More Secrets of Consulting
by
Gerald M. Weinberg
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
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More Secrets of Consulting
Copyright © 2010 by Gerald M. Weinberg
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Contents
Chapter 1. Can I Beat the Law of Raspberry Jam?
Chapter 6. The Detective Hat (and Magnifying Glass)
Chapter 7. The Yes/No Medallion
Chapter 13. The Egg, the Carabiner, and the Feather
Epilogue. The Traveling Tool Kit
Summary of Laws, Rules and Principles of Consulting
[This volume can be considered a sequel or extension to The Secrets of Consulting, but the two books can be read in either order. Also, the Preface serves as a preface to both, as together they form a single piece of work.]
If you are a consultant, or if you ever use a consultant, this book is for you. That's a wide scope, because nowadays, nearly everyone is some kind of a consultant. There are hardware consultants and software consultants, social workers and psychiatrists, management consultants and worker consultants, energy consultants and information consultants, safety consultants and accident consultants, beauty consultants and septic tank consultants, consulting physicians and consulting attorneys, wedding consultants, decorators, genetic consultants, family therapists, economic consultants, bankruptcy consultants, retirement consultants, funeral consultants, and psychic consultants.
And those are only the professionals. You're using a consultant when you ask your neighbor what he uses to remove crabgrass from his lawn. You're being a consultant when your daughter asks you what college she ought to attend. In the United States, at least, you don't have to have a license to advise someone on what car to buy, or to help another find the quickest route to Arkadelphia.
With such diversity, what do all these consultants have in common? What would make them all want to read this book? My definition of consulting is the art of influencing people at their request. People want some sort of change—or fear some sort of change—so they seek consulting, in one form or another.
Many people influence other people without a request. A judge can sentence you to thirty years of hard labor. Your teacher can assign you thirty pages of hard reading. Your boss can give you thirty days of hard traveling. Your priest can apportion you thirty Hail Marys. Judges and teachers and bosses and priests can act as consultants. But they're not consultants in these cases, because these forms of influence are enforced by some authority system, not necessarily by the willing participation of the person influenced.
Other influencers have no authority, but are not consultants because they lack the request. Car dealers and other salespeople come to mind in this category. Again, they may act as consultants, but they're not consultants when they're trying to sell you something you didn't ask for.
Being called a consultant doesn't make you a consultant, either. Many people are called consultants as a way of glorifying their dull jobs. Some "software consultants," for instance, are retained strictly as supplementary programming labor. The last thing their "clients" want is in be influenced. All they want is grunt work turning out computer code, but by calling their temporary workers "consultants," they can get then for a few dollars less than if they called them something more mundane.
Conversely, you may be a consultant even if you don't have the label. Anyone with a staff job is acting as a consultant to the line management. When they hired you, they were requesting your influence (why else would someone hire a staff person?). After you've bets on the payroll for a while, however, they may forget that you were hired to help. Sometimes, even you forget, so your task is a bit different from that of the outsider called in to work on a specific problem.
This is not a book about how to become a consultant. That part easy. Most likely, you already are a consultant, because you become a consultant whenever you accept someone's request for influence. It's after you accept the request that you start needing help. When I became a full-time consultant, I soon discovered that few people request influence when their world is behaving rationally. As a result, consultants tend to see more than their fair share of irrationality. You may have noticed, for instance, how frequently someone who asks you for advice will then attack you angrily because of the requested advice. Such irrationality drives consultants crazy, but if they can cope with it, it can also drive them rich.
There were times, though, when I couldn't cope with it, so I turned to writing books to restore my sanity. Anyone who is irrational enough to buy one of my books may be requesting influence, but at least I don't have to give the advice face-to-face. That's why my books are cheaper than my consulting fees.
Most of the time, though, I enjoyed the direct interaction with my clients, if I could stand the irrationality. If I wanted to stay in the business, it seemed to me I had two choices:
1. Remain rational, and go crazy.
2. Become irrational, and be called crazy.
For many years, I oscillated between these poles of misery, until I hit upon a third approach:
3. Become rational about irrationality.
[Author's Note: Because so much of The Secrets of Consulting and More Secrets of Consulting derive from Virginia Satir's work, I'm placing her Foreword in both volumes.]
Reading The Secrets of Consulting is a very special experience. The book appeals to my sense of humor, my awareness of human foibles, and my knowledge of how human systems work. Most especially, this book enlarges my view of how change takes place, of how a consultant in any context can become more effective.
It is profound in its meaning and humorous and colorful in its presentation. Jerry Weinberg's style is such that he shares his experiences and knowledge with me; I feel inspired, rather than defensive. As I read, I can identify with the people and the problems he describes, and I take pleasure in laughing at myself and in learning from the situations that apply to me.
The Secrets of Consulting is far more than a consultant's handbook. It is actually a book about how people can take charge of their own growth. As a family therapist, I've found it helpful to understand people's behavior and the relationship between consultant and client by relating it to our birth into this world, an appearance into an unequal triad: father, mother, child. The father and mother are supposedly grown, and the child is totally dependent on the adults. What we learn from birth to adulthood is related essentially to this; although much of what we learn is unconscious, it gives us both our feelings about ourselves and about our importance to the world. It also gives us skills for coping, which can be augmented by consultants.
Unconscious or not, our basic childhood learnings still operate, whether we're in the role of client or consultant. Jerry Weinberg often gently teases the reader, as well as himself, about some of these powerful unconscious lessons that get in the way of our hoped-for results.
For example, every one of us needs approval and open recognition of success: "Look, Ma, no hands," says the proud son while riding his bicycle, hoping Mama will smile. When Mama doesn't, the child's need is unfulfilled and, as an adult, he may still look for that smile, but in the wrong context.
Further, many of us still dance between the wish and need to know and the fear of rejection that might come from revealing our needs. "After all," we think to ourselves, "if I am smart, I should know everything already and be able to handle every situation well. If I don't, it is a sign of my weakness, stupidity, perverseness, or incompetence.
Acknowledging such flaws would be intolerable." When this interpretation is made, most of us play games, either hiding our true feelings or projecting them onto someone else: thinking, for example, "I don't need you. And if it looks as if I do, it is probably because you are at fault."
Giving help, offering new ways to cope, is the consultant's job; but in order for the consultant to succeed, the job needs to be framed and approached with just that dance in mind. By asking for the consultant's help, the client is saying, sometimes nonverbally, "I need you. I can't say so directly, so find a way to help me without destroying my sense of worth." The wise consultant answers in a way that recognizes the client's self-worth, but also doesn't compromise his own. Otherwise, no real or lasting change can take place.
As the wise consultant, Jerry Weinberg illustrates this key point in many different contexts. He points to effective and interesting ways to approach the dance, and always praises the client who knows when and whom to ask for help as a mark of greater intelligence than as an admission of incompetence. In this context, both client and consultant grow in learning and strength, and everyone feels good.
After all, aren't the secrets of consulting basically what growth, competence, and good human relations are about? Namely, that we feel good about ourselves and about others, and that we experience our hopes and goals being fulfilled.
October 1985
Palo Alto, California
Virginia Satir
Chapter 1. Can I Beat the Law of Raspberry Jam?
When I mentioned to my pal, Michelle, that I was writing a sequel to my earlier book, The Secrets of Consulting, she shook her head in disbelief. "Why don't you quit while you're ahead? Don't you believe your own preaching? What about The Law of Raspberry Jam?"
Michelle was referring to the law that describes how the Great Message gets diluted when carried too far: "The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets." She doubted that a second volume could be good as the first.
"Yeah," she continued, "I'll grant that your first book was pretty good, so why didn't you stop when you were ahead? Are you just trying to cash in on its success?"
"Well, truthfully, Michelle, I am trying to cash in on the success of Secrets. Should I be ashamed of that?
"Not unless you're not giving value to your readers."
"Fair enough," I said. "I'll start the book by letting the readers know what kind of value they can expect. So let's try an analysis."
I explained to Michelle that up until now, Secrets has sold over 100,000 copies. I also explained that many readers have told me how much they'd increased their annual consulting income by applying such secrets as The Ten Laws of Pricing, the Orange Juice Test, Marvin's Great Secrets, The Buffalo Bridle, and the Ten Laws of Marketing. She agreed, because she claimed it had increased her income, too.
"By how much," I asked.
"Oh, at least $10,000 a year, and that would be conservative."
"Okay," I said, "so, assuming that each copy was read at least once, those readers have increased their earnings by $1,000,000,000 a year. And that's every year from now on."
"Okay," she said. "I'll buy a copy."
The Law of Strawberry Jam
Well, if you're like Michelle, who's the type who believes in numbers, that argument ought to convince you, too. If this book is even half as good as the first, it's still filled with enough jam to make it delicious to read. But what if you're not like Michelle? What if you need general principles to convince you? Then you'll have to read on, and learn about The Law of Strawberry Jam.
To young visionaries, Raspberry Jam is a discouraging law, but that's because they haven't paid sufficient attention to the preserves they distribute on their morning toast. If they'd only experiment a bit with strawberry jam, they'd tumble onto a discovery that could change their lives.
Slather a bit of raspberry jam on a few slices of bread, and you'll see it growing thinner and thinner. But if you try the same trick with strawberry preserves, you'll notice that no matter how much you try to spread it, the lumps remain! Or, in the words of the Law of Strawberry Jam,
As long as it has lumps, you can never spread it too thin.
In strawberry jam, the lumps are strawberries. In the Great Message, the lump is you! As long as your medium of communication involves your own body in the flesh—speaking, writing, hugging—your message cannot be infinitely diluted. And that's why I decided to write this volume about you, the individual consultant, and the personal tools you need to make your messages lumpier than the ones carried by clones issuing forth from the big consulting factories.
The Law of Grape Jelly
Ours is not an age of strawberry jam. Grape jelly seems to be the favorite covering for the American Restaurant Toast—it's absolutely without lumps or even tiny seeds. In fact, it's absolutely without taste, which eliminates complaints. You might complain that the jam tastes "off," but you can hardly complain that it has no taste whatsoever.
Not having lumps, grape jelly are perfect for processing through machines. It's that lumpy third dimension—the depth—that makes copying impractical. Grape jam spreads infinitely thin, so the spreader can color any number of slices of toast out of a single sterilized plastic container. With strawberry jam, there's always the danger of finding a lump, thus consuming the entire "portion control" container on a single slice.
It contains no surprises and it's cheap to manufacture—these two properties of grape jelly combine to give the Law of Grape Jelly:
Nobody ever bothers to complain about grape jelly.
The Law of Grape Jelly is a law about expectations. Another way of stating the law was one of my father's favorites:
If you don't expect much, you'll never be disappointed.
With the sale of ideas, you can also adopt a grape jelly marketing philosophy. If you're presenting a course, it's best from the distributor's point of view to have it reduced to an outline totally lacking in lumps, so that it can be taught by any of a dozen cloned lecturers. Even better is to have it reduced to a video tape or disk that can be played anywhere and give a uniformly thin result. This approach serves to eliminate the bad lumps at the same time it strains out the good ones. Nobody ever found an entire caterpillar in their grape jelly.
Manufactured items are designed to be built of identical components by a series of processes that require not the slightest individuality on the part of the assemblers. Office procedures are reduced to steps that can be carried out by anybody who can fog a mirror. Like grape jelly on white toast, they're not superbly satisfying to their customers, but at least the product is uniform and entirely predictable.
The Lump Law
In another book of mine, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, I introduced the Lump Law:
If we want to learn anything, we mustn't try to learn everything.
In other words, it pays to choose your lumps.
By applying The Lump Law (see, I do use my own principles), I convinced myself that this book should, like the first, not attempt to cover everything a consultant ought to know. Instead, I would confine myself to a few essential tools that every consultant—and really everybody who ever gives or seeks advice—should always have close at hand. Hence the title, The Consultant's Tool Kit.
Many of the other things that a consultant ought to know can be found in the books of Peter Block, who has certainly taught me a great deal. In an interview with Peter, Paula Jacobs asked: "What do you see as the single most important life lesson for consultants?" He answered:
The person is the product. Working on becoming a more authentic, whole person is the best business strategy. We are selling an intangible service, so clients have no way of knowing what they will be getting and whether they can derive value from what they get. ...The more direct we are, the better human contact we make, the more centered and self aware we are, the more likely the client will see us a someone who they can lean on, someone who delivers on promises, someone they can learn from.
That's exactly why I'm going to concentrate here on those tools that most help me to be direct, more centered, more self aware, and more in contact with other people. I've derived these tools from a set originally given to me by the great family therapist, Virginia Satir—who you may remember as the author of the Foreword to The Secrets of Consulting. At the time Virginia wrote that Foreword, I was just beginning to appreciate the depth of her teachings, but by now, they have permeated all aspects of my life.
Satir's Self-Esteem Tool Kit
Virginia, like me, was fond of metaphors and collected them from a profusion of sources. One of her sources was Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz. Remember how the Wizard gave the Scarecrow a brain, the Tin Man a heart, the Cowardly Lion a badge of courage, and Dorothy the power to go home. The Wizard's great secret was that each of them already possessed the tools they thought they lacked. The Wizard's job was merely to remind them.
From this idea, Virginia developed her idea of the "self-esteem tool kit"—a set of resources that each of us owns, but often forgets to use when we're feeling powerless. As a consultant, out there alone in a sometimes unappreciative world, I've frequently reminded myself of the metaphors in Virginia's original kit:
The Wisdom Box—the ability to know what's right and what's not right for me. Without a wisdom box, I would find myself forever working in situations that violated my principles, or for which I had no energy.
The Golden Key—the ability to open up new areas for learning and practicing, and to close them if they don't fit for me at this time. Without my key, my consulting would become narrowly focused, or focused on areas in which I was no longer interested.
The Courage Stick—the courage to try new things, and to risk failure. Without my courage stick, my consulting turns to grape jelly.
The Wishing Wand—the ability to ask for what I want, and to live with not getting it. Without the ability to ask for what I want, I am powerless to be an effective negotiator.
The Detective Hat, sometimes teamed with a Magnifying Glass—the ability to examine data and to reason about those data. Without these detecting abilities, I would become a solution-problemer, a vendor of out-of-the-box, portion-controlled solutions, rather than a problem-solver responding to my clients' real needs.
The Yes/No Medallion—the ability to say YES, the ability to say NO (thank you), and the ability to mean what I say. Without a yes that means yes and a no that means no, my advice would become worthless pandering to my clients' prejudices.
These six tools were Virginia's self-esteem tool kit as I learned it. Over the years, however, various colleagues have helped me add other tools to my personal version of the kit:
The Heart—the ability and willingness to put my heart into my work. Jean McLendon introduced the heart to my kit, though she claimed that the only reason Virginia didn't have one in hers was that she assumed everyone always had access to their heart. Working in technical environments, though, I've learned that I often need to be reminded of the hopes and wishes and fears and sensitivities of others. The heart gives me that nudge when I need it.
The Mirror—the ability to see myself, to seek and use feedback. I'd always known that feedback was important to personal growth, but I learned most about feedback from Edie and Charlie Seashore, as I worked with them on our book about feedback, What Did You Say?. Feedback is the mirror by which I can see myself and monitor how I am affecting those around me—but it works only if I remember to look in that mirror that others offer.
The Telescope—the ability to see others, to bring them closer to my understanding than my naked eye and brain could manage. My telescope is a pair with my mirror, which reminds me to see myself.
The Fish-Eye Lens—the ability to see the context—what surrounds me and others, influencing us as we work together. It reminds me to use the many observational and analytical tools I already have, many of which I've written about in my books yet fail to recall when I most need them. The Mirror, Telescope, and Fish-Eye Lens together give me the self, other, and context—the ingredients that must be balanced if I am to be congruent.
The Gyroscope—the ability to be balanced, to use all of my tools, to be congruent, or centered. My father also gave me my first gyroscope, and to this day I remain fascinated by its ability to balance itself, and to restore its balance when disturbed. Sometimes I think that the gyroscope is too complex a tool for my personal tool kit, but then I remember that restoring balance to my life is complex, and something that I must always do.
The Egg—the ability to grow, develop, learn, using all the parts of myself I need. I actually collect eggs, mostly beautiful stone ones, though I'm allergic to the chicken kind. Perhaps this allergy explains why I took so long to associate the egg with Virginia Satir's Seed Model—the concept that each of us comes into the world with all the tools we need to be fully human beings. When I'm stuck, my Egg reminds me that I have many tools that I don't realize I have—and that I also possess the ability to choose or make my own new tools.
The Carabiner—the ability to ensure my safety, to not take unnecessary risks, so I can take risks at all. For those of you who don't climb mountains, the carabiner is a metal loop used to attach climbing ropes to pitons—hooks embedded in a cliff face. They protect the climbers from the dangers of falling. Linda Swirczek, who was an avid climber, gave me the Carabiner for my self-esteem tool kit. The carabiner gives me that moment to double-check my actions, so I can move ahead with the confidence the situation requires.
The Feather—the ability to tickle myself and others, and not take things, or myself, too seriously. I learned about tickling from my father, Harry Weinberg, though it was a long time before I learned much about the right timing for tickles. The feather reminds me that, as Oscar Wilde said, "Life is too important to be taken seriously."
The Hourglass—the ability to make time for the good and to make good use of time. For me, the hourglass is one of my most important tools, because it's one that I tend to forget.
The Oxygen Mask—the symbol for a balanced life. It reminds me of my ability to breathe, which symbolizes my need to take care of myself before attempting to help others. Eileen Strider added the mask to my kit, reminding me of the safety instructions given on planes: "Before helping others with your mask, be sure your own mask is in place and operating properly." My Oxygen Mask reminds me to operate from a healthy place—the place from which I'm most likely to be able to help others, rather than inflict "help" that may prove harmful because I crash and burn and cannot follow through. The Oxygen Mask reminds me to use all of my other tools, to keep myself healthy and sane.
So, that's my tool kit as it stands today, and it serves me well as consultant, friend, husband, father, grandfather, and, most of all, human being. I know it's not a complete kit, but at least it's a start. I hope you'll join me in the following chapters as I show you how I use it, and perhaps some day you will help me add another fine tool that you have in your consultant's tool kit.
"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us."—Marcel Proust
Having chosen the consultant's tool kit as the organizing theme of this book, I was immediately faced with the problem of which tool should be presented first. Since the tools form a system, there can be no right answer to the question of which is first, so I decided to go by my own personal preference, the Wisdom Box.
The Wisdom Box represents the ability to know what's right and what's not right for me. Without a wisdom box, I would find myself forever working in situations that violated my principles, or for which I had no energy.
Redding's Reading Rule
Although the Wisdom Box is first among my preferences, it certainly wasn't the first to be acquired. And, like most people, I've acquired what little wisdom I have one tiny piece at a time.
I first learned about the importance of wisdom from a schoolmate, Mr. Redding. I call him Mr. Redding because I can no longer remember his first name, and because Professor Freeble always referred to his students by their family names and stressed their titles—Miss Warfield, Mr. Campbell, Mrs. Stein, and, of course, Mr. Redding. Freeble was a straight-laced English professor for whom, 50-odd years ago, I graded Freshman papers.
Freeble had his favorites, and in my estimation, some of them didn't deserve his high esteem. So, each grading period, Freeble would "demonstrate" to me why he was granting his protégés higher grades than I had meted out. At these correctional meetings, Freeble usually took the opportunity to grade down some of my "inflated" grades—and Mr. Redding invariably suffered.
My estimation of Redding's work always exceeded Freeble's. I remember most clearly one occasion on which Redding had written a brilliant essay, but one that wasn't based on the reading Freeble had assigned. Freeble downgraded him—failed him, in fact. That left me the task of explaining to Redding why his brilliance wasn't going to be rewarded if he didn't follow the assignments.
"Too bad," Redding replied, indifferently.
"What's too bad?"
"Oh, I can't waste my time reading Freeble's assignments. Life's too short. I never read anything that isn't worth reading."
And there it was, Redding's Reading Rule:
Never read anything that isn't worth reading.
By happenstance, that same semester I was taking a speed-reading course in one of the World War II quonset huts still gracing the University of Nebraska campus. Speed-reading was the sort of low-status subject that didn't merit a brick-and-mortar building, let alone Grecian columns or actual college credit, but I figured that even a small increase in reading speed would prove worth the investment of time and energy.
Three lessons into the course, I had managed to increase my speed by about 200 words per minute. I was quite proud of my accomplishment—until Mr. Redding rudely deflated me with his Rule. What good was 200 words per minute when by simply not reading stuff that wasn't worth reading, I could instantly triple or quadruple my speed.
Redding's Rule made such an impression on me that I eagerly applied it to other activities in my crowded, four-major college curriculum. I believe I gained a substantial advantage over my less enlightened fellow students, but somehow the advantage wasn't what it should have been. It was to be a more than decade before I discovered why.
Cary's Crap Caution
After leaving the hallowed halls of academe, I began my career in computing, and subsequently my career in writing about computing. After publishing a few technical books of my own, I was invited to resume the job of critic I had abandoned to Professor Freeble. My editor-in-chief, Cary Baker, provided a stream of technical manuscripts and checks, for which I provided a return stream of opinions on how these manuscripts could be improved.
After three of these manuscripts had been published—incorporating many of my suggestions and corrections—I had once again grown inflated with my own accomplishments. Cary's fourth manuscript, however, was beyond even my enlightened redemption. In the first place, the author didn't know anything about the subject. In the second, he didn't know much about the English language. In fact, the manuscript was so bad that it was good—good, that is, for the sadistic delight of shredding it into tiny editorial pieces.
I was living in Greenwich Village at the time, so I hand-carried my 42-page critique uptown to the jade green McGraw-Hill tower, eager to receive Cary's praises face-to-face. But no praise was forthcoming. Instead, Cary merely weighed the neatly typed critique in his left hand and asked, "What's all this?"
"It's my comments on the manuscript," I said, proudly.
He glanced at the last page. "Forty-two pages? On that manuscript?"
"I wanted to be thorough."
"Oh, and do you gift-wrap your garbage? This one wasn't worth more than two sentences."
And so, at long last, I learned that Redding's Reading Rule could be generalized to just about anything. I called this generalization Cary's Crap Caution:
Anything not worth doing is not worth doing right.
Or, in Cary's more vernacular form:
Never gift-wrap garbage.
And that's the first time I consciously realized that I possessed a Wisdom Box. At the time, I had no good name for it. The name was to come many years later when I met Virginia Satir.
My Wisdom Box is my first-order guide to what I ought to be doing—and especially what I ought not to be doing. Before learning Cary's Crap Caution, my first-order guides were different. Sometimes, I grabbed the task that paid the most money. More often, I was snared by the intriguing nature of some problem to be solved, or by the pitiful pleadings of some poor soul in need. And once I began a task, I was easily trapped by my perfectionism into doing superb jobs of polishing crap that never should have been produced in the first place.
Feeble's Feeling Filter
Looking back on my life as a problem-solver, I now realize that I've always had a Wisdom Box, but wasn't terribly conscious or consistent in using it. For instance, my conversation with Mr. Redding wasn't the end of the story of Professor Freeble. The fifth time he overrode my grades to reward the guilty and punish the innocent, I finally heard that tiny internal voice say, "Enough!"
The voice had such a compelling reality that at first I actually thought Freeble had said something, but it wasn't his reedy voice. Some part of me knew that something was terribly wrong with Freeble's flimsy excuses for altering grades. Though I didn't recognize it at the time, that part was my Wisdom Box.
When my Wisdom Box speaks, I know it speaks truth. For one thing, there's that compelling voice, which isn't like any of my other internal voices. So, even though I was earning the magnificent sum of ninety cents an hour for reading Freeble's papers, when that voice spoke, I handed him his gradebook and resigned. I also said a few things that weren't so wise—but my Wisdom Box was still immature.
Immature thought it was, I sensed quite clearly what was right and what was wrong—a sense that made me realize that
Anything I shouldn't be doing, I shouldn't be doing—period.
I call this Freeble's Feeling Filter, and it applies equally to things that aren't worth doing and things that, though worth doing by somebody, are wrong for me. I've memorialized Professor Freeble to remind me of the feeble excuses I concoct when I'm trying to ignore my Wisdom Box.
Is It Wisdom or Is It Memory?
Although I was born fully equipped with a Wisdom Box, I needed substantial practice before I learned to use it well. For one thing, a Wisdom Box speaks in various ways. In Freeble's office, mine used words to put me on alert. Sometimes mine sings to me; I've written about my Songmeister in The Secrets of Consulting. Mostly, though, my Wisdom Box communicates through a general feeling permeating my body, a feeling I can translate into "wrong," or "right." Although it doesn't come through my nose, if I had to choose a sense, I'd say it's a smell.
Virginia herself often used a taste metaphor. "Take a bite," she'd say about some new idea, "and see how it tastes. If it's good, swallow it, but if it doesn't fit for you, spit it out." But if the new situation resembles an earlier one, it's not always easy to take that one bite.
Your Wisdom Box seems to be saying, "Don't bite on that! That's just like the time you ..." As you grow older, the more memories you have of mistakes you've made, and the more chance you have of mistaking one of these memories for wisdom. If all your Wisdom Box does is accumulate old lessons that prevent you from doing things, soon you'll be doing nothing at all. True, you'll never do anything wrong—but is that what you really want?
When you first get the old feeling, ask yourself: Have I already gone beyond this? (Is this the feeling, or a memory of the feeling?) The voice tells you whether this is here-and-now wisdom, or there-and-then.
Wisdom Box Mistakes
Mistaking the past for the present is only one of several common mistakes that you can make with your wisdom box. Here are some others.
Wisdom Boxes don't transplant from one person to another. This is YOUR wisdom box, not your morality bible. It won't work for other people, so if you must offer wisdom from your collection, be prepared for rejection—which may be the other person's Wisdom Box doing its job.
The reverse is also true. Don't expect that you can simply move wisdom from another person's Wisdom Box by reading, or listening, or memorizing "words of wisdom." Wisdom comes from experience, perhaps seasoned with words, but only seasoned. Remember, you can't live on a diet of salt.
Because each Wisdom Box is personal, your own Wisdom Box is not an aid in judging others. For goodness sake, don't be righteous when you think others are acting unwisely. Being righteous helps even less than being right.
Having given you the warning about transplantation, I'm certainly not so stupid as to shower you with the contents of my Wisdom Box. Besides, if you've read some of my other books, you've probably had your fill of what passes for wisdom in my mind.
Nevertheless, there are some special gems in my Wisdom Box that I'd like to offer for you to taste. These gems are not simply wisdom, but wisdom-about-wisdom, or meta-wisdom. I show them because you'll want to be sure that your own Box has a few such gems to keep it functioning properly.
Limit Your Rationality
A good example of meta-wisdom in action is the way I just ignored my own advice about sharing the contents of your Wisdom Box. I ignored my advice because I applied the Rule of Restrained Rationality:
Don't be rational; be reasonable.
Why? I can think of several reasonable reasons:
• I am human, and no human can be completely rational all the time. If I attempt to be so, I will merely appear more foolish than people normally do.
• I am writing this book; you are my customer, my reader; and I can assume that you expect certain reasonable things from a book's author—like some examples of the wisdom he purports to be writing about.
• Rationality depends on tight chains of reasoning, so one weak link can break a chain of rationality. Reasonableness uses multiple chains to arrive at conclusions—some rational, some emotional; some data-based, some intuitional; some internally derived, some from external sources. Thus, reasonableness may not be as sharp and efficient, but it's more secure, less likely to lead to monstrous mistakes.
• Nobody likes a wiseass.
Beware of Rationalizations
Another reason for me to be reasonable is that some of the "wisdom" in my Box isn't very wise at all. Here, the meta-wisdom says,
Not everything that sounds wise is wise.
Some of the truisms in my Box are merely rationalizations that pass for rationality. This preposterous junk must be expunged and relegated to my Witless Box—the place I keep the memories of all the silliness I once believed was wisdom. Most of this foolishness, I learned as a youth—like what my mother's rationalization for the burning when she swabbed antiseptic over one of my cuts or abrasions.
If it hurts, it must be good for you.
I call this common misbelief the Antiseptic Absurdity, and it's on a par with that sign you see in restaurants:
Good food takes time.
Sure, some of the things that hurt are good for you, and some good food takes time to prepare. But, as enunciated, both of these fallacies are rationalizations for poor service. Now my wisdom box contains a rather different aphorism about consulting:
If they tell you it must be good for you because it hurts,
get yourself a different consultant.
This is one of many maxims in my Wisdom Box about when to get rid of consultants.
Eschew False Reasoning
Sometimes I misapply the wisdom in my Box by false reasoning—inverse implications are common examples:
• Although good food may take time, slow food can still be bad.
• Even if hurting demonstrated that the treatment is good for you, there may be good treatments that don't hurt at all.
In my whole consulting career, there have been only two clients who swindled me out of money that I earned. In both cases, they were promoters who put on conferences for the sole purpose of making money.
I don't believe in textbooks, but I had allowed my editor to persuade me that a textbook written by me would surely be a best-seller.. In my writing career, that was the only book of mine that flopped financially.
From these and other examples, I've acquired the wisdom that says,
One of the best ways to lose lots of money is to do something only for the money.
We can call this my Mercenary Maxim, and it seems to be wisdom that applies to me. However, at a certain period of my life, I falsely inverted this maxim to say:
One of the best ways to make lots of money
is to do something without regard for the money.
Alas, though I've had an occasional windfall, this reasoning failed to be generally true. If I wanted to make a living as a consultant, I had to think about money when making contracts. The wisdom was in not thinking only about money:
If you want to make a living as a consultant
think about money, but watch out for other important things.
What important things? Number one on the list would be the character of the people you're dealing with—as in, "Are they thinking only about the money?"
Mistrust greed, especially my own.
Know Your Limits
Wisdom often takes the form of knowing the limits of your knowledge. My Wisdom Box knows that I don't know everything, but in some situations, I allow myself to be overcome with the feeling of absolute mastery. And, every time I succumb to this temptation, I make a fool of myself.
All swindlers—including the promoters who swindled me—understand this meta-wisdom principle, which I call The Sucker Syndrome:
It's easiest to fool the people who know everything.
Check Your Wisdom Box Periodically
As I grow older, I've grown more forgetful. I think somebody warned me about that, but I forget who it was. I do remember, though, that they told me to make lists so I wouldn't forget important tasks. Although I'd never been a list maker, this seemed like a good idea, so I started making lists. But I always forgot to look at the lists.
To conclude this chapter, I was planning to give you a list of all possible misuses of a Wisdom Box, but, guess what? I've lost that list. But that doesn't matter, because I've learned that if something is really important, I'll remember it when it comes time to write about it. And the most important thing I know about my Wisdom Box is that, like my lists, I frequently forget to consult it in time.
Real life isn't like writing—you seldom have the luxury to wait for your Wisdom Box to catch up with real-time events. And remember the the Main Maxim:
What you don't know may not hurt you, but what you don't remember always does.
This is especially true when it's your Wisdom Box that you don't remember. For instance, people often know years in advance when they're in a bad situation—a job, an assignment, a marriage. But they seem to persist in failing to turn on their Wisdom Box. For example, those women I know who have divorced abusive husbands tell me that it takes about three years for them to hear what their Wisdom Box is telling them. With abusive bosses, or clients, there seems to be a similar time span, so where was the Wisdom Box all this time?
I suspect that it creeps up, the way fat creeps around my waist one pastry at a time—a particularly insidious version of the Fast-Food Fallacy:
No difference plus no difference plus no difference plus...
eventually equals a clear difference.
So here's the meta-wisdom from my Box. Some Wisdom Boxes contents do seem to have built-in alarm clocks—warnings that flash as the situation gets dangerous. But some also seem have snooze buttons that allow us to ignore these warnings, no matter how clear.
When you're in a situation that changes by sneaks and slithers, it's safest to have built-in checkpoints that will force you to check your wisdom box periodically. For instance,
• I never make long-term contracts with my clients. That way, we have to renegotiate our situation at reasonable intervals, and these negotiations give me time to ask if the arrangement is still wise for me.
• In the shorter term, I like to take long walks in nature. I find the natural world to be awash with wisdom of its own, wisdom that primes my own Wisdom Box.
• Walking in nature is a kind of meditation, but if that's not convenient, I take short meditations anywhere I happen to find myself—in airports, standing in queues, waiting for internet access. Even the shortest meditation can rouse my Wisdom Box from its dangerous slumber.
• And, I especially like to take long car trips through the mountains with Dani. With no distractions but the natural sights of the trip, I can tap into both Dani's wisdom and mine—and take the time to remember my wisdom and to decide what of hers fits for me.
So, what wisdom-checkpoints have you built into your life?
"One's first step in wisdom is to question everything—and one's last is to come to terms with everything."—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
My Golden Key is a close companion to my Wisdom Box, because I cannot acquire wisdom without the risk of traveling to unexplored realms. The Golden Key represents my ability to open up new areas for learning and practicing, and also to close them if they don't fit for me at this time. Without my key, my consulting would become narrowly focused, or focused on areas in which I was no longer interested.
Nosy But Nice
For some reason, I've always had a fully functional Golden Key. Perhaps I was given this key by my father, who didn't pretend to have an answer to every question, but always asked me back, "How would we find that out?" Or, "Where would we go to get that information?" And sometimes we explored things together. In any case, if he did come up with an answer, he never just popped it out, whole. Instead, he always opened up his chain of exploration for my inspection.
Like my father, I'm a nosy guy, and I don't just mean the prominent proboscis I inherited from Harry. I investigate things I don't understand, and stop investigating when I'm no longer learning. Probably, that's why I've written so many books—researching a book is my standard excuse for exploring, or prying, or snooping.
Lots of my books started with a question—the best ones always did. Some actually have questions for titles—Are Your Lights On? and What Did You Say?.
Others had questions behind them, Golden Keys that opened doors for my mind:
• My doctoral research, Experiments in Problem Solving, asked, "Where do 'aha' experiences come from?
• An Introduction to General Systems Thinking asked, "What are the general laws of thought that apply to virtually every complex situation?"
• The Psychology of Computer Programming posed the query, "What are the mental and emotional processes underlying the act of programming computers?"
• When Don Gause and I wrote Exploring Requirements, we wanted to know, "How do we find out what people really want?"
• And the four volumes of my Quality Software Management series are all based on the question, "How do managers affect the quality of software produced under their stewardship?"
In fact, this book, itself, started with the question, "What are the most powerful tools that all successful consultants need?"
Polanski's Pointer
Well, writing's not for everyone, but there are other ways of using your Golden Key. Once I knew something about programming computers, I was often asked to help people find errors in their programs. At first, I didn't have much wisdom about "debugging," as this activity is sometimes called, and I wasted a lot of time following false clues. Finally, one rainy December morning in the District of Columbia, my eyes were opened. We were working to a hard deadline—a scheduled rocket launch—and one of the programs just wouldn't work properly. Wally, one of the programmers, called on me to help, saying that they'd worked all night and hadn't located the problem. I asked him what they had already figured out.
"One thing I'm absolutely sure of," Wally said, "is that the bug can't be in the Red program. I've checked that one six times. And Sarah checked it, too."
So, taking him at his word, I plunged right into the Blue, the Green, and the Yellow programs—and never came out. That is, I didn't come out for lunch, and I didn't come out for dinner—both significant events in my working day. Finally, at around 9:30 in the evening, my stomach told me that Polanski's Deli next door was going to close in half an hour, so I took a break. When I got there, Polanski's crew had already cleaned up for closing, so I asked Julie, the counter waitress, for a take-out corned beef—extra lean.
"All our corned beef is extra lean," Julie insisted while assembling the sandwich. "Hey, Polanski, bring me one of those take-out bags?"
"Harold must have put 'em away," Polanski shouted from the back. "Do you know where he put them?"
"No, but I'm sure they're not in the cookie cabinet. I already looked in there."
"Thanks," Polanski shouted back, and soon emerged from the kitchen proudly displaying a brown paper bag.
"Where'd you find it?" Julie asked. "I can never find stuff that Harold puts away."
"They were in the cookie cabinet."
I was dumbfounded. "Why did you look there?" I asked, "when she told you she was sure they weren't there."
"Precisely," said Polanski. "When Julie's that sure it's not there, it means that she believes it's not there, so she probably never looked there. So, it's probably there."
"Oh," I muttered. I grabbed my sandwich, paid the check, and rushed back to the office.
Wally was still studying the errant code. "Give me the Red listing," I insisted.
"Why,?" Wally questioned, but handed me the listing anyway. "We know it's not there."
"Precisely," I said, and proceeded to find the bug in about two minutes.
And that's how I learned another way to use my Golden Key, a technique I call Polanski's Pointer:
If they're absolutely sure it's not there, it's probably there.
Polanski's Pointer tells me what doors to open, and a corollary tells me which ones not to bother with:
Don't bother looking where everyone is pointing.
After all, if they knew the right place to look, they wouldn't be asking a consultant to help them find it.
And there's another version of Polanski's Pointer, one that I apply when I find myself "pointing" away from some subject.
Whenever you believe that a subject has nothing for you,
it probably has something for you.
Why? Well, if it's a subject, somebody is interested in it, so there's definitely something about it capable of arousing human interest Therefore, if I don't see anything interesting about it, I must not even know enough to know why it can be interesting. That's a sure sign that I'll learn something if I open that closed door.
The Golden Lock
I have a trick for applying this personal version of Polanski's Pointer. I search for someone who is genuinely interested in the subject, then ask them for the one reference they would recommend to someone who knows nothing about the subject. This always works—unless I find someone who doesn't really love the subject, but is just making a living at it. There's a difference.
The reason there's a difference is that most people don't make full use of their Golden Key, and thus it's too easy for them to get stuck in a field that bores them. I call this phenomenon the Golden Lock:
I'd like to learn something new, but what I already know pays too well.
The Golden Lock is a close cousin to the Golden Handcuffs corporations use to shackle their most valuable employees. But unlike the Handcuffs, the Lock is self-imposed, self-designed. Being self-designed, it's a far better trap than any Handcuffs could ever be, and only the Golden Key can unlock it.
The "pay" for wearing the Golden Lock need not be money, though that's surely common among consultants. Quite frequently, the pay is prestige, or the envy of ones colleagues, or the gratitude of ones clients. Whatever the pay, it's not easily dispensed with—and thus the Lock.
That's why the Golden Key has two aspects—one that opens doors, and one that locks them again. I like to think my Golden Key is also very good at locking doors, but compared to my wife and partner, Dani, I'm a novice. Dani is particularly good at locking doors and moving on, having mastered several different areas of human knowledge in succession, and become a highly successful practitioner in each—teaching piano, doing anthropology, consulting to large organizations, and training professional dog trainers.
Over the years, I believe I've learned Dani's secret rule, which I call Dani's Decider:
When you stop learning new things, it's time to move on.
Dani's Decider is one of the most powerful secrets of consulting. Why? Consultants are hired for knowing what others don't know, so a consultant who stops learning soon decays in value. On the other hand, the less you know, the less likely you are to threaten your clients with change, so maybe you can become a "safe" consultant—one who offers no danger of changing the client's status quo.
Lock Language
We know that consultants can be threatening to their clients, especially if they're adept with their Golden Keys. That's why we often find our clients using "lock language" to keep us from opening their closets and seeing their real or imagined skeletons.
Some lock language is very direct. I've had client's invite me to examine their organizations, then tell me up front, "These are the things we don't want you to look at."
And, sometimes, when I apply Polanski's Pointer and say I want to look into X, they say, "No, I forbid you to look at X."
"Forbid" is rather direct lock language, but those with less authority tend to be more subtle. Possibly the most common lock phrase I hear in my work is "They won't like it if you ask about X."
Naturally, it's never very clear who "they" are, so I always counter with, "Oh, I didn't know that. Can you identify who 'they' are, so I can go ask their permission?" Generally, the speaker can't or won't identify a specific person, but if they do, I simply go to the person and tell them I'd like to ask about X.
An even more subtle way of locking doors is built into us by years of schooling—schooling that teaches many of us not to ask "too many" questions. Certainly I can understand why a teacher burdened with a large class of obstreperous children would want to restrict the number of questions per student, but these conditions don't apply to obstreperous consultants. So, when clients show non-verbal signs of impatience with my questions, I simply say, "Am I asking too many things all at once? I can come back if this is too much for now."
Of course, part of what makes my Golden Key golden is my skill in getting information that's behind locked doors—and getting it without provoking locking reactions in my clients. If I've done a good job of entering the client's system, I'm not likely to trigger any forbidding. Or, at least, I've avoided making contracts with clients whose locks are going to make it impossible for me to do what they're paying me for.
And, I've learned not to ask endless streams of questions. I don't need them, because I have so many other ways of getting information, as I've described in several of my books. So, I don't get much hard, direct forbidding, but if I'm not careful, my clients can lull my Golden Key to sleep.
Lullaby Language
Late one summer, I was called in to help an IT client learn to work better with their customers. I don't ordinarily travel in the summer, but this sounded like a real emergency, one where I had to be on the scene to calm down both parties. The customers were enraged with the IT manager because a new system wasn't ready on time, and IT manager was enraged with the customers because they hadn't delivered some essential information as promised, thus causing the entire project to lag its schedule by four months.
It was over 100 degrees outside, but even hotter inside—emotionally. Jeff, the IT manager, would smack the table and say, "You promised that the component pricing data would be in our hands by February first."
Penny, the catalog manager, would give him a steely-eyed glare and mutter, "We never promised that. Never!"
"Yes, you did!"
"No, we didn't."
And then they would loop back to the beginning, raising the temperature a few degrees.
I thought that the problem-solving would go better if I could cool things down, but all I was hearing was "yes-you-did-no-we-didn't," back and forth. I decided to attempt to establish some facts that were not a matter of opinion, so I asked for the original requirements document. Both Penny and Jeff seemed a bit stunned by this reference to data, then Penny recovered and said, "Yes, that will prove my point."
"No, it will prove my point," Jeff countered. "Good idea, Jerry. Now we'll see whose fault this is."
I was a bit surprised at how readily they each found the document. (Lots of my clients seem to lose requirements documents once a project is under way.) Jeff got his open first, and placed his index finger on the following key line:
The Catalog Department should deliver component pricing data by 1 February to the IT Department.
I thought Penny would find some other statement to "prove" her point, but a few moments later, she had her copy open to the same page, upon which the same sentence was highlighted in DayGlo pink. "There." She said, triumphantly. "There's my proof. We never promised to deliver that data that early."
"Yes you did. It's perfectly clear, right there. Should deliver by 1 February."
"Exactly," Penny countered. "It doesn't say we will, but only that we should. And we did try. But you computer people apparently don't appreciate the difficulty of getting every single one of those prices signed off by every person involved."
Well, I eventually got things cooled down, and we moved from blaming to problem-solving, but not before I extracted a promise from both parties to attend a little workshop I designed for them. I designed the workshop because I didn't want to have to come back the next summer when they ran into the same problem—a lack of understanding of the ambiguity of the English language. The following are some excerpts from that workshop:
Should
I started the workshop with focus of their original problem, the nasty little word, "should." Jeff read the original statement as
The Catalog Department [must] deliver component pricing data by 1 February to the IT Department.
Penny, however, interpreted the "should" differently, as
The Catalog Department [will make every effort to] deliver component pricing data by 1 February to the IT Department.
What I taught them was a safer meaning, of "should" would be "probably won't," so the sentence reads,
The Catalog Department [probably won't] deliver component pricing data by 1 February to the IT Department.
"Oh," said Jeff, "if I'd realized that, we could have designed the project differently. Could Catalog have delivered parts of the pricing data by February 1?"
"Sure," said Penny. "We actually had about 90% of it by then, but that last 10%—mostly new items—took all the work."
"Ah. If only we'd known. We didn't need the entire table to proceed. Okay, next time we'll just let you know what we really need."
Just
Jeff had given me the perfect opening for the next lesson. "Sorry, Jeff," I said. That won't do."
"Why not?"
"Because you've managed to sneak in another one of those discounting words."
"What word?"
"Just." I went to the whiteboard and wrote what he said:
"Next time we'll just let you know what we really need."
"Now, what's the difference between that sentence and this one? I wrote:
"Next time we'll let you know what we really need."