The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully — Book Summary

It’s been four years since the passing of Gerald M. Weinberg, and his impact is still felt by those who had the privilege of learning from him. His book “The Secrets of Consulting” is a true gem, containing wisdom that is as relevant today as it was when it was first published. This summary is just a small taste of the immense body of work he left behind, and how it has influenced my life both professionally and personally.

If you like this summary, a clap or two is appreciated and please do take a look at his amazing works. Get this book here.

And, for Agile Consultants/Transformation Consultants and Coaches, Al Shalloway and I are co-teaching Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant (DAVSC) from Oct 31st-Nov 3rd, 2022. To enroll, please use this link https://www.leangyan.com/davscnov22 or register via PMI website.

The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully

Chapter 1. Why Consulting Is So Tough

Here are the three laws, which all consultants must remember when taking on a new assignment:

There’s Always a Problem

Nothing is more puzzling to a young consultant than to arrive at the client’s office and be told, first thing, “We really don’t have any problems here. Nothing that we can’t handle, anyway.” Indeed, more than one green consultant has been so ignorant as to reply, “If there is no problem, then why did you hire me?” This may seem logical, but logic and culture have nothing to do with one another. In the culture of management, the worst thing you can do is admit to anyone that you have a problem you can’t handle by yourself. If you really do need help, you have to sneak it in somehow without admitting in public that there is any problem at all.

The Ten percent Promise

Few people are willing to admit that they’re sick, but most of us are willing to admit that we could use improvement. Unless we’re really sick. But be careful not to overdo this ploy out of eagerness to get the job. If you promise too much improvement, they’ll never hire you, because that would force them to admit they had a problem. A corollary of The First Law of Consulting is The Ten Percent Promise Law:

Never promise more than ten percent improvement.

Most people can successfully absorb ten percent into their psychological category of “no problem.” Anything more, however, would be embarrassing if the consultant succeeded.

The Ten Percent Solution

Another corollary is The Ten Percent Solution Law:

If you happen to achieve more than ten percent improvement, make sure it isn’t noticed.

The best way to make sure it isn’t noticed, of course, is to help the client take all the credit. Consultants who don’t bury their huge successes are like guests who clean their shoes on the table napkins. They aren’t invited back.

It’s Always a People Problem

One way for managers to avoid mentioning that they have a problem is to label the problem a “technical problem” as they aren’t really supposed to be a manager’s responsibility. Even when it’s “really” a technical problem, it can always be traced back to management action or inaction. The experienced consultant will resist pointing out that it was management who hired all the technical people and is responsible for their development. At the same time, the consultant will look for the people who should have prevented this problem or dealt with it when it arose.

Marvin’s Law

A corollary of The Second Law of Consulting is one of Marvin’s Laws:

Whatever the client is doing, advise something else.

At the very least, the people’s problem is either lack of imagination or lack of perspective. People who are close to a problem tend to keep repeating what didn’t work the first time. If it did work, they wouldn’t have called in a consultant. Since every hard-working person loses perspective at times, executives should be wary of managers who never call in outside consultants. They are so close to their problems that they don’t know how much trouble they’re in.

Never Forget They’re Paying You by the Hour

Many good consultants have tried to get paid by the solution, but none to my knowledge has ever succeeded. To succeed, you would first have to get the client to admit that there was a problem, then that the problem was big enough to justify paying you well for solving it. The Third Law of Consulting actually reminds the consultant that if the clients had wanted a solution, they would have paid for a solution.

The Credit Rule

In short, managers may not be buying solutions, but alibis to give their management. A corollary of The Third Law of Consulting is The Credit Rule:

You’ll never accomplish anything if you care who gets the credit.

In order for a consultant to get credit, the client would have to admit there had been a solution. To admit there was a solution, the client would have to admit there was a problem, which is unthinkable. As a result, the only consultants who get invited back are those who never seem to accomplish anything. Whether these consultants actually do accomplish anything is an unanswerable question. Whichever way it was answered, it would leave the consultant out of a job, so effective consultants make sure it is never asked. Unfortunately, so do ineffective consultants. The difference, however, is that when an effective consultant is present, the client solves problems.

By now, if you have decided to make your life tougher by jumping into the business of consulting, remember the three secrets of consulting: The Hard Law, The Harder Law, and The Hardest Law.

The Hard Law

We’ve seen how difficult change is. This difficulty suggests that most of your consulting interventions simply won’t work. If that prospect sends you into deep depression, stay out of the consulting trade. The Hard Law says:

If you can’t accept failure, you’ll never succeed as a consultant.

This is truly a hard law, yet expressed in inverse form, it offers an atom of hope: Some people do succeed as consultants, so it must be possible to deal with failure. So what keeps successful consultants going, even when they fail?

The Harder Law

For consultants, solving problems is synonymous with living. I need problems so badly that if problems didn’t exist, I’d have to invent them. And I do. The Harder Law states:

Once you eliminate your number one problem, YOU promote number two.

The ability to find the problem in any situation is the consultant’s best asset. It’s also the consultant’s occupational disease. To be a consultant, you must detest problems, but if you can’t live with problems, consulting will kill you. Does this mean you must give up trying to solve problems? Not at all. It means that you must give up the illusion that you’ll ever finish solving problems. Once you give up that illusion, you’ll be able to relax now and then and let the problems take care of themselves. People who can solve problems do lead better lives. But people who can ignore problems, when they choose to, live the best lives. If you can’t do both, stay out of consulting.

The Hardest Law

Obviously, I’m sufficiently thick-skinned to accept failure and ignore problems. Otherwise, I’d be out of the consulting business by now. So, now I’ll let you in on the biggest secret. I’m not writing this book for you, I’m writing it for me. In fact, that’s also why I do all my consulting work, because trying to help others always winds up initially helping me more than it helps my clients. I can never be of maximum help to clients if my problems are tangled uncontrollably with theirs. So I try to get my own mess straightened out before tackling theirs. Unfortunately, as my own behavior demonstrates:

Helping myself is even harder than helping others.

Chapter 2. Cultivating A Paradoxical Frame Of Mind

By now, you may have noticed that many of the laws of consulting take the form of paradoxes, dilemmas, and contradictions, and that they are often humorous. Perhaps this format has surprised you. Perhaps you thought that the consultant, of all people, must be logical, single-minded, and, above all, serious. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If logic always worked, nobody would need consultants. So consultants always confront contradictions. That’s why I advise consultants:

Don’t be rational; be reasonable.

OPTIMITIS AND THE TRADEOFFTREATMENT

The inability to resist solving problems is only one of the occupational diseases from which consultants suffer. The most serious occupational disease is known as optimitis.

Optimitis can be found in anyone who is asked to produce solutions to problems. It is an inflammation of the optimization nerve, that part of the nervous system which responds to such requests as

• “Give us the minimum cost solution.”
• “Get it done in the shortest possible time.”
• “We must do it in the best possible way.”

In a healthy individual, the optimization nerve receives such requests and sends an impulse to the mouth to respond, “What are you willing to sacrifice?” In the diseased individual, however, this neural pathway is interrupted, and the mouth utters some distorted phrases like, “Yes, boss. Right away, boss.”

The Tradeoff Treatment Seeing

The Tradeoff Treatment cures optimitis. When someone asks a diseased consultant to “design X in the shortest possible time,” conditioning through long therapy must trigger the reaction, “Let me check my tradeoff chart.” After creating the chart, the consultant will naturally think of responses such as the following:

1. What are you willing to sacrifice in order to deliver X in the shortest possible time?

2. If you want X in the shortest possible time, you might not get product Y in the defined time.

3. To get X in the shortest possible time, you might have to compromise on the quality of its A, B, C,… features, etc.

There are many tradeoffs in any business, and the consultant must learn them and call them to the client’s attention. In short,

Moving in one direction incurs a cost in the other.

TIME TRADEOFFS

Once you’ve taken TheTradeoff Treatment, the world is never quite the same. Everywhere you look, you see tradeoffs, especially time tradeoffs.

Now Versus Later

Last week, one of my clients got angry about something I said in a meeting, and I didn’t understand what her objection was. I had to make a decision: Deal with her anger now, which would take time from the meeting, or deal with it later. If I waited until later, the problem might just fade away, or it might fester and cost me much more time. I was aware of the tradeoff, and I decided to handle the problem by sharing my awareness with her during the meeting. I said to her, “I’m aware that something I said doesn’t agree with you. I don’t want to ignore that, but we all have business to attend to in this meeting. Can you and I discuss this over lunch, or do you think it will interfere with the business of the meeting if we don’t resolve it first?”

In effect, I was presenting the time tradeoff as a problem for all in the meeting to solve, which ran the risk of using even more time now. I tend to do that because I’ve learned that people underestimate future time when it’s something that might be unpleasant.“Maybe it will go away” is the attitude, and, of course, sometimes it does. But on the average, it seems to pay to invest a little more time now at least to find out how much time it will take later. By making the time tradeoff explicit, I make it clear that it is a problem of limited time, not a problem of limited respect for the other person.

Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem

Many years ago, Sir Ronald Fisher noted that every biological system had to face the problem of present versus future, and that the future was always less certain than the present. To survive, a species had to do well today, but not so well that it didn’t allow for possible change tomorrow, i.e. the more adapted an organism was to present conditions, the less adaptable it tended to be to unknown future conditions. We can apply the theorem to individuals, organizations, and machines:

The better adapted you are, the less adaptable you tend to be.

In my consulting, I’m often called upon to help establish recruiting policies. Inevitably, a decision must be made between hiring older people, who are more experienced in a particular skill, and younger people, who may prove more adaptable to learning new skills that may be required in the future. Again, my bias tends to be toward investing in the future, even at considerable sacrifice of present performance.

The Third-Time Charm

I used to be upset when my clients were so conservative about implementing my great ideas, especially when they seemed to promise great future payoffs for small present risks. Then one client pointed out that my risk, as consultant, was quite different from his: If my ideas kept being ignored, I would certainly lose my consulting contract. If they were implemented, I might be a hero, but even if everything flopped, I would merely lose the contract I was going to lose anyway. His risk was quite different: If he did nothing, he wouldn’t be any worse off than he was now. If he did what I suggested, he might be better off, but if my ideas flopped, he would be much worse off.

With a secure job, he was well adapted to the present situation. With a shaky consulting contract, I was prepared to be much more adaptable, with his organization. So Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem provides one reason why people need consultants.

Consultants are less adapted to the present situation, and therefore are potentially more adaptable.

Their perception of now/then tradeoffs is different from those close to the problem, which makes them a valuable source of ideas, as well as people not to be trusted. By working with a client for an extended period of time, it’s possible to establish trust by recommending only low-risk alternatives. This strategy is another now/then tradeoff: small results now for the possibility of bigger results later. But later, the consultant will be better adapted to the situation, and thus less likely to provide a truly big idea.

These consulting tradeoffs may explain something I’ve observed in myself and other consultants:

Consultants tend to be most effective on the third problem you give them.

We call this The Third-Time Charm. Unfortunately, most clients don’t seem to know about it, because they either drop you after one problem or retain you indefinitely.

Chapter 3. Being Effective When You Don’t Know What You’re Doing

Unlike most people, I’m blessed with a brother-in-law, Marvin, who’s a doctor. Marvin assures me that The First Great Secret is:

Ninety percent of all illness cures itself — with absolutely no intervention from the doctor.

A successful doctor must also convince the patient that something is being done to cure the disease. Otherwise, there would soon be doctors on the breadlines. The reason that ninety percent of all illness cures itself lies in “the wisdom of the body.” Any body design that didn’t have the wisdom to cure itself was summarily removed from the population. Each of us, after all, is the direct descendant of innumerable unbroken lines of survivors.

The First Great Secret

If a consultant is called to cure an organizational disease, for example, fixing an ill computer, the remedy might have to be quite direct and harsh, like amputating memory. Since Sherbie says, “it’s always a people problem,” the consultant should consider the people who are ordinarily responsible for keeping the computer well. If the computer plus those people are considered the “body,” then you can expect a certain amount of wisdom from them, and temper your prescription accordingly. In short, we can adapt Marvin’s First Great Secret to say:

Deal gently with systems that should be able to cure themselves.

The Second Great Secret

According to Marvin, the second secret of medicine has to do with penicillin. Of the ten percent of illnesses that don’t cure themselves, penicillin or some other antibiotic handily dispatches another ninety percent. In some people, however, penicillin provokes an allergic reaction, sometimes leading to death; at the very least, each use of it affects the body’s sensitivity to penicillin, so that someday when it’s really needed, it may have little or no effect, which leads us to Marvin’s Second Great Secret:

Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can’t.

The Third Great Secret

Any drug as strong as penicillin is bound to create problems. Some people are so worried about taking unnecessary drugs that they stop taking their antibiotics too soon. Rather than complete the prescribed course of treatment, they stop if the most obvious and uncomfortable symptoms don’t disappear immediately. But if the treatment stops too soon, the disease springs back, and this time it’s probably resistant to the antibiotic. Marvin’s Third Great Secret says:

Every prescription has two parts: the medicine and the method of ensuring correct use.

The Fourth Great Secret

Marvin is not merely a plain old M.D.; he is a psychiatrist. Once a month, Marvin drives to the state mental hospital to consult with staff physicians on their most intransigent cases. Marvin says that this kind of consulting is his easiest work, because he really doesn’t have to know any medicine or psychiatry at all. Whenever they bring out one of their tough cases, Marvin merely asks them what treatment they’ve been using. If they say treatment A, he tells them to switch to treatment B. If they tell him treatment B, he switches treatment to A. Oh, he surrounds all this with suitable mumbo jumbo, but the principle is simple and powerful enough to be Marvin’s Fourth Great Secret:

If what they’ve been doing hasn’t solved the problem, tell them to do something else.

The Fifth Great Secret

Because Marvin’s a consultant, the only cases he sees are the problems the hospital doctors aren’t solving by themselves. Therefore, one thing Marvin knows for sure is that whatever they’re doing, it isn’t right. They’ve become stuck on one approach and can’t get unstuck. He also knows that this system only works if they’re paying him a large fee, which leads to The Fifth Great Secret:

Make sure they pay you enough so they’ll do what you say.

The Sixth Great Secret

There’s so much we can learn from one another by sharing secrets, but we can learn even more by examining a few of the secrets side by side. For instance, two of the secrets say, in effect Don’t give up the treatment too soon. Don’t stick with the treatment too long. So, perhaps there’s another good reason for those huge fees. The secret of their secrets lies not in the secrets themselves, but in knowing when to apply each one, which is The Sixth Great Secret:

Know-how pays much less than know-when.

Chapter 4. Seeing What’s There

THE LAW OF THE HAMMER

For one thing, there’s The Law of the Hammer, which says

The child who receives a hammer for Christmas will discover that everything needs pounding.

The specialist who has only one tool may wind up hammering screws. Often, though, it’s not the consultant who brings out special tools, but the client who insists on them. In my work with computing firms, they always want me to solve problems by using computer programs. If I suggest an approach that doesn’t require using a computer at all, they can’t believe it’s worth anything.

Boulding’s Backward Basis

The consultant who studies history can learn to avoid mistakes, capture missed opportunities, keep what worked, and change what had no effect. The consultant can learn about the environment, too, for even though the system is to be changed, it will have to survive in the environment experienced by the former system. In short, the consultant studies history because, as the economist Kenneth Boulding says,

Things are the way they are because they got that way.

Anytime you’re on a new consulting assignment and need to become acquainted with the situation in a hurry, try using Boulding’s Backward Basis. To do so, you may have to slow down and listen to a client’s long, boring, irrelevant story.

Sparks’s Law of Problem Solution

But even if the stories actually turn out to be irrelevant, there may be important political reasons for beginning with a historical survey: The people who were part of the process that produced the problem are still around and will be involved, in one way or another, in the attempts to solve it. But it’s not always a good idea to comment on everything. If you loudly castigate the people who were responsible for producing the present mess, you may then discover that

1. There were, at the time, good and sufficient reasons for decisions that seem idiotic today.

2. The person most responsible is now your client or your client’s manager.

For these and other reasons, remember:

The chances of solving a problem decline the closer you get to finding out who was the cause of the problem.

Study Guides

In order to avoid the easy trap of placing blame, a consultant needs a few principles to guide the historical study. The first rule might be

Keep it simple and not too detailed; you’re a consultant, not a district attorney.

If you interrogate people, you may offend them. So ask less and listen more. Of course, all this listening could fill your mind with trivia. To help you decide which details can be safely ignored,

Study for understanding, not for criticism.

The people who know the history are your best source of information. Rather than shut them up with criticism, try opening them up:

Look for what you like in the present situation, and comment on it.

The bad will come to the fore soon enough. If you don’t mention it, other people surely will.

THE WHY WHAMMY

If you have the knack for getting information that other people can’t get, you’ll never starve. Many of my clients hire me as a “mirror” — a tool for seeing themselves. Sometimes, all it takes to get information out is to ask a list of questions starting with why.

We may run out of energy, or air, or water, or food, but we’ll never run out of reasons.

People can give reasons for why they do things, and if you’re not satisfied, they can give you more reasons. People can do just as well with reasons for why not. Or with reasons on both sides at the same time.

The Label Law

Giving your clients The Why Whammy is an excellent way to get facts, but that still leaves you with the problem of seeing the principles underlying the facts. An even more powerful technique is to learn a principle from a client, then apply the principle to that client’s problem.

Rick is a data processing manager, but his first love is training horses. He recently came to Lincoln to work on his company’s maintenance problems, but before we started to work, he insisted to go on a horse show. When I’m around horses, all I can think of is what would happen if one of them stepped on my foot. When I mentioned my fears to Rick, he chuckled and said, “The bigness is not the horse.” To people who don’t train horses, the only thing they notice is the first and most obvious thing: their size.” He then gestured fearfully toward the horse. “Look at those teeth. She could eat me alive!” Rick had given me a lesson in what I now call The Label Law:

Most of us buy the label, not the merchandise.

Linguists and philosophers put this in a different way: The name of a thing is not the thing.

Maintenance Versus Design

I’m learning that the word “maintenance” is one of the poorest labels we’ve ever invented. Rick started our session by saying that he spent eighty percent of his software budget doing maintenance. I suggested that perhaps this large amount merely meant that he was lumping too many things under one label. Looking into the actual work done under the maintenance label, I found that roughly half the work ought to have been labeled differently. For instance, prices that changed every few months were built right into the programs, rather than stored in easily maintained and checked tables. A team of three programmers spent its full time updating prices by changing the software.

The choice of terms had influenced the way Rick tried to improve the situation. By calling this work maintenance, Rick had directed attention to the efficiency of this team’s coding and testing. I suggested that he speak of this problem as a “mismatch between design approach and maintenance abilities.” The team of programmers decided to redesign the code using a table of prices — a table that already was maintained by the user department. The team’s “maintenance” work simply disappeared.

THE FIVE-MINUTE RULE

Over the years, I’ve become convinced that somewhere in that mass of facts is the solution to the client’s problems, a solution that the clients themselves could see if it weren’t for the overwhelming flood. But they are overwhelmed, so they call in a consultant, who listens to what they say and spins it back in a slightly different package. Nowadays, the primary method I use for reducing the flood of facts is The Five-Minute Rule:

Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell the solution in the first five minutes.

It was true of Rick, who had mislabeled design problems as maintenance problems, as well as of the other client who couldn’t distinguish between overrun and under budget. As a consultant, I could have picked up these signals in the first five minutes, saving myself days of tedious fact-gathering, or at least giving myself a strong clue as to how to organize the facts.

Chapter 5. Seeing What’s Not There

Tabulating complaints is part of the process of producing quality software. If that part of the process is missing, then it is pretty hard for people to know they are producing poor quality, and thus quite difficult for them to do anything about it. I prided myself on my ability to use the pinboard information to locate the group producing the worst quality. Then, I would help improve that group’s quality by pointing out all the things it was doing wrong.

This approach definitely improved quality, but it almost seemed like I was sticking pins in the poor people who weren’t doing a good job. Eventually, I was asked, “Why are you so negative? Don’t you want to see what our good programmers are doing?” I had used the pins to focus on the products that were having quality problems, but I could just as well have used the technique to see which groups weren’t having quality problems. When I visited those groups, I immediately learned a dozen new ways to improve software quality. Once again, I had failed to notice what wasn’t there. I was so problem-oriented, that I missed the non-problems, those problems that might have been there but weren’t. I took a long, searching look at my consultant’s tool kit and concluded that I was missing the tools I needed to see what wasn’t there.

HOW TO SEE WHAT ISN’T THERE

Acting on the absence of a request for help is but one example of how a consultant uses missing elements as a guide to action. For instance, I was helped in one assignment when I noticed that there were no visible personal items in anyone’s office. In a second, nobody used certain features of a new computer. Examples such as these have convinced me that I should cultivate the ability to notice missing things — to see what isn’t there. But how can I see what isn’t there?

Be Aware of Your Own Limitations

There’s one thing that’s not missing in every single one of your consulting situations: you. Suppose you missed X, Y, and Z in your previous assignment. Apply Boulding’s Backward Basis and ask why? The answer is probably that you personally are missing something, namely, the power to observe X, Y, and Z. I’ve always had a problem noticing that nobody asked me for help in the first place, and so I’ve developed techniques that force me to notice. When prospective clients call, I always ask them to confirm their call in a simple letter since I can study a letter more easily than a verbal request, to see what they really have and have not asked me to do. Therefore,

Find out what you usually miss and design a tool to ensure that you don’t miss it again.

Use Other People

The diversity of people can frustrate any consultant because he or she must assess the individual characteristics of each new environment, but when it comes to seeing what’s missing, diversity is your ally. Pose the question “What am I missing?” to as many people as you can find. Recruit people at different levels, with different roles, and with different backgrounds. Listen to their first impressions, but also allow the question to simmer in their minds.

Use Laundry Lists

Rather than rely on your memory of other situations, it’s sometimes useful to develop explicit lists of items that may be missing. In our work on technical reviews, we developed a number of lists, such as of materials you might want in your meetings, steps to be taken in preparing for reviews, or of points to look for in a reviewed document. We called them laundry lists. A laundry list reminds you of the different items that you might have forgotten, but that just might need cleaning up. A checklist is similar, but says these are items that must be present.

Check the Process

In addition to telling you what’s missing, a laundry list can be used in another way. It can be used to determine whether your search for missing things has been effective. Keep your laundry list in reserve until after you have your own list of missing items. Then compare the two lists. If the laundry list brings up new items, perhaps your original process of thinking up missing items wasn’t that comprehensive. Try changing the process in some way and continue working. Although a good process won’t ensure that you see everything, a poor process will almost certainly cause you to overlook something. Any indication that your process was poor is an indication that a new process should be fruitful.

The Rule of Three

Wanting to be right all the time makes it especially difficult to notice what’s missing in your own thought processes. As a check on the software design process, we teach The Rule of Three:

If you can’t think of three things that might go wrong with your plans, then there’s something wrong with your thinking.

The Rule of Three can be used to check any thinking process. It invariably turns up something that everybody missed, and if you’re a bettor, it will save you lots of money on “sure things.”

LOOSENING UP YOUR THINKING

The first time you apply The Rule of Three, though, you’ll probably find people complaining, “But I can’t think of anything else.” For times like these, every consultant should have a repertoire of idea-generating techniques, such as brainstorming, brainwriting, and games. Here are some of the ones we use.

Look for Analogies

Think of some system that is somehow like the one you’re examining, then use it as a source of ideas. It’s not necessary for the systems to be identical; you’re looking for ideas, not answers. In one organization, we were studying their technical training program when someone suggested the analogy of animal training. This analogy made us realize that we’d been concentrating on the content of training, rather than the implicit system of reward and punishment. This led to a small survey of recent trainees, which showed that many of them regarded video training as a form of punishment because they had to sit alone in a poorly ventilated, dirty stockroom when they viewed the videos. The situation was easily corrected, resulting in a startling increase in the number of requests for training.

Move to Extremes

Another way to explore the unexplored is to take some attribute of the system and imagine what would happen if you moved it to some extreme value. What if costs doubled? What if we could get these parts for nothing? You don’t expect these things to happen, but playing with them in your mind distorts the current system and lets you see things that were previously concealed by reasonableness. For instance, in studying morale and turnover problems, we imagined what would happen to the organization if there were no turnover whatsoever. This led us to realize one of the previously unnoticed benefits of turnover: the influx of new ideas when new people were hired. As programs were implemented to reduce turnover, other programs were added to supplement the flow of new ideas to the organization.

Look for Alibis Versus Explanations

Look for explanations and see if they are alibis for something that is missing.

Any suspect with too elaborate an alibi must be guilty of something.

For example, on the tub of a hotel, we find a warning: FOR YOURSAFETY! PLEASE NOTE BATHTUBELEVATION. Because this sign wasn’t there on the previous visit, we suspect that it was added after someone fell getting out of the tub. In other words, it is there to protect the hotel from the consequences of forgetting to do it right in the first place.

When working with organizations, I often study their written standards and procedures in exactly the same way I study hotel signs. Buried in one procedures manual was a curious rule that prohibited the use of certain code combinations for identifying products. Tracing the history of this rule, I discovered that the programmers had used these codes for special internal records, a terrible programming practice that got them into trouble when someone accidentally assigned one of these internal codes. Many written rules are instituted as quick fixes for problems that happened once in the past. The incident may be forgotten, but the rule lingers on as a clue to an event that may happen again. Prohibiting certain product codes did not solve the problem of this poor programming practice being used in other programs.When we searched the entire program library, we found a dozen other places that were vulnerable to the same kind of accident.

Chapter 6. Avoiding Traps

What you don’t know may not hurt you, but what you don’t remember always does.

Triggers are catchy phrases designed to pop into your mind when you’re just about to do something you know you shouldn’t do. Or to forget to do something you know you should do. (The name I use is designed to help you remember the trigger, whenever possible by puns, alliteration, or by some other device, as in Brown’s Brilliant Bequest, Rudy’s Rutabaga Rule, and Boulding’s Backward Basis. The important thing is that you are triggered at the right moment, when you need the idea, rather than that you be able to list all rules, bequests, laws, and principles in some hierarchy. The most important law is the one you need right now, not the one I thought was most important when I named them.)

THE ART OF SETTING TRIGGERS

As a consultant, you need to be able to set triggers in your own head, and also in the heads of your clients. One of the most influential services you can provide is to help people stay out of trouble they know is there.

The Potato Chip Principle

Does the idea of triggers planted in your brain frighten you? It should. I have a compulsion to eat potato chips. (I’ve learned that I’m allergic to potatoes. Serve’s me right.) But that’s not the worst of it. I’m also a compulsive reader. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. Some of the earliest messages I remember reading were on potato chip boxes. You’d think that after half a century I’d have learned all there was to know about potato chips, but I just caught myself doing it again. For a compulsive reader and potato chip eater, anything written anywhere on a potato chip box will pull the trigger. Which suggests The Potato Chip Principle:

If you know your audience, it’s easy to set triggers.

The Titanic Effect

The rule in poker is that you don’t lose your shirt on bad hands, but on hands that “can’t lose.” The owners of the Titanic “knew” that their ship was unsinkable. They weren’t going to waste time steering around icebergs, or waste money having needless lifeboats. This attitude can be devastating, as expressed in The Titanic Effect:

The thought that disaster is impossible often leads to an unthinkable disaster.

BUILDING YOUR OWN SYSTEM

Attached Notes

My problem is overeating in restaurants. When I embark on a consulting trip, I’m usually so nervous about doing well that I stuff myself at the first opportunity. A note to yourself makes a good trigger if you can attach it to an event that’s related to the behavior you want to catch. I recently got a fortune cookie reading “Resist impulses to change your plans.” That’s good advice for me, but I need it more when I’m about to accept a client’s dinner invitation. So I clipped the note to my appointment calendar, where it gives me a chance of staying out of serious trouble.

Tally Cards

To alter any habit that makes you feel bad about yourself, write it down everytime you feel the urge to do it. For example, to alter the habit of interrupting other people, I advise clients to keep a record of the time of each interruption and whom they are interrupting. To reduce the tendency to waste time on the telephone, I have them keep a list of whom they spoke to, what time they started, and what time they finished. In each of these cases, there’s no requirement to do anything about the habit, except to gather information. Some people find that the habit isn’t as bad as they feared: Their trouble wasn’t the habit, but how they felt about it.

Other People

It’s tempting to use other people as triggers, but it’s a dangerous practice. I’ve sometimes asked people to remind me of something when all I really wanted was someone to blame when I didn’t do what I was supposed to do. I finally learned to use my blaming as a trigger, to remind me that it was really my problem, not theirs. Consultants should keep this in mind when their clients start blaming them. You may want to be a highly paid scapegoat, but you should make a conscious choice.

Signals

It’s a good policy not to use people as triggers unless they volunteer for the job, and know exactly what they’re getting into. To avoid abusing your volunteers, you must know about your own emotional reactions. I’ve learned that I respond much better to hand signals than to words. As a consultant, I spend a great deal of time facilitating meetings. Hand signals are particularly effective at reminding me to shut up when I’m dominating the meeting by talking too fast, too long, and too loud. Verbal signals only exacerbate the situation, making me fear that someone else is trying to dominate the meeting. Therefore, I make pacts with my clients and students to give me hand signals when I forget myself.

Chapter 7. Amplifying Your Impact

Sometimes, a consultant working on one problem can accidentally touch another area in which the organization is unknowingly stuck. In recent years, the computer and the computer sales force have assumed the role of organization jiggler. When I worked for IBM, I myself often played this role, getting customers unstuck from problems that had nothing whatsoever to do with computers. As a jiggler, my job is to get something started, to cause some changes that will ultimately get the system unstuck. As a systems jiggler, I confine myself to working with organizations at various levels. Although I naturally work with both workers and management in my efforts to get things off dead center.

Stuck by Overload

Perhaps the best way to understand what a jiggler does is to consider the following example. A systems programmer complained that he was bothered by applications programmers all the time and could not do his assigned systems work. I observed their interaction and discovered that every problem involved reading dumps, the detailed printouts of the machine’s full memory contents. The applications programmers didn’t know how to read dumps effectively, so they turned to the systems programmer each time they had a problem. I jiggled them at one level by observing that there are tools that format dumps so they can be read by the applications programmers. The systems programmer was delighted with this solution, but I knew that this problem might be merely a symptom of a larger form of organizational stuckness. Therefore, I jiggled management with the following questions:

• Is it possible that nobody in the entire, rather large, organization knows of the existence of common tools like dump formatters?

• Isn’t it surprising that so many applications programs are getting dumps in the first place?

• Is the training program so out of touch with the actual work done that programmers aren’t taught to interpret dumps?

Working with questions such as these, I got the client to re-examine the entire department as a problem-solving organization. But even that wasn’t enough. 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? With this question, I started the organization on the road to problem prevention, one level higher than problem-solving.

Stuck Communication

A project manager told me that she was worried about her team leaders. They didn’t appear to appreciate that the project was in serious trouble. I asked the Project manager to leave me alone with the five team leaders for half an hour and then proposed that each leader write an anonymous schedule estimate on a slip of paper. The estimate gave the probability that the project would be done on schedule. I gathered the papers and found that the highest of the five estimates was twenty percent! All five knew that the project was in serious trouble, but all were afraid to say anything in front of their manager. Using asimilar technique, I mapped out the probabilities of completion at various dates in the future. When the project manager returned, she gave her own figures for the same probabilities. When the team leaders saw that their manager was equally pessimistic, communication began, and the team leaders admitted that they were afraid to speak their mind because they didn’t know that the others felt the same way. Ultimately, project completion was rescheduled to a more realistic date, and steps were taken to assure that the new date would be met.

Changing Perceptions

Companies that rotate their employees through different jobs and departments seem to develop people with richer perspectives. 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. I can achieve a similar effect through mixed meetings or putting people from two or more groups together ostensibly as a way of “saving my time” for which they’re paying by the hour. My favorite method is to open clients’ eyes to new ways of seeing things. Once their eyes are open, they’ll continue to learn new things about elephants long after they’ve stopped paying my fees.

The Hippopotamus

By “new ways of seeing,” of course I don’t necessarily mean seeing with the eyes. There is an ancient story of the king who wanted a formula for turning lead into gold. He threatened his alchemist with death if he didn’t produce it, so the alchemist gave him a complex series of magical steps to perform. The king memorized the steps, then asked the alchemist if the formula was foolproof. “Absolutely,” he replied, “except” The alchemist hesitated, “while you are carrying out the steps, you must not think of a hippopotamus.” By this clever trick, the alchemist saved his life by putting the responsibility for failure on the king. I do the same thing when I tell a client: “Don’t be aware of your feet pressing on the floor!” The more you try to obey the suggestion, the more you violate it. I use this approach when trying to get clients to use nonverbal behavior more effectively.

Seeing Internal Behavior

We live in a culture dominated by talking, which is why we tend to be blind to a person’s external behavior. Internal behavior, of course, is even less visible. Most of the time, we don’t “see” our own internal behavior, and we almost never can see someone else’s directly. With training, however, we can begin to see what might be going on inside someone else, and how that might be quite different from the external presentation.

Almost all of my consulting is conducted in some sort of meeting. Before a meeting begins, I give each participant a sheet of paper on which is written a secret personal assignment for that meeting. Here are some examples of such secret assignments:

• Try to see to it that every decision the meeting takes is written down and displayed so all can view it.

• Make sure that every person gets a chance to talk on every topic.

• Do not let any single person or clique dominate the meeting.

• Pretend that you have not prepared for this meeting, and try to conceal that fact from everyone else throughout the entire meeting.

• If at all possible, see that the meeting comes to decision X without letting yourself be identified with that decision.

The typical secret assignment describes something that people normally do in meetings, with some assignments having a positive effect, some negative, and some neutral. By playing the role explicitly, the actor learns to “see” behavior that was previously invisible, or to see alternative interpretations for behavior that was previously visible. This new vision inevitably affects a person’s future understanding of meetings.

THE POWERFUL CONSULTANT

If you keep amplifying your impact, you’ll eventually become a more powerful consultant. Your consulting style will reflect an increasingly complex understanding of your task and will have the following characteristics:

• Your task is to influence people, but only at their request.

• You strive to make people less dependent on you, rather than more dependent.

• You try to obey The Law of the Jiggle: The less you actually intervene, the better you feel about your work.

• 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.

• Most satisfying is to help them learn how to prevent problems in the first place.

• You can be satisfied with your accomplishments, even if clients don’t give you credit.

• Your ideal form of influence is first to help people see their world more clearly.

• Your methods of working are always open for display and discussion with your clients.

• Your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.

Chapter 8. Gaining Control of Change

I believe that consultants work by getting their clients to amplify small interventions. But how can the co-author of Weinbergs’ Law of Twins believe that any change is possible, let alone change triggered by a single person?

WEINBERGS’ LAW INVERTED

This question arises from a common misunderstanding of Weinbergs’ Law of Twins. Some people remember the law as saying:

No matter how hard people work at it, nothing of any significance happens.

But the actual law has a preamble and states:

Most of the time, for most of the world, no matter how hard people work at it, nothing of any significance happens.

Which is entirely different. Weinbergs’ Law of Twins can be stated in other forms, to emphasize this other aspect. For instance, it can be turned upside down:

Some of the time, in some places, significant change happens — especially when people aren’t working hard at it.

Weinbergs’ Law of Twins does not prohibit change. Because so many changes are for the worse, consultants are often called upon not to change things, but to keep them from changing. “Influence” does not always mean influence for change. For consultants, therefore, at least, it would be a good idea to study the other side of Weinbergs’ Law of Twins: how it is that change ever happens, and what can be done to prevent it.

Prescott’s Pickle Principle

Prescott’s Pickle Principle states:

A small system that tries to change a big system through long and continued contact is more likely to be changed itself.

I’m a small person with big clients. And so are many other consultants, which explains why so many of them get pickled. Anthropologists go native. Psychiatrists go crazy. People who worked in the Bell System, once the world’s largest company, used to say that they became “Bell-shaped,” a condition that befell external consultants as well as internal staffers. To avoid getting pickled, a consultant must not spend too much time with one client. If you can’t avoid this, at least break up the time by working with other clients, even for free. Change generally takes both time and continued contact, or at least one of the two. The challenge, then, is how to get the client in long, continued contact with some kind of brine, without the consultant even being present.

CONTROLLING SMALL CHANGES

Romer’s Rule says that the biggest and longest-lasting changes usually originate in attempts to preserve the everything that ultimately changes most.Consultants can use Romer’s Rule to advantage when trying to change a large system, but what if the consultant has been retained to preserve that valued thing? Perhaps we’d better examine a classic case of gradual change more closely, to understand how the best intentions can get off track.

The Fast-Food Fallacy

In order for The Fast-Food Fallacy to be valid, we need two logical conditions: First, we must have repetition (providing some standard product or service a large number of times); and second, we must have centralization (accounting for the cost of providing the standard product or service). Because of the repetition, a small savings on one item provides a large savings on all the items. But without centralization, this savings never accumulates enough in one place to make a difference. When the two factors coincide, the organization will inevitably yield to the temptation to make a change that will save substantial costs, but which will make no difference to the product. It matters because it’s a special case of what systems thinkers call Compositional Fallacy, the idea that no difference plus no difference equals no difference. The Fast-Food Fallacy is, therefore, inescapable, because

No difference plus no difference plus no difference plus … eventually equals a clear difference.

The Strong and Unrelenting Force

To achieve constancy amidst change, there has to be some strong and unrelenting force. In many successful companies, that force is provided by a strong, charismatic founder, like Corporal MacAndrew. The Corporal knew how to save money, and bequeathed to his corporation a preoccupation with savings. But he also had an “irrational” dedication to his original recipe, which protected his Possum Patties from slow death by The Fast-Food Fallacy. As the company grows, one individual isn’t strong enough, and one of two things happens: Either the company loses its force and changes the quality of its product, or the founder becomes larger than life, a religious symbol in the corporate culture. And a religious symbol, though irrational, can be a strong and unrelenting force.

Just because a force is strong and unrelenting, it doesn’t have to be good. Many companies, many countries, many species, and many individuals have failed because they held on too tightly to the wrong things. The Corporal’s successor, Harold Halstead demonstrates his own variation:

The biggest and longest-lasting changes usually originate in attempts to preserve the very thing that ultimately changes most.

Halstead is a “rational” businessman. He knows that the Corporal’s strong and unrelenting penny-saving is essential to the survival of the organization in “today’s highly competitive business world.” What he doesn’t understand is that the business is being strangled by his own efforts to maintain profits by cutting expenses, one penny at a time, because he hasn’t got the same unrelenting dedication to the original recipe.

Ford’s Fundamental Feedback Formula

The strong and unrelenting force needed to prevent The Fast-Food Fallacy need not come from a strong, unrelenting individual. But there is an alternative that consultants can use to prevent their planned changes from turning rotten one tiny step at a time. According to legend, Henry Ford was once interviewed by Congress on the question of how to prevent river pollution caused by industrial plants. Ford proposed a single law that would “end river pollution once and for all.” Ford’s suggestion proposed that people can do what they want with water, as long as they themselves have to live with the consequences.

Why does this principle, which I call Ford’s Fundamental Feedback Formula, prevent a gradual drift into pollution? There are two reasons:

1. It is strong, because without the water, there can be no industrial process.

2. It is unrelenting, because it is attached by law to an essential input to the process, and cannot be escaped even for an instant.

If Harold Halstead and his researchers were forced to eat Possum-Patties as a condition of employment, The Fast-Food Fallacy would never get off the ground. Consultants seeking to preserve quality should first verify that the people responsible for quality are, in fact, downstream from that quality. Individuals who act obnoxiously are generally unaware of their behavior. Hard-hearted surgeons often soften the first time they undergo real surgery themselves. So next time you’re looking for a restaurant, find out if the owners eat there. If they do, the food might still not be to your taste, but if they don’t, it won’t be to anyone’s.

THE WEINBERG TEST

Over the years, whenever anyone asks me how to measure risk, I suggest applying The Weinberg Test which seems to occupy a fundamental place in the hierarchy of all possible tests. In brief, The Weinberg Test asks,

Would you place your own life in the hands of this system?

The essential element of The Weinberg Test is the requirement that the claimant risk something personal, rather than simply blabber some empty abstractions. In street language, The Weinberg Test is called “putting your money where your mouth is.” When we consultants propose changes, the first thing we should do is decide what level of Weinberg Test we’re designing for, then put our own feelings on the line. If human lives are at stake, then our own feeling of safety is the minimum goal. If money is at stake, then we have to personalize that money on a scale we’d feel if it were our own money.

Chapter 9. How to make Changes Safely

Winston Churchill once remarked that he was happy he wasn’t a radical in his youth, so he wouldn’t turn out to be a reactionary in his old age. As people grow older, they learn about how change works, which could easily cause them to be discouraged. What kept me from turning reactionary was the comfortable income I was earning as a consultant, playing the midwife to change. Prosperous midwives don’t go out of business just because many deliveries are fraught with complications. In fact, it’s because of complications that midwives become prosperous. So instead of being discouraged, I turned my inquiries to ways of lowering the risks of change, just as a midwife learns to lower the risks of childbirth.

Pandora’s Box

As long as hope remains, people make the same mistake over and over again. This is the truly great discovery:

Nothing new ever works, but there’s always hope that this time will be different.

Surely this law deserves a trigger name, and what could be better than Pandora’s Pox? Pandora’s Pox is a social disease, spread by marketers. Like most social diseases, it’s endemic. And don’t hope for a technological breakthrough to eradicate Pandora’s Pox. 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.

The Dealer’s Choice

If those marketeers keep coming around, your clients are sure to succumb to some of their blandishments, so why not go with the flow. As my friend Henry was fond of saying, ‘trust everyone, but cut the cards.’ Or, in the present instance,

Let them try whatever they like, but teach them how to protect themselves.

I call this principle The Dealer’s Choice, because as a consultant, you’re dealing the cards. Your clients have to be in the game, but you can stack the deck for them by helping them establish a series of defenses when they are trying some new deal.

Accept Failure

The first line of defense is accepting that the new system will fail, possibly in several ways. When I find my self thinking, “I must have this change because I can’t afford failures,” then I’m in big trouble. If I can’t afford some failures, a new system won’t help. And neither will an old one. Once I accept that failure is inevitable, my next defense is to ask myself a different question: “Why do I have the impression that I can’t afford even some failures?” The new alarm clock is a good example. Have you ever lost sleep wondering whether the alarm would wake you for important business?

Trade Improvement for Perfection

What’s the one thing that’s worse than not waking up? Not going to sleep. Which suggests my next defensive question: “If the new system can’t be perfect, how can I use it so it will be better than the one I have now?” Improvement is easier than perfection, and as the Chinese say, the best is the enemy of the good. For instance, I can use my new alarm to supplement the old one. With two alarms, my chances of waking on time have to be better — or at least no worse.

PREVENTIVE MEDICINE

Consider the Edsel, the Ford Motor Company’s great flop of the Fifties. I was a consultant to Ford on the Edsel. In my memory, the Edsel project was a great triumph. We installed some terrific new computer systems that ultimately were adopted by the entire auto industry. Even if the Edsel didn’t sell, our ideas were vindicated. No backup system in the world, no series of defenses, will protect you from failure in the type of situation that produced the Edsel. Only preventive medicine might have helped, so let’s honor that noble antique by naming one preventive bit of advice The Edsel Edict:

If you must have something new, take one, not two.

Choosing Your Time and Place

Another approach to protection against Pandora’s Pox is to choose the time and place to put the change into effect. If you’re trying your new alarm clock, wait for the weekend, or the day you’ve nothing on at the office until noon.

The Volkswagen Verity

Edsel tried too many new features at once. Volkswagen, on the other hand, is a company famous for its deliberate policy of introducing one small change at a time, and testing that change any which way possible. To The Edsel Edict, we can add The Volkswagen Verity:

If you can’t refuse it, defuse it.

There are many strategies for defusing newness, such as,

• making practice runs in a similar situation

• breaking the newness into parts, to be adopted singly

• letting others share the breaking-in

The Struggle to Preserve

When you create an illusion, to prevent or soften change, the change becomes more likely — and harder to take.

This insight applies to all possible approaches a consultant might use to help a client deal with change. Whatever approach you use, do it in an open, clear manner. That’s the greatest service you can offer a client, because when difficult changes begin, truth is always a scarce commodity. You should also encourage your client to face the truth at the earliest possible moment. If you really care about “protecting” people, don’t ever “protect” them from the truth. The truth may hurt, but illusions hurt worse.

Chapter 10. What to Do When They Resist

Even after providing backups for all the risks of large changes and all the pitfalls of small ones, consultants are confronted with people who don’t seem to want to change at all, people who sometimes have excellent reasons. What people do to prevent directed change — their resistance — ranges from outright sabotage to more sophisticated forms, such as the “help me/don’t help me” game. The one form of resistance I rarely see is a simple statement, “No, thank you. I don’t want to change.”

APPRECIATING RESISTANCE

Every consultant complains about resistance, but if you think resistance is bad, consider the alternative: 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. So, the first step in dealing with resistance is to appreciate it for the way in which it makes the consultant’s job easier.

GETTING THE RESISTANCE OUT IN THE OPEN

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.

Your Reaction

Whenever I feel resistance to my ideas, my first instinct is to resist the resistance. My conscious mind is slower to realize what’s going on, but when it finally gets into the act, my most reliable resistance detector is direct observation of my own behavior. Notice nonverbal behavior, which will either be defensive or aggressive, depending on how you perceive the resistance.

Here are a few of the actions you may catch yourself doing:

Defensive: moving away, looking away

Aggressive: pointing fingers, staring downward, shaking head yes, shaking fist, etc.

Having noticed one of these actions, I can usually trace it inward and find that I’m feeling bored, annoyed, impatient, or angry.

Their Action

I can also detect resistance through the nonverbal behavior of the other people, although I find this technique slower and less reliable because I don’t have access to other people’s inner feelings. As a last resort, I listen to their words, but this is the least reliable method of all. Many people are skilled at concealing their resistance in words, though sometimes I can trigger on such key phrases as

• “I need more detail.” or “You need more detail.”

• “It’s too soon.” or “It’s too late.”

• “The real world is different.” or “I have a theory about it.”

NAMING THE RESISTANCE IN A NEUTRAL WAY

In order to keep my own issues clear, I have to find some neutral way to get the problem on the table. I know from Sparks that blaming someone else will only put the solution further out of reach, so scapegoating is out. Instead, I might say, “I’m having trouble because the subject keeps changing. Can you help me stay focused on one thing at a time?”

Waiting for a Response

Keeping things on a neutral plane is the hardest part for me to do, because I must keep my mouth shut: I try to limit my statement to no more than two short sentences. Then I stop talking. And I wait. Waiting is hard for me because I get tense when the room grows silent. But so do the clients, and it’s their problem we’re working on, not mine. Eventually, I’ll be gone from the scene, leaving them to implement the changes, so I might as well let them practice taking responsibility. They always do, eventually, if I wait long enough.

Dealing with Questions

Sometimes, the response simply takes another resistant tack. In that case, I simply repeat the process and eventually I find the client addressing the true concerns. I tend to get hooked, though, by the client who asks questions, even though it is often the same question but in slightly altered form. I answer in good faith — but no more than three times. After that, I regard the questioning as a form of resistance and name it in a neutral way. I might say, “I’ve answered three questions, but I don’t see the direction we’re going in.” Then I wait

Work Together to Discover the Source

Working together brings subconscious factors into the light. Clients tend to overestimate negative factors that go unspoken. When my client and I put a name and a clear description on some potential loss, the irrational fear evaporates. But most of the factors my clients forget are positive, including even ones that seem obvious to me. Sometimes, the benefits I perceive are of no importance to my client, while at other times, the client attaches much more importance to a benefit than I could imagine. It’s not important what I think of the benefits. That’s why I must make them public.

Find and Test Alternative Approaches

An excellent way to disclose the unconscious sources of resistance is by testing the attractiveness of alternative approaches. At times I can circumvent the subconscious defenses by saying, “I know you can’t think of anything you’d like to change about this plan, but if you could think of something, what would it be?” At least half the time, this paradoxical question gets right to the core of the matter. It does so because paradox is the language of the subconscious. Another paradoxical way around the client’s inability to identify the resistance is to emphasize the positive, by asking, for example, “What do you like best about this plan?” Once you have that answer, you can ask, “What do you like next best?” Eventually, certain aspects of the plan will become conspicuous by their absence.

PREVENTING RESISTANCE

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.” I may win the argument, but I may also place the clients in a position where changing their mind is a form of “losing.” The risk of losing face in the here-and-now always seems bigger than the risk of losing a million dollars in the there-and-then. For me, the risk of losing face is even worse, because my “face” is my client’s business and the million dollars at risk isn’t my money. When a plan seems to be frozen in a state of resistance, chances are two-to-one that it’s me who’s frozen, not the client. That’s why I keep returning to the process of identifying the source of resistance, starting with my own gut.

Chapter 11. Marketing Your Services

THE LAWS OF MARKETING

The Right Amount of Business

The first thing I do is pose a riddle. Question: How do you tell an old consultant from a new consultant? Answer: The new consultant complains, “I need more business.” The old consultant complains, “I need more time.” It is the consultant’s lot to have either too much time and too little business, or too little time and too much business, which leads us to The First Law of Marketing:

A consultant can exist in one of two states: State I (idle) or State B (busy).

The Best Way to Get Clients

Why isn’t it possible to have just the right amount of business? For one thing, the amount of business you have partially determines the amount of business you get. When a consultant asks me the best way to get new clients, I must, in all honesty, reply with The Second Law of Marketing:

The best way to get clients is to have clients.

Needless to say, this answer doesn’t make them happy, because they’re in State I. If they already had clients, they wouldn’t be asking for marketing advice, but that’s exactly the wrong timing. The time to look for consulting business is when you have too much consulting business.

Exposure Time

Because the best way to get clients is to have clients, the rich get richer and the poor, poorer. Many of the poor consultants get discouraged and drop out of the business. Most of the rich ones, however, eventually make a mistake that drops them out of State B and back to State I. For one thing, they’re so busy in State B that they forget that State B is the best time to do marketing. The Third Law of Marketing is designed to remind them:

Spend at least one day a week getting exposure.

How Important Are You?

I must confess that I have a hard time swallowing the need to spend so much time getting exposure. I’m sensitive to rejection, and if I make a marketing effort, someone might say no. When business is good, I like to imagine it’s because I’m such a good person, not because I’ve made any marketing effort. All I have to do is remain a good person and the business will remain good. Because of my inability to face reality, I need a Fourth Law of Marketing that reminds me:

Clients are more important to you than you can ever be to them.

Big Clients

I have literally lost one-third of my business in a single day, with two phone calls and a letter. Other consultants have done even worse, losing all of their business with a single call. They had fallen into the most common of all consulting traps: that of letting one client get such a large share of their business that they could not survive the loss of that client. So, we always advise consultants to follow The Fifth Law of Marketing:

Never let a single client have more than one fourth of your business.

Satisfied Clients

The Sixth Law of Marketing says

The best marketing tool is a satisfied client.

For one thing, a previous client is twenty times better as a future prospect than somebody entirely new if you’ve done your job properly. But when you do try to sell yourself to somebody new, a specific reference triples your chances of landing the contract. That’s why I always ask satisfied clients for permission to use them as references.

Chapter 12. Putting a Price on Your Head

SEX AND THE FIRST LAW OF PRICING

Why are people so fascinated with pricing? Like sex, price setting is done behind closed doors, consumes a lot of energy, and has unpredictable consequences. But one of the reasons sex fascinates us is that it can mean so many things to so many people, all at the same time. It’s a means of procreation, an expression of love, a method of gaining power and control, a physical exercise, an exciting game of chance, a business deal, a confirmation of self-worth, and a great deal of pleasure in and of itself. Except for the physical exercise, most of the same things can be said about the prices consultants set on their services. Hence, The First Law of Pricing:

Pricing has many functions, only one of which is the exchange of money.

IMAGE AND THE SECOND LAW OF PRICING

Lipstick that won’t sell at one dollar may sell enormous quantities at five dollars, which is exactly the kind of psychology that works for some consultants. You’re sending your clients a mixed message if you bill yourself as the world’s foremost authority and charge minimum wage. The Second Law of Pricing states,

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. You can lower your fees to get business, but don’t forget that there’s another way of stating this Second Law of Pricing:

The less they pay you, the less they respect you.

MORE THAN MONEY: THE THIRD LAW OF PRICING

Suppose you want to work with an organization that really has no possibility of meeting your usual fee scale. Don’t let The Second Law discourage you: You can still make the client respect you by setting the proper price. All you need to remember is The Third Law of Pricing:

The money is usually the smallest part of the price.

The Third Law is especially important to the internal consultant, making it possible for the employee on a fixed wage to be respected as much as any high-priced outside authority. If you examine the total “cost” to a client of using your services, you’ll find that there are many costs besides the money. There is the psychological cost of admitting there is a problem, the labor to get approval for your visit, plus all the extra work the client might have to do after you’ve gone. By arranging for clients to pay something that’s of value to them, even if it’s not paid to you, you have, in effect, raised the price. If they’ve invested something in getting you there, then they’ll pay attention to you once you arrive.

ALTERNATIVE FEES, THE FOURTH LAW OF PRICING

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. For instance, universities can sometimes provide a specialized audience on which I can test new material. I see members of this audience as experimental subjects, but they see themselves as participating in the leading edge of knowledge.

NEED FOR MONEY AND THE FIFTH LAW OF PRICING

If you need the money, don’t take the job.

Why not? 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. In any case, if you really need the job that badly, you’re not likely to get it because when you negotiate with the client, your anxiety is going to show. The client will reason, probably with some justification, that a consultant who needs business that badly can’t be very good.

FEE AS FEEDBACK: THE SIXTH LAW OF PRICING

If you’re desperate for business, the best strategy may be to offer your services free. Be nice and up-front about the fact that you’re just starting out and you have a lot to learn, so that you aren’t trying to hide anything. Some clients will appreciate this openness and give you a chance. Any time I do work, I explain that after we’re finished, if my clients don’t agree that it was worth the fee, they can have their money back. You will be tempted not to mention your guarantee, but if you do mention it sincerely, you will inspire a certain amount of confidence. If you’ve done your job properly, you ought to have some direct feedback on your performance. But there’s something about the reality of a fee, a contingency fee, as feedback that surpasses all the evaluation forms that you might concoct. For that reason, if for no other, I subscribe to The Sixth Law of Pricing:

If they don’t like your work, don’t take their money.

FEES FOR SPECIAL EFFECTS AND THE SEVENTH LAW OF PRICING

Price is more than money, but it’s also true that Money is more than price.

This Seventh Law of Pricing means that you can use the exchange of money to create the conditions you need in order to be successful at consulting. For instance, when clients want me to hold a certain date, I may ask for a nonrefundable fee to compensate for possible loss of business if they change their mind. Such a fee also forces clients to consider the contract more carefully, and to respect the value of my time.

NEGOTIATION AND THE EIGHTH LAW OF PRICING

We’ve already seen that pricing is not something you can do in isolation, but The Eighth Law of Pricing makes that implication a bit more explicit:

Price is not a thing; it’s a negotiated relationship.

For almost any consultant, an investment of a few dollars in a good book on negotiation will pay for itself a hundred times over. In my case, it paid off even more when I gave the book and the responsibility for negotiating my contracts to Judy, my office manager.

Dealing through Judy has also helped me to make my feelings and assumptions about fees explicit. When I’m offered a new kind of work, Judy and I sit down to discuss setting a fee. This process forces me to think out loud. It also forces me to take a little time before coming to some hasty decision that I may well regret later.

THE PRINCIPLE OF LEAST REGRET: THE NINTH LAW OF PRICING

Through discussions with Judy, I arrived at the principle by which I now set all fees in new situations. I call this Ninth Law of Pricing my Principle of Least Regret:

Set the price so you won’t regret it either way.

When I set a fee, there are two possibilities: One is that the client will accept it, I’ll do the work, and I’ll be paid that fee; the other is that the client will reject it, I won’t do the work, and I won’t get that fee. The Ninth Law says that I should set the fee so that whatever happens, I’ll feel more or less the same.

Chapter 13. How To Be Trusted

The Laws of Pricing tell us that price sets the conditions of work, but generally doesn’t determine whether or not you get the job. Consultants are not commodities. One pork-belly might be pretty much like any other, but it’s the differences between consultants that determine who gets the job. And who keeps it.

IMAGE AND THE FIRST LAW OF TRUST

Price Versus Trust

Fowler was a competent consultant. Much of the time, our mutual work was advantageous to both of us. But each of his occasional lapses cost me more than I benefitted from twenty of his good jobs, and even when he was doing a good job, I couldn’t get the fear of failure out of my mind. Working with Fowler, I felt vulnerable, powerless to protect myself. That’s why I ended our relationship. Something similar often happens to the relationship between clients and consultants. According to Sherbie, people usually feel weak and vulnerable when they retain a consultant. Small wonder that the consultants they retain are first and foremost the ones they feel will not hurt them. Consultants who are looking for work should think less about price and learn more about trust.

The Value of Explanations

Nobody but you cares about the reason you let another person down.

Looking back on our relationship, I really believe that Fowler never understood why I didn’t trust him. The fact that he spent so much time trying to convince me that he wasn’t a liar indicates to me that he never comprehended that whether he was lying didn’t matter to me at all. Of course, it mattered to Fowler: The label of incompetence was only a slur on his ability, but calling him a liar was an attack on his integrity.

Other people can form all the image of you they need from deeds, not words.

FAIRNESS AND THE SECOND LAW OF TRUST

Any time a consultant acts in an unpredictable manner, the client’s “firm reliance” may be eroded. Over the years, whenever I acted in a manner that appeared unreliable to my client, I usually lost the business. Long before I understood why it was true, I had learned from bitter experience The Second Law of Trust: Trust takes years to win, moments to lose.

LOST TRUST AND THE THIRD LAW

People don’t tell you when they stop trusting you.

After all, if the clients don’t trust you, why should they bother communicating with you? This unwillingness to communicate makes it very difficult for a consultant to correct behavior that the client sees as untrustworthy. If the consultant’s problem is not listening, as mine was, then the problem is doubly difficult. Since that time, I’ve taken a number of steps to ensure that I hear the client. First, I have worked on my listening skills, both verbal and nonverbal. Second, whenever possible, I work with a partner so at least one of us can pay full attention to the listening problem.

TRICKS AND THE FOURTH LAW OF TRUST

Like most people, I’ve always known that trust was crucial to human interaction, so for many years I searched for the secret tricks of being trusted. Before each new consulting assignment, I would concoct intricate plans for manipulating the client’s feelings about me, none of which ever seemed to work. Eventually, I reached the point where I was unable to dream up anything new, so I asked Dani if she had any favorite tricks for building trust. “Sure,” she said. “Try being straight for a change.” In a twinkling, my search was ended, for Dani had given me the one secret trick of being trusted, which is The Fourth Law of Trust:

The trick of earning trust is to avoid all tricks.

WHO’S LYING? THE FIFTH LAW OF TRUST

People are never liars — in their own eyes.

When I discover that someone has given me incorrect facts and I confront the issue, I am usually told something along the following lines:

• “I thought it would make it easier for you if I simplified the explanation in that way.”

• “I felt it would cause trouble to allow you to investigate that problem, so I smoothed it over.”

• “I knew that was irrelevant, so I simply omitted it to keep you from going on a wild-goose chase.”

None of these actions — simplifying, smoothing, or omitting — are thought to involve lies. I act in a similar fashion when presenting data to people who are trying to deal with a complex situation, reasoning that it will help them reduce the amount of data to be handled. I’m up-front about the situation, so if the clients want more information, they can always ask for it.

PROTECTION AND THE SIXTH LAW OF TRUST

I always believe that my clients are telling me the truth — as they see it, and as they think it would help me to hear it. I trust the clients’ integrity, but I don’t have to trust their ability. In other words, The Sixth Law of Trust is based on The Dealer’s Choice

Always trust your client — and cut the cards.

HONESTY AND THE SEVENTH LAW OF TRUST

Never be dishonest, even if the client requests it.

If you turn down such a request, the client may remember you as uncooperative. But if you give in to a request for dishonesty, you’ll always be remembered as a cheat. There’s no better way to lose trust than to show you can only be trusted when nothing important is at stake.

PROMISES, PROMISES, AND TWO MORE LAWS OF TRUST

Never promise anything you’re not sure you can deliver. But nobody can be sure of the future, so an even better rule is The Eighth Law of Trust:

Never promise anything.

But how can a consultant succeed without ever making promises? Isn’t every contract a promise? Yes, a contract is a promise, but a contingent promise. A contract says that I’ll try to do something, and that if I do, you’ll pay me so much for the service. If I don’t succeed, you don’t pay. A contract is also a written promise, which helps prevent you from unwittingly making implied promises.

CONTRACTS AND THE TENTH LAW OF TRUST

The subject of contracts brings me back to Fowler. Fowler once told me that he took a course on contracts in which the professor said there were only three very important rules to remember:

1. First, get it in writing.

2. Second, get it in writing.

3. Third, get it in writing.

I believe that every consultant should memorize these rules.

The Tenth Law of Trust:

Get it in writing, but depend on trust.

To a consultant, trust without a contract is infinitely better than a contract without trust, in spite of anything Fowler learned in school.

Chapter 14. Getting People to Follow Your Advice

LESSONS FROM THE FARM

It struck me the other day when I was trying to make a list of consultants that John is my gardening consultant. I hadn’t realized this for ten years, which makes John the perfect consultant.

1. Never use cheap seed.

The cost of getting an idea is very small compared with the amount you’re going to invest in trying to make that idea develop. So, make sure that your ideas are of the best quality. Do whatever you can to get the best ideas before you invest a lot of money cultivating them.

2. A prepared soil is the secret of all gardening.

In fact, it’s best if you just leave it alone and let the soil do the work. In other words, it’s the preparation before you plant an idea that makes most of the difference as to whether it works or not.

3. Timing is critical.

The best seed planted too early will be killed off as a tiny sprout by an untimely frost. Too often, consultants broadcast their ideas the moment they happen to get them, rather than the moment that’s right for germination.

4. The plants that hold firmest are the ones that develop their own roots.

The same is true for ideas, but sometimes we can’t seem to resist grinding them into the ground.

5. Excessive watering produces weakness, not strength.

Too many resources poured into a young idea produces lots of action, but few results. Ideas, like plants, thrive on a certain amount of struggle.

6. In spite of your best efforts, some plants will die.

If you count on all plants to live, you may go hungry. Farmers, because they’re always working with a large, complex system, learn to live with failure and to not take it personally.