Consulting Conversations: 1. The 7Cs of Consulting

This is my series finale!

Not so much a climatic cliff edge closing, but rather an exhortation not to enter into any change situation or campaign without a clear exit strategy.

There is encouragement not to move on too fast and leave a legacy of loose ends and incompleted relationships but rather to focus on satisfaction, learning and acknowledgement.

On which subject, thank you the listener for your interest and thank you to all my colleagues at Catalyst, now Sionic who have contributed their expertise to our joint endeavours. You will recognise your wisdom coming out in many of the episodes in this series. 

Every good wish for your ongoing success.

We often spend so much of our time 'doing' that we have no energy or appetite left for having conversations about how we are 'being', or how we could be doing better.

If 'feedback is the breakfast of champions', are we skipping the most important meal of the day? Many, or most, of us do.

As a consequence, individuals live with their 'blind spots' unrecognised, teams get stuck in low performance modes, and change initiatives run into the rocks through avoidable 'plan continuation error'.

In this podcast I share some thoughts around why we can find giving and hearing feedback difficult, and go on to propose some remedies.

The key message is that we should see 'feedforward' as the goal of feedback: we are seeking to identify what would be 'even better if' going forward, not engaging in 'blamestorming' about the past. Breakdowns, constructively managed, are the gateways to breakthroughs.

Build 'feedforward' into your operating model, there is nothing to fear and much to gain. 

When we are helping to lead and bring about change, we rule by consent not by command. We need the support of key influencers, early adopters, our colleagues and team members. Achieving their buy-in to the change or adoption of our product is clearly critical to success.

Too often however, we can find that the world does not beat a path to our door. It is said that ideas are like children: there are none a beautiful as our own. If our default style of communicating our ideas and pitching our proposals is to 'describe and defend', we are inviting challenge, which often we may interpret as attack. These conversations at worst run the risk of acheiving the opposite of buy-in.

Enrollment occurs when others understand our vision and can see their their commitments being fulfilled within it. The communication skill to cultivate involves going beyond describing the features and attributes of our solution towards identifying and helping others see the benefits to them.

In this podcast, I outline a pattern for making proposals, requests and offers that is more effective than 'describe and defend'. It involves making the  requested action explicit up front, providing supporting rationale, anticipating objections,  sharing concrete examples and stories to illustrate the benefit and closing with the 'ask'.

Having learnt to apply this structure, I use it daily. Perhaps you can experiment with it and see if it works for you?

How as a change expert or consultant can you create and influence the conditions for project success?

In this episode I share some critical insights from Sionic's research into project success factors, and my own experience.

The core message is that relentless focus on outcomes, degree of collaboration and clarity of vision are found to be present in over 90% of the projects we have analysed that were considered successful. 

The assertion is that sustained attention to these factors can make all the difference between being on the failure path or the success path.

I wish you every success on your endeavours and hope that these insights are helpful to you.

As change leaders and project managers we only tend to see as risks the problems that we have seen before and solved in the past.

In my earlier days as a project and programme manager, I believed that as PM I was responsible for and owned the plan, therefore I should be its sole author. After all, I was the expert with the knowledge and experience to succeed. This belief did not always serve me well...particularly when coupled with inappropriate self-belief and optimism bias...

In this episode I share a few of the more spectacular project failures this mindset led to. (It goes without saying that these all predate my time with Sionic!)

The overall lesson learned and shared is that Change planning is a design activity, and like all design, is best done with divergent conversation up front to identify and assess critical risks and alternative approaches - so that validation and mitigation is built into one's convergent thinking and strategy for change.

The specific enquiries I suggest are:

1. How to avoid 'big bang'  implementations?

2. How to deliver value early and incrementally (applying the principle of 6x6)?

3. What are the most critical assumptions and what experiments could validate them?

4. What are the adaptive challenges to remediate?

Forewarned is, as they say, forearmed - prior knowledge of possible dangers or problems gives one a tactical advantage. 

I hope you find the stories in this episode interesting and illuminating.

'Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.' - Michael Jordan.

Following from conversations for possibility we need to be able to manage effective conversations for opportunity, making the critical decisons that create the strategy for change. It is clearly important to make the right calls at this point: the cost of change inexorably climbs as we progress through implementation.

Although we may be experts in our field, we should not believe that we have a monopoly of good ideas. We need to be inclusive and collaborative in our approach. Rather than having to sell our solutions to our teams, stakeholders and clients, it is far better to include them in the conversations that create those strategies. 

We therefore need to be skilled in facilitating groups to achieve alignment, creativity, innovation and connection, whilst avoiding the perils of domination and groupthink.

In this podcast episode, I share a powerful process for generating this collaborative intelligence. A process we have trained others in and applied ourselves for many years in Sionic and have seen underpin many succesful transformations. 

I hope that you are inspired to try it out and that the results are as positive for you as they have been for others.

'Every system is perfectly designed...to get the results it gets'. As consultants, we aim to change results towards desired outcomes. This requires us to think at the level of changing complex systems. Not merely information systems, but wider enterprise ecosytems. We need to see organisations not as simple machine bureaucracies but as complex social systems - and the larger the organisation, the more complex the system. In Sionic, we have for more than twenty years now, developed and used a powerful systemic design approach to create Visons and strategies for change that modify the key dimensions of organisational performance: Leadership, People, Processes, Structure, Culture and infrastructure Assets. In our experience unless change Visions and programmes are designed across all of these dimensions, there is significant risk of undesirable unintended consequences. In this episode, I share the conversational pattern we use to faciliate this thinking, analysis, and solution design. When people have a better understanding of the system, they are better able to identify actions that lead to desired outcomes.

"If you want to have a good idea, have a lot of them" (Mark Twain)

In this podcast I share ideas on how an expert advisor, facilitator or coach can add value through generating new possibilities for action with their clients. If we only have one idea on the table, or at worst, no ideas, then our ability to arrive at the optimum solution will be severely limited. 

Consider the possibility that a great skill to develop to be an effective change agent is the ability to lead and facilitate 'conversations for possibility', and that these conversations are essential when we are seeking to innovate to achieve breakthroughs towards transformational outcomes.

The 'conversation for possibility' exists (though often with a different label) as the opening to design and action planning in multiple methodologies, such as 'ideate' in design thinking, 'options' in the GROW coachng model, and the divergent thinking stages of the 'double diamond' approach to problem solving..

There is an obvious debt here to the work of Fernado Flores, which I highly recommend to you if you are now convinced that the core role of the change agent is to change the conversations that people are having.

In this episode I explain why generative, creative divergent thinking requires active facilitation and coaching, sharing a few tips I have learned over the years on how to succeed in this.

If you find this interesting and of value, my job is done :)

A good idea goes nowhere if it is not communicated well. In this episode I share the communications principles and patterns that allow you to tell a compelling business value story of your proposed change. An effective story will have powerful numbers and evidence but also a compelling emotional call to action. We need to learn to appeal to hearts as well as minds. If you take the time to craft these stories with care, you will generate positive impact and influence as a consultant or change leader. This is a 'write once: read often' investment that will repay itself many times over as you continuously tell and sell the story of your change over the rest of the lifecycle. I really hope you find this content interesting and of practical value!

"If you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there...If only you walk long enough"

Unlike Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat, as expert consultants and advisors, we will always seek to start with the end in mind - defining the desired future state to move towards. 

It turns out that this is another one of those 'common sense' skills that is not that common in reality. All too often, we see change programmes focussed entirely on the deliverables, or measurement scorecards focussing on the benefits. Both of these, although laudable, can lead to behaviours that are sub-optimal in terms of driving the real result intended. From Sionic's extensive research into the conditions for project success in financial services change programmes, 'a clear and relentless focus on achieving the outcome' came out as the #1 success factor.

A skilled consultant, I assert, makes clear distinctions between deliverables, outcomes and beneifts - and has the skills to create these distinctions in conversation with clients. These are the skills shared in this episode.