My top 11 for new consultants

So, I’m midflight with inflight wifi and I’ve been chatting with one of our new consultant’s over Whatsapp and ended up bashing out some ‘advice’.

Of course, like any other midflight wifi based advice (MWBA), please feel free to ignore this.

But here goes.

1. Drive — the solution, even the problem, isn’t going to find you. You need to be the one making the phone calls, finding the right person, doing the googling, walking up to the desk. It’s not a passive role.
2. Trust your gut — If something sounds a little strange, it probably is. If you think a weird decision is being made, you’re probably right.
3. Don’t assume it’s already been thought of —Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest ones that just haven’t been thought of by someone yet. A new set of eyes can show something that is ridiculously obvious that others just haven’t seen. Speak it, you’re a consultant, you’ve been hired and trusted to do this.
4. Have a point of view — This one is more nuanced depending on the circumstance, but don’t say “I can mow the lawn however you want me to!”, it’s “I think it’s best to do the front hedges as they are the most visible”. Sure the client ultimately decides, but have a point of view on everything. It’s completely ok to work with partial information and to assume and to guess, just state those as well.
5. Prototype quickly, but decide (a little bit) slower — We live in a great time where we can prototype most things. A physical space, a new process or of course, an app. A good diagram is worth a 100 meetings, a good prototype is worth 1000 diagrams. Less talky more buildy and showy. A prototype can be done on a napkin, in a bar, whilst drinking a nutella vodka cappuccino, and validated with someone right there. It’s not a working thing, it’s a way to show what a working thing might look like in order to get feedback.
6. The small and boring things matter — Naming convention, folder structure, consistency. We spend countless hours finding the latest version, doing rework, dealing with inconsistency. To go fast you have to go slow. The boring things matter.
7. Ask all the dumb questions. Ask. All. The. Dumb. Questions — In one of my first consulting gigs, I was in a CPQ workshop being run by someone else, halfway through I stopped the consultant and said “does everyone here know what CPQ means”, not a single person did and not a single person asked. You’ll sleep a lot better knowing you’re ok with embarrassing yourself in order to close your knowledge gap. If you still feel self concious at a new client, find your client ‘buddy’, the person who you can sit with and they’ll explain it all to you. Some people, like me, love breaking down complexity and seeing things ‘click’ in someone else. These people are everywhere.
8. Build to think — The same as #5 kind of, but with anything it’s far quicker to build a bad version of something and then quickly fix. If you build a bad prototype on Monday, you’ll have a good prototype by Friday. Also, give your team permission to build badly. “I know you don’t have a ton to go on right now, but build me a terrible prototype/powerpoint/project plan/agenda, and we’ll start there”.
9. Speak like you would at home — avoid the consulting jargon garbage, we’re moving away from it. You don’t need to say “We are helping them align their synergies to unlock trapped value in cloud ecosystems so they can move forward from a shareholder value perspective”. What trash.
10. Be predictable — Do what you say you’ll do, have consistent manageable output, don’t save it all for the end. Don’t be the hero consultant, the one who works until 4am to get it done. Be the one who leaves at 5pm but has something to show for it every day.
11. Be honest — it’s completely 100% ok to say, “I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to start this”. Or even better, “I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to start this but I gave it a shot anyways, I figured a bad prototype is better than none at all”.