The Luinaries episode delves into the fascinating intersection between consulting and medicine, drawing insights from the writings of Gerald Weinberg, a legendary consultant and computer scientist. The hosts explore Weinberg's 'secrets for consultants' that are inspired by advice from his brother-in-law, a wise but cynical physician named Marvin. The discussion emphasizes the notion that a significant percentage of problems, akin to illnesses, tend to resolve themselves without intervention—highlighting the importance of understanding when a consultant's involvement is truly necessary. The hosts reflect on their experiences in consulting, drawing parallels to the medical field and discussing how consultants, like doctors, often face the challenge of determining whether their interventions are genuinely beneficial or merely prolonging a problem. The episode encourages listeners to adopt a critical mindset about their role as consultants, urging them to discern the value of their recommendations and the importance of empowering clients to address their own issues.

Takeaways:

• Consultants, like doctors, must recognize that many problems can resolve themselves without intervention.
• Understanding the importance of implementation is as crucial as diagnosis in consulting work.
• The advice provided by consultants should consider the client's past experiences and attempts.
• High fees can signal both the complexity of the advice and the consultant's ego.
• Knowing when to apply certain consulting principles is crucial for effective problem-solving.
• Regularly revisiting and questioning previous client strategies can lead to better outcomes.

Remember you can reach out to Ian and Mike to ask a question or share your thoughts - email them at consultingforhumans@p31-consulting.com

You can follow the show on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13116342/

And you can follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/learn.consulting

The Consulting For Humans podcast is brought to you by P31 Consulting LLC

Foreign.

Welcome, luminaries.

We're so glad you've joined us.

Congratulations on being part of the luminary community.

Mike, tell us a little bit about what's going to be on our agenda for the luminaries today.

Go.

Be delighted to.

Ian.

In our main episode, we've been discussing the wise writings of consultant and computer scientist Gerald Weinberg.

We heard Jerry talk about his third time charm rule and also the see what isn't there rule in the main episode.

But there's a lot more to cover in this fabulous book.

There really is.

And some takeaways for us, I think, in consulting life too.

Now, one of the things that caught our eye was the way Weinberg had put together some rules.

He called them secrets for consultants based on, as he described it, the thoughts of his brother in law, Marvin.

Marvin, it turns out, is a physician, a doctor, said by Weinberg to be wise but also cynical.

And Mike, I think anytime I hear there's advice coming from, from somebody who's wise and cynical, that kind of stuff earns a place, I think, on consulting for humans and on the luminaries.

So, Mike, you and I have talked with clients over the years about the similarities between consulting and medicine.

So I'm looking forward to this one.

I will say just this.

Consultants and doctors alike are basically garage mechanics.

And I'm looking forward to how we can dig into that and unearth the similarities a little bit here now, Mike, but let's think about what we might expect from doctors here in the 21st century and to what extent that might play out with consultants.

Which diagnostic checks will your insurance cover?

Okay, we'll do all of them.

We've heard that happen from time to time from acquisitive doctors.

That's kind of the same as a consultant saying, which PowerPoint slides do you need?

You're not sure?

I'm going to give you all of them and charge you for every single one.

Right, right.

Well, one that perhaps I've discovered before with doctors.

I'm not sure if we can do this as consultants.

Maybe at some level, high level consultants do this.

This problem really isn't my specialty.

You need somebody who does X.

And that'll be $7,500, please.

Mike.

By the way, in our show notes here, I'd written $750, but you've just stuck your finger on the problem of health care in the U.S.

actually, it should have been a zero.

Wow.

I sold the 750 and I translated it.

I mean, 750 bought you a Tylenol in the emergency room about 50, 15 years ago.

20 years ago here.

Right.

And Mike, maybe even a physician might say, if they were thinking like a consultant, the most cost effective solutions these days are imported from Canada.

That would be cool as well, wouldn't it?

Right, right.

Hence the desire to make them a 51st state, which we won't even go there.

So, Mike, in this Luminaries episode, we're going to go through the medical secrets learned from brother in law Marvin.

Which ones are going to be useful for us in consulting?

Which ones have or have not stood the test of time.

This is going to get us thinking about whether it helps or doesn't help to be thought of as a specialist.

It's going to get us thinking about the pitfalls of believing that consultants can cure anything.

It's going to get us thinking about the value of knowing how to implement your own advice or as you might say, Mike, how to take your own medicine.

Let's see what we can learn from this.

Nice.

You know, and taking your own medicine being certainly different than breathing your own exhaust.

Well, we'll see.

Let's get into it.

Ian.

I found it really interesting that Weinberg is discussing these secrets from his, his brother in law Marvin as part of a discussion on being a fake effective when you don't know what you're doing.

As he says, sometimes being out of your kind of out of your area and out of your depth here.

But it's also a discussion about the fact that, as he says, consultants usually start as specialists and are often called in as specialists.

But the problem with that is that the toughest problems don't have labels attached to them.

So oftentimes, and he estimates it's at least three quarters of the time, the specialists that are called in are not actually the specialists needed for this job.

It's like if I really knew what the problem was, I might have called somebody differently.

However, good consultants, he says, aren't just specialists, they're problem solvers.

And they have a bag of tricks that can actually be generalized across multiple different specialties.

Just expressed a little bit differently.

And I want to tell a little bit of a story about how I ran into that specifically and in the medical industry.

And then let's get into these things and unpack them a little bit.

So I ran into this with my daughter Meredith, and it was in the early days, well, kind, kind of pre, the early days of Lyme disease.

Lyme was known, but not widely known and, you know, the fatal thing of anything in the US There was not an insurance payback because there wasn't a diagnosis code.

So she went over the course of many months to many specialists.

And what I found was exactly the joke that I made earlier.

The specialist who says, yep, not mine.

Here's your bill, good luck.

And what we ran into was a specialist who could act like a generalist.

And even more near and dear to my heart, somebody who was a consultant who also was a human.

Now, the humanity, I think was, was kind of brought to the fore because Meredith reminded him of his daughter, same age, shared a lot of characteristics.

So I think even though it in his area, quote unquote, he didn't see anything.

He gathered all the tests, all the diagnosis, all the comments from all the other specialists and then tried to piece them together, that problem solver and apply more generalist rubrics to say, well, wait a minute, what fits?

What doesn't fit?

You know, what, what are we seeing here?

And actually came across some things that got us going towards a real solution there here.

So these characteristics of good consultants, absolutely on target from Jerry.

And even better when we're humans consulting to humans here.

Well, fantastic.

Let's get back to Marvin secrets, Ian.

Right, Mike, let's read them out all together as a block of 6, and then we will dig into them individually.

So let's give you an idea of where we're headed with Marvin secrets.

Secret number one.

90% of all illness cures itself with absolutely no intervention from the doctor.

That's going to shake things up a little bit, Mike, in the world of consulting.

How about secret number two?

Secret number two, I'd say deal gently with systems that should be able to cure themselves.

Expressed this way repeatedly.

Curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't.

Hmm.

Okay, again, that might put a cat amongst a few consulting pigeons.

Secret number three, in the world of medicine says every prescription has two parts, the medicine itself and the method of ensuring correct use.

Ah, okay, I'm hearing some consulting advice coming through here.

Secret number four.

What does that say?

Yeah, it says if what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.

Oh, okay.

Secret number five.

I like this one.

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

Which is not something I'd expect to hear from a doctor in my world, but I think in your world, Mike, it could well be.

Yes, absolutely.

And, well, I'm reminded of somebody we worked with in Ireland who said his grandmother was really upset because under the new in health insurance she was going to have, there was going to be no charge for some things.

And she said, well that's ridiculous.

If they don't charge me something, I won't take it.

And I thought, wow, wise woman, wise woman here.

Anyways, the last one is secret number six.

Know how pays much less than know when.

Oh, right.

So we're going to be thinking about clients attitudes to consultants, consultants attitude to clients, problems and everybody's attitude to each other.

There's going to be something for us learn, I think a little bit from Marvin.

These are all expressed, as you say Mike, in terms of the world of a physician.

Clearly the idea is that lots of these aphorisms stand true for engineers, accountants, lawyers, and of course the subject of the book, consultants.

So let's hear me go through them one by one, let's decode them a little bit.

Let's get into it.

You remember number one here, 90% of all illnesses cure themselves with absolutely no intervention from a doctor.

So in a doctor's world, as long as you in fact do no harm, the illness is likely to cure itself.

So if I was listening to an engineering consultant with a lot of great insight and experience, they might say if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

No.

And a system that's not broken will fix itself.

Right.

Which sounds like a very Zen enlightened approach to medicine and to humans.

I wonder how it applies to consulting projects.

When I first read this I thought, yeah, hahaha, there's a salutary lesson for consultants not to be too optimistic about the value of what they're going to do.

If you're a client and you've just spent a million on consultants, and then the problem got better.

This law of regression to the mean that things fix themselves, this law means that it may well be that the million that you spent didn't cause the improvement, that you don't know whether it actually paid back or not.

But I want to go to the other side of the equation, Mike.

He's saying 90% of problems get better by themselves.

That says if I'm a consultant charging for advice, it's going to really help me and the client.

If I'm sure as we get started that the problem we're working on right now is one of those 10% that for sure won't get better by itself.

So there's real value in knowing the diagnosis.

I think this is going to be a theme through quite a few of these bits of advice here.

So we should be skeptical of easy Claims from consultants that they at some time in the past have saved the day.

But as consultants, we also need to be careful and serious about taking part in the diagnosis, really understanding what are the consequences of the problems that we uncover.

What are the benefits?

What some people sometimes call addressing the so what?

Question.

Well, and it's interesting to me, I don't want to roll over that, but it also reminded me of the old consulting joke that consultants come in, borrow your watch and tell you the time.

Yeah.

But if we assume that the client's confused about the time, and in fact they borrow your watches, tell you the time, and you now are no longer confused, they.

That's really helpful.

And I think sometimes that's exactly what happens.

That rather than having to make great big changes, the fact that people came in, people listen, people consolidated it, got fed back from a third party objective source, it actually now works when it didn't before.

But as you say, there is a great warning to take away here because of that 10% that is not gonna cure itself.

Yeah, absolutely.

So now that we've dealt with problems that might fix themselves, let's dig a little bit deeper.

Let's go up to the level of the organization, because Marvin's secret number two is up at that level.

One phrasing of it says you should deal gently with systems that can cure themselves.

The consequence of this, though, the real secret number two says this.

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

And I first read this and I thought, this is trying to repeat the lesson of, you know, medication resistance in antibiotics or something.

How does that relate to consulting?

But actually it is possible, right, for us to repeatedly lure the client into thinking that what they really need next is another fancy solution from us of the other next problem.

Yeah, I remember so clearly.

And this, this came to me when we were bidding for a piece of strategy work from a firm that was kind of outside our specialties.

It was a really top global company.

And I was thinking we were kind of brand new to the strategy piece of work.

We weren't well known.

How in the world, you know, are we really just a third bid here?

You know, kind of procurements right off.

But it was fascinating to me that this company had used the same boutique consulting firm over and over again in some really big strategy decisions.

They were kind of famous.

They were the stuff of a Harvard business case study.

They were also the stuff of books written by the consulting firm.

But the interesting thing is, if you continued on to follow the rest of the story, this firm always ended up in the ditch again.

You know, another year or two or three down and they would call their saviors the boutique consulting firm in again.

Brand new, big win.

But boom, you follow ahead again, back in the ditch again.

So our pitch to get the strategy was to point this out and it had happened over a long period of time and you had to kind of look at that and have the memory to think back to realize, what's this pattern now these high points are always followed by these low points.

And I do think it was a case of exactly what you've just said and that that pitch in fact won us that business, right?

Weaning your client off this kind of codependent savior thing that they've got going on with the other really, really fancy consulting firm.

This is sort of the dark side of the consulting industry.

So I guess I don't want people to think this is a risk around every corner, but it is a risk where there's a long term relationship with one consulting firm.

And we find ourselves repeatedly getting not only deeply embedded in the organization and being trusted, which is great, but in effect teaching the leaders and teaching the organization to not only that they can't help themselves, but that they are going to be triggered to stumble into a series of new problems, each of them requiring yet more outside consulting help.

There are books written about these kind of toxic consultant client relationships.

Like I say, Mike, I think they are the minority, but.

But it's a salutary thing to think about.

Hopefully none of us is going to end up there that often.

But history says it's not impossible.

I can remember in a firm that I worked with one particular client really, really badly needed help.

They got into a big regulatory mess and they hired the firm that I was working for via one particular partner to do all manner of things to help get them back on track after this regulatory problem.

And a regulatory problem ballooned into being some manufacturing problems and some research problems and some marketing problems.

And all of a sudden there were billable hours through the roof.

And there were many shiny rental cars in the parking lot of this particular firm, all occupied by consultants who are piling in to fix all of these great and important problems.

Until one day the CEO of this company finally got the sack.

And the new CEO came and said, what are all these great big invoices that I'm getting billed here from this consulting firm?

And who are all the folks in the shiny rental cars in the parking lot?

And it took an emperor's New clothes kind of moment to say, hold on a minute.

We've got two dependent on each other here.

Rather than fixing the problem, we are continuously extending the problem profitably, but not properly.

Yeah.

Jerry makes a passing comment in this section, and I think it's so true.

They said, not only are consultants guilty of this, not only are doctors guilty of this, any parent that continues to wipe their child's nose past the age four is guilty of this right to learn to wipe their own nose.

Right.

And as anybody, you know, I'm thinking back to my days in teaching at university and in the business school, seeing these really capable young people whose parents are now intervening on their behalf, something about their career or class choice or something going, stop, please stop.

Well, in number three, every prescription has two parts, the medicine and the method of ensuring the correct use.

And I can't help but remember, you know, walking into clients who've asked us to come in.

We've done, you know, work with them before.

They're inviting us in sometimes, no bidding to come do work for them again.

And we're having that initial great, good to see you again conversation.

And yes, I remember the work on Project 124, and that was so good.

And the client reaching back, pulling that report off the shelf, blowing the dust off it and going, that was.

That was a great report.

Only to chat a little bit more and find out they never actually did anything with it.

Very impressed, loved it.

Everybody was happy.

Great.

Client sat wasn't implemented.

Ah, the medicine and the method of ensuring correct use.

Right.

And this is an interesting conversation that gets us into the territory of specialization.

For example, is it okay to specialize in just doing strategy or just doing diagnosis work versus specializing in just doing implementation work?

And I can think of a dozen reasons why it's useful the majority of times to specialize in terms of skill and approach and business development and client relationships, to specialize in diagnosis rather than implementation and vice versa.

But it's also a bit of a trap.

You can't do good diagnosis, you can't do good strategy, I don't think, unless somebody in the team can also interpret what implementation is going to look like.

And that's, I think, what was missing in the story that you told there.

Similarly, I don't think you can do good implementation unless you've got a really good skeptical eye for what the business case was, for what the diagnosis was.

To put it another way, Mike, simply answering the what should you do and why question is not useful on its own unless somebody at some Point also asks how, like, if we get there, how are we going to take it forward?

But, you know, it also strikes me it's so important about understanding what's in the mind of your client.

You know, not just, oh, I'm really happy with this, or I'm persuaded by what you said, but why?

And what are they actually thinking?

I remember running into this in my university days when I was on the receiving line of calls to the Human Sexuality Counseling Hotline.

And this is going to be good.

Yeah.

I had.

I thought that the presented problem was somebody's skepticism about the effectiveness of birth control pills.

And we had a nice conversation.

We went back and forth about the statistics about the relative efficiency of different methods of contraception.

And I thought we were all good.

And her final or her next to last comment was, I just find that so hard to believe because every time I stand up, the pills fall out.

And I realized I really had not done a good job of understanding what was on the mind of my client and ensuring the method of correct use.

Very good.

Well, part of me would like to imagine how the call ended, but I think we'll just leave it there for the sake of decency.

Wow, Mike.

And I guess lots of us have got stories about clients that thought they understood our advice, but we had not really made it clear for them.

Excellent.

So, Mike, so far we've dealt with doctors, attitudes to illness, consultants, attitudes to clients, problems.

In the next three secrets, we're going to look at the decisions that patients make, or rather the clients make, based on our advice.

Stick around.

Number four, if what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.

And I think a couple of implications here.

One is this bedrock principle that says, in order to apply this principle, you have to know what they've been doing.

You have to have asked about it, you have to understand it as otherwise we're going to do that.

And to get a little bit underneath this to say, well, wait a minute, if what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.

On the one hand, that could just be logical.

You know, keep doing the same thing, you keep getting the same results.

But the other part is not just logical, it's psychological.

It's the fact that we're perhaps telling them to do something that in their minds they've already done and it didn't work.

And I think we'll come back to that one.

It's funny, it's something that's almost always there in the record, if we just ask for it.

Like, what have they tried already?

What have they tried so far?

But so often I've seen consultants forget to ask.

We're quite obsessed with what we're going to recommend and what comes next.

It's a really smart thing to ask.

What.

What have they already tried?

So moving on then to secret number five.

This gets me into one of our favorite areas, Mike.

Pricing.

Let's talk about money for a minute.

This, from a doctor's perspective, sounds very cynical.

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

And maybe this is going to sound a little bit less cynical from the point of view of a consultant.

Let's put it this way.

The more your advice is likely to be unfamiliar, unpalatable, or counterintuitive, the more billable hours it's going to take, especially from your seniors, to explain and rationalize and persuade and build consensus, most importantly, about acting on the recommendations.

So the bigger and scarier the advice is going to be, the more effort it's going to take, the more high value effort it's going to take for the client to say, okay, let's do it.

And therefore the fee budget goes up.

So there's a nice, I think a reasonably honorable cause and effect in that direction.

The more tricky the advice is likely to be, the more expensive it's going to be to get it and to believe it and to buy into it.

But there's a more cynical perspective, right, Mike?

Well, there is.

From a cynical perspective, the fee budget reflects the ego of the consultants and the person buying their services.

And if the fees are super high, then the recommendations had better be really amazing and unexpected.

Or if this vodka is priced higher than that vodka, it's gotta be a better vodka.

And you know, to a certain extent, the market takes care of that.

And there are firms, and you all know the names of the firms I'm thinking about.

There are firms out there that make a big margin and charge a large fee based on both of these rationales.

First of all, if it's that expensive, the advice must be great.

But also, if they're going to make really scary advice stick, they're going to have to put a lot of effort in and there's a lot of value behind that.

So this, this kind of works.

I'm, I'm happier ascribing this secret to consultants, actually, than to physicians, at least in a world outside the United States.

Mike.

And I like our Irish grandmother who reminds us that if it was really important, I'D actually have to pay something for it.

And if I don't have to pay anything for it, then I'm, you know, a lot.

It's a lot easier for me to say, oh, well, it doesn't matter whether I take it or not.

Wait, that cost me.

That cost me a pound.

Wait, no, no, no, I'm going to take that.

Yeah, exactly.

If anybody knows anybody who's been taking Wegovy or Mounjaro these days, the GLP1s the big weight loss drugs, not for every patient, but most doctors will say the first and the cheapest and the most effective thing you can do is reduce your calorie intake, improve your diet and do some exercise.

Those things are relatively cheap, almost free, at least in pharmaceutical terms.

But maybe there's some truth to the idea that the more you believe is being spent on the treatment, the more likely it is that you might stick with it.

Discuss.

Anyhow, Mike, we've done five out of six of the Secrets of Marvin.

Let's get down to the last one here.

What is secret number six?

Secret number six, Know how pays much less than know when.

And for Jerry, you know, this is an interesting one because I thought, well, wait a minute.

Know how pays much less than know when.

But that's a little bit of our specialist generalist thing.

But it's also this, Jerry says that this list of secrets and its version, whether it's the medical version or the engineer's version, lawyers, consultants, for any consulting specialty is very important.

But some of our greatest value as consultants isn't just in the secrets themselves, but in our ability to know when to apply them.

So, for example, not resting your case on number one, it's going to cure itself, when in fact, what we've got is a number two situation here.

Now, it's a common objection.

Once you get into the guts of a consulting project and you start generating conclusions and recommendations, it's a common objection to a recommendation that the client might say, well, we tried that before and it didn't work.

Or we looked at it two years ago and we chose not to pursue it with the implied meaning that that's therefore not a great recommendation.

But actually, lots of the value in consulting is actually in helping clients believe that this relatively obvious, expected, fashionable, straightforward thing, believing that this thing for this thing, now is the right time.

And you could take AI as an example, Mike.

The idea that software driven AI could revolutionize business, it's certainly been around for a little while.

It's certainly been true that AI based tools have existed in all kinds of computer software and personal devices and, you know, it, productivity apps.

But now is the time for a whole bunch of reasons, some of them real and rational and economic, some of them really technical, some of them just a little bit emotional, and some of them outright commercial.

Now is the time that we are being encouraged to take advantage of AI.

So you don't just need to know that the solution lies there.

You need to know and believe that now is the right time to take advantage of it.

I think getting that sense of urgency is a really important thing in helping our clients go ahead and reach the point of making a decision.

We've talked a good bit about these secrets of consulting and trying to figure out what to try in real life.

Let's get to that.

So if I'm listening right now, what could I be doing about this?

So, Mike, first of all, if any of our listeners is in the frame of mind to take up a new book about consulting, go out there and get hold of Jerry Weinberg's book.

It has aged really well since the mid-80s when he first put it to paper.

And it's fascinating and funny and wise.

Hence, we've had fun making an episode or two out of it.

And I would also say, go back to the learnings from the main episode.

Give it a try paying attention to that third project.

If you're at third project stage, then that's a moment to take stock, to get feedback, make sure your team are enjoying it, make sure the client and the firm are profiting from it, because that's a really great moment in the life of your relationship, and it's a critical moment for thinking about where to go next.

I think that's a great idea.

So, you know, third project.

There you go.

Great takeaways.

But if you're contemplating a project, perhaps you're even in a business development opportunity right now, or writing a proposal or starting a project, you might want to go down the Marvin list here.

You might want to say, wait a minute, is this something that would cure itself?

And if so, how should I be handling that?

And is that what we're doing with this client at this time?

Right.

We could be asking ourselves as we sit down to write that proposal, are we showing the client that we know and care about both sides of implementation and diagnosis?

Not hanging too heavily on our specialty there?

Does our pricing represent the importance and complexity of our likely recommendations?

And what is it doing about signaling the value of this project both to the client and to ourselves?

Exactly.

We should ask ourselves as well, Mike, have they tried this before?

Let's take a look at history.

What have they tried already?

What's been the outcome?

Because there's going to be some learning and some context for us there, right?

And why now?

You know, we just said it's the know how, but the know when might even be more important.

So have we just written about and discussed and understood the know what?

Or have we really put ourselves in a position to nail with ourselves and the client, the know when, the why now of all this fantastic.

Well, we hope all of those are a little jog towards things that you can do to apply some other learning.

We hope that you've enjoyed at least listening along to some of the Jerry Weinberg material.

That's it for our show for this week.

As always, we'd love to hear what you think.

We'd love to hear more as well about books and ideas and concepts that you'd like us to debate and debunk a little bit.

So please join us next time on the Consulting for Humans podcast and be with us with the luminaries.

It.