easily used by its intended users. Good design also means:

Affordability
Maintainability
Flexibility
Elegance

Affordability and maintainability usually go together, and both are often related to simplicity and pragmatism. A good design will do as much of the job as it is sensible to do, as simply as possible, for as long as possible.

In the physical world there’s usually a trade off between high quality of materials (and consequently a long life) and cost. Choosing how well to build something is a matter of cash flow, the pattern of expected return on investment, required lifespan and available resources to invest.

For most people who need to go from A to B, this is a better choice…

than this…

And something like this…

is easier to maintain than this…

In the abstract world of software design, maintainability also requires that know-how persists in your supplier or your workforce. Bear that in mind. Sometimes all the money in the world won’t buy the knowledge that the original designer had.

Flexibility is a more difficult concept. Good design will enable adaptation as requirements change. But anticipating the future, which flexibility requires, is always tricky.

Suppose you are designing an invoicing system and it must be completely flexible, then you must choose a word processing tool such as Word (not in fact a ‘system’ at all), though this comes at the cost of there being no constraints and controls on what a user might do.

Flexibility is expensive. I am a designer of a software package for Professional Services Management and Expense Management (see systems@work). This software must work for many kinds of companies so I must design it to be flexible. This costs a lot more overall than it would if I were designing just for one organisation, even if I designed a certain level of flexibility for that organisation. But even so, our software will sometimes hit a brick wall of impossible requirements and we can’t always do everything that a client might want. Sometimes, if this is a showstopper, we lose the deal.

Judging just how much flexibility is needed in good design is an art. It comes with experience, but you must take account of this. Not to do so can mean enormous expense when requirements unavoidably change.

Finally, elegance. This is an insubstantial concept, and perhaps, if all other principles are adhered to, elegance simply emerges. The most efficient, pragmatic, simple, maintainable, affordable and flexible design may also turn out to be the most elegant. But, for sure, elegance involves art. It is a matter of aesthetics and it is as difficult to prescribe as it is to write music as well as Mozart did.

See also:

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent

The Art of Consulting – Representation and Analysis

The Art of Consulting – Designing (Completeness & Simplicity)

You can design the most beautiful building in the world but it’s no good if it’s too difficult to build. Think of the Sydney Opera House. It was imaginatively and brilliantly conceived with little regard for how it might be built, and the final cost of construction was astronomically higher than the original budget allowed.

You can design a software system that reflects a set of business requirements completely, and as simply as logic permits, but it’s no good if you need a doctorate in mathematical logic to use it.

Perhaps you can even build a sophisticated legal argument too brilliant for a jury to grasp. And I’m sure a surgeon can design a surgical procedure that’s far too difficult for most surgeons to execute.

Theory can enable you to design something as perfect and as simple as it might possibly be, but only experience can tell you whether you need to simplify still further to make it usable. Consulting is an art, and although the best artists are often young iconoclasts with the most up-to-date knowledge of technology, consultants generally get better with experience, and it’s often the grey-haired veterans who are the best at designing something workable. They’ve come to know what is possible in the real world.

I remember the frightening years of the Dot.Com boom when those of us who possessed even a few grey hairs were thought of as past it. The IT world suddenly belonged to the young dotcommers who thought up brilliant things that our minds, dulled by too much experience, were incapable of. If you were over thirty, you probably couldn’t raise a penny in investment capital.

One of these brilliant things was a website called boo.com which was designed to sell clothes through the internet and which would be driven by software so brilliant that users would see what clothes might look like on their own bodies by entering their vital statistics and then rotating a graphical ‘model’. It doesn’t sound so difficult now, but back then, more than fifteen years ago, it was impossible. Bandwidth wouldn’t allow it and there wasn’t enough time to write good enough software. Boo.com got through its 135 million dollars of venture capital and failed spectacularly. The real world wasn’t good enough for the entrepreneurs’ ideas. Read about it in BooHoo.

Of all my own failings as a systems design consultant none is worse than my always attempting to build something that can do everything a client wants or needs. I’ve probably got wiser over the years, but I still try too hard to design some logic for every eventuality. It’s not that the logic I design isn’t right, but rather it’s sometimes too complex. It’s a general rule that as the logic of systems becomes more complicated, so the users’ understanding of it becomes weaker.

When something is more complicated there is not only more of it that can go wrong (software is never perfect) but more importantly, more user mistakes can be made with it, and such mistakes get ever harder to correct. Given that a consultant must eventually do a disappearing act, it’s better to leave a client with something simple and manageable.

Along with this wisdom of experience comes the skill of convincing a client that ‘keep it simple’ is a good guiding principle and that although you CAN do what the client wants, it wouldn’t be wise.

Think also of the Kalashnikov rifle – simple and pragmatic. In a life or death moment you want something that can’t go wrong in too many ways.

In the film, Lord of War, arms dealer Yuri Orlov comments:

Of all the weapons in the vast Soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova…. more commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It’s the world’s most popular assault rifle, a weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple, 9 pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn’t break, jam, or overheat. It’ll shoot whether it’s covered in mud or filled with sand. It’s so easy, even a child can use it – and they do.

So, one of the secrets of good design is to design something that can actually work, can actually be used. Don’t let theoretical fancy lead you into the realms of the impossible, however complete, however beautiful your idea.

See also:

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent

The Art of Consulting – Representation and Analysis

The Art of Consulting – Designing (Completeness & Simplicity)

There comes a moment, after all the reading, listening, questioning, analysing, presenting and writing, when you’ve finally got to come up with an idea. You can’t defer it indefinitely.

Whether you’re a lawyer devising an argument, a systems analyst designing software, an architect designing a house, an engineer constructing a bridge, a general planning an attack, or a marketing consultant devising a campaign, there’s only so long you can ignore that look in the client’s eye that says, ‘So….what should we do?’

Imagination is involved at all stages of the consulting process, but so far it’s played a relatively minor role. There’s imagination involved in ferreting out the facts, for example, but it’s needed most of all at the point where you must devise a solution, though it’s also tempered by experience and wisdom. Sadly, solutions can’t simply be logically derived from the facts in front of you. If you’ve structured your findings well, you’ve probably already worked your way towards the answer. But you need inspiration to get you there.

However, inspiration, like the poet’s Muse, isn’t always at your beck and call. Each of us has a different way of invoking it. Some get drunk, some sleep on it, sometimes even dreaming a solution (just as Wagner dreamt the opening bars of Das Rheingold whilst dozing before the fire), some play rugby or squash, some play chamber music. Sherlock Holmes played the violin and injected himself with something special. We all have our own way, legal or otherwise. I like to put things aside for a while and let the facts tumble about in my mental washing-machine until, at an unexpected moment, they seem to sort themselves out into an idea. But however they come, they don’t come through a logical progression of the facts.

Scientific theory is the same. The experimental evidence is laid out before the scientist, who has to sweep it all up into one grand theory that accommodates it all. Or more than one theory. Half the problem with solutions and theories is deciding which one is the right one.

A solution must solve the problem, a scientific theory must fit the facts (and predict a few more facts so that it can move forward through failure). But often there are many theories that fit the facts, and many solutions that solve the problem. Does the earth rotate around the sun, or the sun around the earth? Rival theories can be made to fit the facts, almost indefinitely, but the strain begins to show when one theory becomes more complex as the other one remains simple. We reject complexity where simplicity will do. (Conspiracy theorists habitually break this rule.)

And that’s where other principles play a part. Completeness may be the first principle of good design (your solution or theory must explain (or rationally discard) your findings) but the second principle of good design is simplicity.

Simplicity may seem like an obvious principle that doesn’t need writing down, but it’s first expression is credited to William of Ockham (1238-1348). His ‘law of parsimony’, often known as Occam’s Razor, cuts out the unnecessary entities in a theory. He framed his lex parsimoniae in Latin – entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitate which is roughly translated as ‘entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity’. There’s an alternative version Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate which is translated as ‘plurality should not be posited without necessity’. Both can be paraphrased as ‘All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.’

Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and he lived before the scientific age, but his principle of simplicity applies to theory even if there aren’t any ‘facts’. He applied his law to the make-believe world of medieval theology. Try counting entities you can’t actually see. But what the law doesn’t tell you is exactly how to recognise simplicity. It isn’t always obvious. Must you count the ‘entities’ or is your judgement aesthetic? I suspect it’s a bit of both.

How would you design a device for removing the peel from potatoes (otherwise known as a potato peeler!)?

Like this?

Or like this?

William Heath Robinson was famous for designing unnecessarily complicated machines. There’s a simple and serious point to his drawings. Though there’s a certain joy in ingenuity and complexity, it’s best never to make things more complicated than they need to be.

So, what is good design?

Good design is:

Complete
Simple

But it’s also:

Practical
Affordable
Flexible
Maintainable
Elegant

We will look at these additional principles in a later post.

See also:

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent

The Art of Consulting – Representation and Analysis

Consultants of any kind must be able to write well, to document facts clearly, and convey ideas and plans succinctly, unambiguously and persuasively. In my view, except when specific technical terms must be used, everything that can usefully be said can be said using simple language.

Graham Greene – one of my literary heroes

What’s the best prose style for a consultant (assuming that we needn’t consider poetry)? It should:

Be logically clear
Use everyday vocabulary
Consist of short sentences
Avoid exaggeration
Be persuasive but not emotional
Be direct and explicit (avoiding hints, suggestion, implication, and ambiguity)
Be as brief as possible
Be complete and coherent
Avoid cliché
Avoid jargon
Not use unexplained acronyms
Use humour carefully
Avoid repetition and redundancy, except in an explicit summary

That said, I do like stylish writing from time to time, I just don’t think it’s how a consultant should write in his or her professional role. Take this excerpt from Henry James’ The Ambassadors (1903):

Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive until evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him bespeaking a room ‘only if not noisy’, reply paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound.

It is wonderfully elliptic, its rambling structure conveying Strether’s hesitant and uncertain thinking, but, if you go by Microsoft Word’s measure of readability (see below) this kind of prose requires a relatively high level of education (not to mention patience).

In contrast, here’s a much easier excerpt from Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938):

It was a fine day for the races. People poured into Brighton by the first train; it was like Bank Holiday all over again, except that these people didn’t spend their money; they harboured it. They stood packed deep on the tops of the trams rocking down to the Aquarium, they surged like some natural and irrational migration of insects up and down the front.

Microsoft Word calculates readability as:

We can probably assume that most consultants and their clients have completed secondary education, so both passages should make sense to them, but simplicity is always better if it can be achieved.

Here’s my rewriting of Henry James’ text in the style of Graham Greene, just for the fun of it:

When he reached the hotel, Strether asked about his friend, Waymarsh. The clerk told him that Waymarsh would not arrive until the evening. Strether was not worried. The clerk showed him Waymarsh’s reply-paid telegram asking for a quiet room. Waymarsh knew then that they would definitely meet here in Chester rather than in Liverpool.

More digestible, even if the information is the same, but less ‘stylish’.

One more point about style: though many conservative writers of prose don’t like contractions such as don’t for do not (notably Michael Gove, the UK’s Minister of Justice, who circulated a memo on prose style to his department a few days ago), I favour prose that sounds like speech. So I would go a little further with the Graham Greene rewriting of Henry James:

When he reached the hotel, Strether asked about his friend, Waymarsh. The clerk told him that Waymarsh wouldn’t arrive until the evening. Strether wasn’t worried. The clerk showed him Waymarsh’s reply-paid telegram asking for a quiet room. Waymarsh knew then that they would definitely meet here in Chester rather than in Liverpool.

(You might have noticed that Graham Greene uses one contraction in the excerpt from Brighton Rock.)

In our ‘professional’ prose, we should avoid:

Long sentences
Difficult words when simple words would do
Passive constructions
Double negatives

Unfortunately, this is the sort of rubbish that some consultants write:

The fundamental and underlying issue we have, as of now, in respect of teaming up the system selection group, is this: the human resources currently involved in preparation for the project have already expressed a preference for their system of choice, even before project initiation. This system doesn’t reflect the input to the choice process from the logistics department, who have not, as of now, been contributive.

Sins include:

Repetition (fundamental and underlying)
Redundancy (as of now, currently)
Lazy neologisms (teaming up, choice process, contributive)
Cliches (human resources (when people would do), system of choice)

This ‘rubbish’ is a deliberate exaggeration, concocted by me, but some consultants do write in this way. Why not put it all more simply?

We must include the logistics department in the system selection team.

We mustn’t think that we’re paid by the sheer quantity of words we write for our clients.

Here are some more rules:

If a paragraph can be removed without loss of meaning, remove it.
If a sentence can be removed without loss of meaning, remove it.
If a word can be removed without loss of meaning, remove it.
No need for a literary style
No need for poetry

Or, putting it another way (taking my own medicine):

If a paragraph, sentence, or word can be removed without loss of meaning, remove it.

Or why not…

If something can be removed without loss, remove it.

To use a horrible cliché – LESS IS MORE!

See also:

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent

The Art of Consulting – Representation and Analysis

Listening and questioning do involve imagination to some extent, but when your investigations are finished and you’ve got most of the facts in front of you, imagination takes over and you must use it to analyse and structure your facts usefully. Writing things down, representing things diagrammatically, and explaining things involves thought, choice and creativity.

How to do it in a way that lays the issues bare in the right kind of way? The ‘right kind of way’, of course, reflects your theory about the facts and the solution you want to put forward.

Representing what we’ve understood is an essential step in the consulting process. We do it in order to articulate and obtain confirmation of our findings and to advance our own view of them, what they mean, and what should be done about them. The very act of analysing will often deliver a solution to us. This is the Sherlock Holmes part of the process – seeing a coherent explanation in a mess of disparate clues.

When I run my training course on Non-Technical Skills for Consultants I ask participants to ‘structure’ the information contained in a rather undisciplined stream of thought. I ask them to imagine someone considering a trip from the UK to Italy. The consultant’s role is to lay out the options in a way that helps this traveller to decide how to travel.

“I hate flying, but there’s a flight that leaves on Saturday morning via Paris. Even with the connection it only takes three hours. Or I could drive, but at this time of year you can’t trust the mountain passes, even if this is the cheapest way. The train goes directly to the town, and the church isn’t far from the station. Trains are always the most relaxing, even if they’re very expensive these days. I could even have dinner and get a good night’s sleep. The trouble with the flight is that it arrives only half an hour before the wedding starts and I can’t risk not getting there. I can’t understand why my friends chose a tiny town near Rome for their wedding. And if my Mother comes too, it’s going to cost an awful lot unless I go by car. Why did they ask me to be a witness?”

The first step is to tease out the facts relevant to the issue at stake. These are:, in the sequence in which they are expressed:

The traveller hates flying
The flight will take only three hours
Driving is the cheapest form of travel
The mountain passes are unreliable at this time of year
Travelling by train would be the most restful
Travelling by train would be very expensive
The flight may not get the traveller to his or her destination in time
The traveller may travel with his or her mother
Costs are in proportion to the number of travellers except in the case of travelling by car

How should such information be represented?

One way might be this way:

These colourful diagrams sort out the advantages and disadvantages and lay them out against the three modes of transport. It’s logically correct but not persuasive because its primary structure (separating advantages and disadvantages) doesn’t reflect the way we think, the process of decision between modes of transport involving immediate comparison of advantage and disadvantage.

This one is better:

This one better still, because it enables comparison more easily.

But none of the above provides a very deep analysis of the issue. They simply lay out the facts as divulged. Better, perhaps, to group each ‘determinant’ by ‘category’ – such as speed, comfort, cost, and risk. This involves deeper judgement as to what matters when a traveller must make a decision.

It’s more helpful because it enables us to ask the traveller, ‘What matters more to you? Is it comfort, or speed, or cost or risk?’ It lays bare the fact that we must first decide what matters most before a decision can be made.

You might even go a stage further and develop an ‘algorithmic’ way of representing the data so that a decision can be derived from the way the data are represented.

Supposing we assign the following weightings to these four categories:

Speed – 6
Comfort – 7
Cost – 8
Risk – 8

We show the data for the two different situations – with mother and without – and the diagrams deliver a decision for us, which is Train in both cases.

Of course the result would be different according to how you weight the categories.

I find the discipline of describing and representing a problem the most important step in terms of coming up with a solution. I try one way and find that the facts don’t fit, or that there’s something awkward in the way I’ve chosen to describe things, and then I try another until I arrive at the right way. And if I’m lucky a solution tumbles out.

See also:

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent

A question is the most important tool in the consultant’s armoury, especially, of course, during the investigative phase of a project.

You should never run out of them. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and if there’s one thing I learned it is that there is always another question.

But there are good questions and bad questions.

What makes a good question?

A good question needs to do at least one of the following:

Find things out, efficiently and precisely
Confirm things, even the obvious things that you think everyone already knows
Establish that you’re an expert
Establish that you’re a person of broad interests
Establish a good working relationship

Finding things out

A good question is one that finds the most out, and delivers the most information. When I’m running my training course on Non-Technical Skills for Consultants I make everyone play Twenty Questions. You have to ask no more than twenty questions of the yes-or-no variety in order to identify a single thing. It might be an elephant, a submarine, Mars, Manon Lescaut, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a cappuccino, indeed anything at all. The best questions, of course, are those that divide the remaining possibilities approximately in half.

If you were just thinking of a number then twenty questions would enable you to identify any number lower than 1,048,576. You’d start by asking ‘Is the number lower than 524,288?’ and then, depending on the answer, asking the same of 786,432 or 262,144. Assuming that most people can’t in practice think of more than 1,048,576 different things when the game applies to things other than numbers it’s usually possible, with judicious questioning, always to find the answer. Of course, you’d need a good taxonomical mind to do it well. But asking ‘Does it have a head?’ after learning that it’s a mammal is an obvious example of a bad question.

Another kind of bad question is one that doesn’t have an answer, or can’t have an answer in the situation you find yourself in. ‘How many archangels can dance on the tip of a pin?’ is an obvious example of an extremely bad question, but you should also avoid questions to which you must know there’s no known answer, such as ‘How many of your team feel demotivated?’ if this isn’t something anyone has attempted to measure. Better to ask a question to which there can be an answer, such as ‘Have any of your team told you they feel demotivated?’

It’s often said that a good barrister never asks a question of a witness in a courtroom unless he or she already knows the answer. Whilst a discussion between a consultant and client doesn’t take place in the same adversarial context an amended version of this is still a good rule: a good consultant never asks a question to which there cannot be an answer.

Finding things out another way

As for good questions, there are many other kinds. How often, when you’re trying to understand how things work do you feel that you haven’t got the right answer. Another good question is the same question, asked again and again in an entirely different way. You must always indulge that nagging feeling that your client has a different understanding of what you’ve asked, or has answered incorrectly. Never allow yourself to think that it will somehow be clarified later, or that your client will think you stupid for asking for clarification. Inaccuracy grows like a weed if left untended.

Open questions

Open questions, of course, are fun at the beginning, especially if you think of yourself as a psychoanalyst. ‘What’s on your mind?’ ‘What do you spend most of your time worrying about?’ ‘What’s the biggest problem you face?’ can get you started, but only if it’s your plan to delve into the forensic detail later. Such a game won’t impress your client for very long.

Social questions

Questions also serve a social purpose. I’ve seen consultants so intent on their cross-examination of a client that they forget to show a wider interest in what the client does. Don’t forget that an interest in others is a sure way to win trust and promote friendship. How often have you met people who never ask you anything, and how often do you want to meet them again? If you want to show that you care then you must ask questions that suggest you have a wider interest in the world than, for example, the minutiae of stock control. ‘How is your business doing?’ is, at least, a start.

Show-off questions

You’ve also got to establish that you know what you’re talking about, so you’ve got to ask some questions that demonstrate your technical expertise. If you’re looking at the efficiency of a professional services organisation (my particular field) then you’ll ask questions about the ways an organisation measures its work – about utilisation (and what your client means by that measure), about realisation, revenue recognition problems, and so on.

Positive questions

It’s also very important to ask some ‘positive’ questions. We spend our time as consultants nagging away at problems, concentrating on the bad things (which we hope to do something about) rather than on the good (which we generally leave well alone). But people are naturally defensive and if you’re only asking them about things they feel they’ve failed to do something about, you will be the doctor who only brings bad news. How we like it when our GP has something positive to say as well, such as ‘You’re in really good shape for your age.’ So, ask some questions that let the client show off his competence or excellence.

Don’t forget the basic questions

When I worked in Hungary in the early 1990s I was sent from Budapest to a pharmaceutical company sixty miles from the capital. My mission was to discover if they needed any kind of management consulting. I got down to the detail straight away. I asked dozens of questions about their systems – whether they needed software to do both local and corporate accounting, whether they needed a payroll system, or some software to manage their manufacturing processes. I entirely forgot to show interest in, or even to ask them, what they actually ‘did’, until I was leaving. When I asked, the answer was an unusual one: ‘We extract tiny amounts of a particular hormone from the urine of the Hungarian Army,’ This obviously accounted for the slightly familiar smell of the place.

I felt a fool because so many of my questions were irrelevant and the client must have thought them (and me) rather silly or naive. The company was called Urinex, after all.

Be prepared

Before you begin your discussions with a client, note down a few good questions that will achieve all of these objectives. And never forget to write down what the answers are and the extent to which you can put your faith in their veracity.

See also:

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent

Ask anyone what their idea of a salesman is and they’ll usually tell you it’s someone who doesn’t stop talking, someone who wears you down with words until you surrender and buy, just to shut him up.

But it’s not like that at all, at least not outside the world of second hand cars and home insulation. The best salesmen listen more than they talk, and that’s true of the best consultants too. After all, consultant comes from the Latin verb consultare, to discuss, and discussion must be at least two-sided.

Listening is the basis of everything. There’s no possibility of your giving your client some good advice until you’ve understood what his problems are. And the best way of finding them out is to listen (and use all your other senses too).

But listening isn’t just a matter of sitting back and letting sound assault you. It’s work. It needs concentration. You must listen neutrally, deeply, sensitively and critically. It isn’t necessarily the downhill free-wheeling part of the consulting process.

Listen neutrally

Especially during the early stages of the consulting process you must listen neutrally, and avoid listening selectively to fit the evidence to the theory you’ve already constructed or are constructing. Don’t just hear what you want to hear. Record the evidence that refutes your theory as assiduously as that which supports it. Whatever theory you put forward must accommodate the evidence that goes against it.

And when you hear things that you disagree with, don’t combine argument with listening. The time for argument comes later. Listen as comfortably to things you don’t like as to the words that confirm your views.

Listen deeply

Sometimes people say the opposite of what they mean. That includes lying of course, for which you must always be alert. But sometimes it’s more complicated than that. It need not be as dramatically evident as in this song by Kurt Weill – Je ne t’aime pas – but people may be constrained by loyalty to say things they don’t really believe, and if you listen deeply and thoughtfully you can tell.

Listen sensitively

General Practitioners often say that the most important moment in an appointment comes at the end. The patient has explained the relatively trivial pretext for his or her visit, the doctor has produced a prescription, then just as he or she is about to leave, the patient says, ‘Oh, I know it’s probably a very silly thing, but I’ve got this lump…’

Listen to everything, and give equal weight to what the speaker regards as trivial or serious.

Listen critically

Think about what makes the speaker says what he says. Always consider the advantage or disadvantage to be gained by the speaker from what he says. Most of the people you listen to have an interest in the outcome of your engagement and will want to influence it.

And listen with a pen, pencil or keyboard…

Always make notes of what you’re hearing. And always seek clarification if something isn’t clear. You will never be a fool if you ask for repetition or clarification, regardless of the irritability or impatience of the person you’re talking too. Don’t let acronyms pass you by without getting the speaker to spell them out. How often I still listen to people who say things like, ‘The trouble with the CFD is that the TKIO doesn’t really understand the aims of the NNBVC.’ Everyone has their own familiar technical vocabulary and their own shortcuts. They often use these to establish their own belonging and to demonstrate that you’re an outsider, consciously or otherwise. Don’t let them get away with it!

Above all, when you’re listening, make sure you’ve understood everything. If you allow inaccuracy and misunderstanding to creep into the process at the earliest stage, it will only be amplified as the engagement continues, and the end result might be wildly inappropriate.

See also:

The Art of Consulting – What’s the Role of the Consultant?

The Art of Consulting – Impartial, Honest and Independent