The Perils of Experience III: Leaping to Conclusions

I've recently talked about how after years consulting for a variety of clients, you can almost instantly size up a situation and see where the solution to the client's needs is likely to lie. I also discussed, later, how as your confidence grows in your own perceptions -- which are usually right, that's not the issue -- you can forget that just coming up with the right answer quickly isn't enough, that the client has to do the work to really understand the problem, see the situation, and embrace a solution.

Another "peril" I referred to in my original post was that of leaping to conclusions, a particularly ironic fault in an experienced consultant.

With new clients, especially -- people who aren't necessarily accustomed to calling in outside help to deal with the kinds of problems you solve -- they have usually jumped to several conclusions of their own long before they called you. They saw a problem, thought they understood it, and thought they knew what they should do about it.

It is only when they've tried a couple of things and figured out that either they don't understand the problem, or they don't know how to address it (or both), that they've called you.

It is somewhat amusing, then, to realize how easy it is to do the same thing, as a consultant, that your clients have been doing: making snap judgments about the problem and its solution, and charging down some chosen path without sufficient humility and wisdom to look around and see if what you've come up with really is a good fit for the client's needs and circumstances.

Actually, this is what many consultants end up doing in the latter part of their careers, and we also see it in all kinds of companies that sell products and services, not just consulting. They develop solutions that are good solutions, that have worked repeatedly for a range of clients or customers. And then they get so enamored of those solutions that they apply them to every problem they see, whether or not they will work.

Becoming a problem in search of a solution, or a "one size fits all" tailor to your clients, is all too easy. It feels good to have figured out how things work, to know that you have diagnosed their situation so quickly, that you've dealt with their sorts of problems over and over again.

That's where the warning bells should sound. It all feels a little too good, and if you give in to the feeling too often, without using your head and all your senses to measure your first impressions against the client's real circumstances, you're not likely to be the savior, for your client, that you imagine yourself to be.