The most important thing for a successful consulting career

Yes it’s a clickbait title.

Recently I was thinking of someone I was working with who hadn’t been winning many fans. Things weren’t going their way, as it never had, but it was always someone else’s fault, the system was broken apparently and everyone else was wrong. They’d do this whilst spouting their experience and using big words and jargon. When they’d enter a room they would put on a performance showing off their intellect, and exit feeling destined that good things would come.

Except they never did. The reason was from the way they entered the room, with their mind full. They entered assuming they were the smartest person in the room, and their role was to put on a show illustrating this, and this was part of their craft. It was almost like witnessing a mating dance of a bird in the Amazon, hoping to attract an audience. And in many cases, they actually were the smartest person, by significant margin. But the outcome remained the same, poor.

Those that do well time and time again enter the room with their mind empty. They enter as the most curious in the room. They ask all the dumb questions because the fear of not knowing trumps the fear of embarrassment, and we all know that every question we ask, half the people in the room are thinking the same.

It’s the BA that enters a room with an empty mind and after an hour ends up knowing an inventory management process better than anyone who’s been in the company for several years, because they asked all the questions.

It’s the designer that hears end users call their product ‘rubbish’ and instead of defending it, or telling them that they’re using it wrong, they say ‘interesting, tell me more’.

It’s the product owner that spends as much time with validating their customers as the time spent with the development team.

The curious mind doesn’t say ‘yes, but’, they say ‘tell me more’, ‘what else’, ‘who else should I be talking to’.

This is the most powerful tool, the easiest to deploy, it’s free of charge, yet not used widely. However, those that do become the experts, the ‘smart’ ones. Their products are better, their users happier, and also, people tend to like them a heck of a lot, because we all love talking about ourselves, and that’s all the curious want to do with you.

Don’t apologise, don’t say ‘sorry if it’s been answered already’, don’t say ‘silly question, but’.

Just say ‘what else?’.