Ancient Wisdom for Modern Consultants: Discovering Jerry Weinberg's Secrets
We dive into the intriguing world of consulting wisdom inspired by Gerald M. Weinberg's classic book, "Secrets of Consulting." The main takeaway is Weinberg's "third time charm law," which suggests that consultants are most effective on the third project with a client, as trust and understanding build over time. We also explore the importance of seeing what isn't there, encouraging consultants to look beyond the obvious and ask deeper questions to uncover valuable insights. With a blend of humor and practical advice, we reflect on our own consulting experiences and the dynamics of client relationships. Join us for an engaging discussion that promises to enhance your consulting journey and add a little humanity to your work!
Transcript
Welcome to Consulting for Humans, a podcast all about life in consulting.
Mike:You're with Mike and with Ian, and in each episode, we shine a light on a topic that gets to the heart of what makes consultants happy and successful.
Ian:On the Consulting for Humans podcast, it's our mission to add a little more humanity to the lives of consultants.
Ian:We love to bring some of the skills and perspectives of consulting to human lives, too.
Ian:So, Mike, tell us a bit about what we humans are going to be talking about in our episode today.
Mike:Well, today we're going to uncover some ancient wisdom.
Mike:The secrets of.
Mike:Of consulting.
Mike:Yeah, this.
Ian:This has a kind of Indiana Jones ring to it here.
Ian:Mike, maybe we should just say a little bit more.
Ian: kshelf, right, dating back to: Ian:Weinberg's book, the Secrets of Consulting, A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully.
Ian:And you and I were kicking around some ideas for new podcast episodes.
Ian:By the way, we came up with an idea for some new and forthcoming consulting books that we're going to talk about, but more on that later.
Ian:But having lit upon really great old book, we thought, why not talk about it in the show?
Ian:So, Mike, you and I've been talking about this book.
Ian:We realized that there are lots of great ideas in it that might be intriguing for our listeners and also for us.
Ian:Tell us a bit about who Jerry Weinberg was and how come his book found its way onto your shelf.
Mike:Well, it's fascinating.
Mike:I've got a consulting library on my shelf, most of which got there because they look like they belong in a consulting library.
Mike:I happened to pass by the Secrets of Consulting, and probably wouldn't it have given it much of a glance, except it said Forward by Virginia Satir?
Mike:So that immediately I thought, wait, wait, I know Virginia Satir.
Mike:What's she got to do with consulting?
Mike:So wind back for a second.
Mike:What I did.
Mike:I didn't know Jerry Weinberg at all, which is probably one of the reasons that I walked past it.
Mike:And if I had just read about Jerry Weinberg, I probably would have continued to walk past this.
Mike:I mean, he was really known as an American computer scientist, a software engineer.
Mike:He did write a book called the Psychology of Software Engineering or the Psychology of Computer Programming.
Mike:Now, had I seen his other probably most famous book, Introduction to General Systems Thinking, that I probably just swung back around for, because I love systems thinking ideas.
Mike:However, Virginia Satir, I got introduced to in sociology, she's known as the Mother of Family Therapy.
Mike:I mean, her People Making book came out Right as I was hitting my psychology, sociology, religion, all my people core oriented courses, philosophy, and just digging in deep here.
Mike: s and the: Mike:So she had done this amazing thing from family systems therapy to organizational change based upon changes in family systems systems thinking.
Mike:And Jerry Weinberg, it turns out, is also a guy who's thought a lot about the psychology and the anthropology not only of computer software development, but of consulting in that field, which he has generalized to consulting more generally.
Mike:As a matter of fact, I remember finding myself reading this thinking, I really love some of these insights.
Mike:It's all these people insights.
Mike:Ah, this relates to management consulting.
Mike:But then realizing, wait a minute, he's a computer consultant and why is he so deep into all this people stuff?
Mike:So really fascinating combination of things.
Mike:And there are some parts about how it's written that we found particularly endearing and thought you would as well.
Ian:Absolutely.
Ian:It's funny, it's packed with all these aphorisms and folksy sounding pieces of wisdom.
Ian:It's packed with things that he labels as laws and theories and rules and of course, secrets, all with capital letters.
Ian:And they're funny and we think that you'll love them.
Ian:And if we're thinking about consulting for humans, what better combination to look for than a computer scientist and a social scientist?
Ian:Here we go.
Ian:Mike, there's so much to dip into in this book, but I think we're going to talk about two in particular.
Ian:First of all, we're going to dig into Weinberg's third time charm law.
Ian:I'll say it again, his third time charm law, which is going to sound like an oddly specific forecast of which consulting projects are going to be most effective, but actually has some really profound ramifications for the human side of the relationship between consultants on clients.
Mike:Right.
Mike:We're also going to talk about his instruction to see what isn't there, which again, sounds a little obtuse or perhaps a little Zen like, but it leads to all kinds of great advice for humans who want to be great consultants.
Mike:And if we have some additional time, perhaps we can pick up on a few more bits of advice from his book or eventually maybe lead to his second book in consulting.
Ian:Wow.
Ian:Okay.
Ian:Well, having scratched the surface of Weinberg's consulting secrets in this episode, of course, in the Luminaries episode, we're going to go below the Surface a little bit.
Ian:If you want to join us in the luminaries tier, we'll be talking through a whole other set of wise sayings from Jerry Weinberg, including talking about how consultants can learn from doctors and just possibly vice versa.
Ian:But that's all for the future.
Ian:Mike, let's get into it.
Ian:Tell us then, what all is Weinberg's third time charm law?
Mike:Yeah, this is great stuff.
Mike:So just simply put from the text, consultants tend to be most effective on the third problem you give them.
Mike:So this idea that perhaps this fundamental truth that the effectiveness of a consultant is partly measured by their domain knowledge, and let's face it, that tends to be the lowest when we're working with the new client for the first time.
Mike:And perhaps even more importantly, by the willingness of the client to consider the consultant's more challenging ideas, which oftentimes is based on trust.
Mike:Also pretty thin at first, builds up over time and by the willingness of the consultant to be more challenging with their ideas, again based on trust.
Mike:But trust going the other way.
Ian:Right.
Ian:So the third project might be the one where the consultants have learned enough and the clients and the consultants are starting to trust each other enough that you can do the best, the most effective work.
Ian:I love the way he chose this word effective as well, because it's quite specific.
Ian:That doesn't mean that the third project is the one where you'll come up with the best analysis.
Ian:It doesn't mean that that's the one where you'll be fastest to some kind of a solution.
Ian:It's.
Ian:It might not mean that for the consulting firm, the third project is the most profitable.
Ian:Although, to be honest, I would hope it would be.
Ian:I would hope that by the time we're on our third engagement letter, we've learned how to make a profit doing the kind of work that this particular client values.
Ian:But anyhow, I love this idea that the third one is the most effective.
Ian:That sounds like good news, Mike, if you consider that there's a reward for both the consultant and the client for sticking with it and learning about each other and learning about the problems.
Ian:But the corollary of this is that maybe the fourth, fifth and sixth projects have the risk that they might not be so effective, that there's a time limit to how effective and how applicable our knowledge is.
Mike:Yeah.
Mike:I can't help but wonder, Ian, if sometimes the third project is as far as you can get and still maintain a stable core team on the consultant side and on the client side.
Mike:So perhaps part of this is related to the fact that after this third project, people and situations start to move on and it's never quite as good as it was the third time.
Ian:Right.
Ian:And maybe by that third time, the mix of people has got to be the best that it can be as well.
Ian:You know, thinking about some of the language from our earlier shows between us and the client, we've got a compatible mix of talkers and listeners and confident folks and humble folks and certainty cravers and ambiguity surfers and it's all just starting to gel.
Ian:And I can certainly think of consulting projects where you feel great that they know us, they trust us, we're doing our best work.
Ian:All of our people are still enjoying that.
Ian:We don't feel like we're attached to this client by a ball and chain, yet we're all enjoying the fact that our work is appreciated.
Ian:And it's a really, really great moment in your career.
Ian:And it's a great moment in the evolution of the relationship.
Ian:Presumably by this stage as well.
Ian:The partner is getting happy because they're starting to see an account forming and they're starting to make a plan for next year and they're using words like annuity and forward load and all this kind of stuff as well.
Mike:Well, it's so true.
Mike:I mean, our teams particularly early on were all on site, so we always were headed to remote parts of the states or remote parts of the world.
Mike:We were camping out for a long time and part of human nature was we just wanted to go home.
Mike:And sometimes we kind of wanted to get on to something new and different.
Mike:But we really realized, you know, the cost of sell on opportunities was much lower once you got to know somebody and could see a lot of the stuff we've been talking about starting to build up and getting much better returns, not just financially, but in terms of adding value to the client out of it.
Mike:So we really tried to build a core culture of preparing to stay, not preparing to leave.
Ian:Yeah.
Mike:But it may run counter to some of what the client's thinking.
Ian:I loved as well the fact that Weinberg writes this advice directs it at clients.
Ian:Your consultants will be most effective on the third project that you give them, which is great.
Ian:I love the empathy for the clients that's implied here.
Ian:But there's a bit of a paradox there if you think about how the decision to switch consulting providers sometimes goes.
Ian:I think a reason that is often given when clients say they're going to switch from their incumbent consultant or advisor to a new one is often that they say, oh, well, we need Some fresh ideas.
Ian:We need some fresh thinking.
Ian:So we're going to get a new team and a new set of brains to work on a new version of the problem.
Ian:And Weinberg's third time charm rule actually says that's a bit of a fallacy.
Ian:That expectation may not be met because when you hire a new consultant to look at your problems, it's going to take them three projects to get up to speed with you and you with them.
Ian:So maybe actually recruiting a new consulting team to generate new ideas isn't going to generate the kind of return that you get.
Ian:It'll certainly generate some attention and friction and churn and more PowerPoint slides and a new set of personalities to deal with.
Ian:And of course that's going to feel like progress.
Ian:You might get lucky and your consultants might hit upon something new that the other folks have been missing.
Ian:But I think there's a trap here.
Ian:Consultants who are walking in going, hey, we've bussed into the world that the incumbents previously had and we're the new kids on the block and we're going to show you all our fancy stuff.
Ian:Trying to impress a new client with the freshness of our ideas is a bit of a false hope.
Ian:You know, we're not going to be welcomed or trusted in quite the way that they expect, and therefore our fresh ideas are not yet going to land on fertile soil.
Ian:I think that's quite a good, sobering perspective for consultants who get excited about new accounts.
Ian:What do you think?
Mike:Yeah, I agree.
Mike:And it hopefully will tell us something.
Mike:If we're the firm that's on our third project, maybe, you know, we could do something besides say, oh, let's all enjoy this third project and appreciate the rewards because it's downhill from here.
Mike:Maybe it says that this third project's exactly the right moment to have a wide ranging and candid client satisfaction review, not just the typical end of project survey.
Mike:Maybe it's a great time to start to introduce some new changes in the account team on the consultant side.
Mike:Maybe it's a great moment, if you haven't done so already, to start asking about introductions to other parts of the client organization, because the same kinds of things that have made you more effective with this client will likely start to have been building a foundation for you to be more successful across this organization.
Mike:And nothing quite succeeds like success.
Ian:It's really great.
Ian:I love this idea that there's a little hidden peak of interest and also risk at project number three.
Ian:It's not so difficult to get three projects in a Row.
Ian:But it does take some success and concentration to get beyond three projects and to get a real account relationship opened up.
Ian:I think this is a really great new way of thinking about the evolution of the relationship.
Ian:We've learned that the third time really can be the charm, but it could also be a risk.
Ian:What else has Weinberg got for us, Mike?
Mike:One of our other favorites was See what Isn't There.
Mike:See what Isn't There.
Mike:And this, I think this perhaps is a little bit of an anecdote to something we were talking about last time.
Ian:Well, it's funny, we were talking about when to jump in and how sometimes consultants get a little bit overexcited by all the things they have to say.
Ian:We talked about the Anx parade of knowledge.
Ian:And this advice from Weinberg to look for what's not there is quite a good antidote, maybe even a remedy to this anxiety that we have to parade everything that we know, everything that we found out about all of the steps in our process, if you like, or all of the topics in our topic list.
Ian:Mike, a really good friend, a colleague of ours, Tish.
Ian:Hello, Tish.
Ian:If you're listening, one of the habits that Tish has that I admire the most is that at the end of any conversation with a client, she'll always ask a what else Question, like, what have we not talked about?
Ian:Or even she'll say to the client, what are you surprised that we have not mentioned yet?
Ian:And so many times in conversations that has dug up some real gems.
Ian:And I think reminding ourselves all the time to be dissatisfied, that we might have missed something.
Ian:However good our work process is, I think that's a really good little bit of conscience to have working away at the back of our minds.
Mike:We're reaching back in time to this book.
Mike:I'm gonna reach back in time to a television series, Detective Columbo.
Mike:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Mike:And I always love that question at the very end of Columbo's.
Mike:And it reminds me a lot of Tish's the way she ends those conversations or those interviews.
Mike:It's really fascinating to me that in the Columbo series he would always be interviewing a potential suspect or something, and it would all go there, and it went routine.
Mike:And he'd be putting on his jacket or something, and you could almost see that person relax, okay, it's done.
Mike:Wow.
Mike:And then he'd say, oh, so just one more thing.
Mike:And kind of the way that Tish does that.
Mike:And I think perhaps what happens a little bit is the interviewee's Mind has relaxed, it opens up, it's a little more unguarded, it's a little more off script.
Mike:And that's when perhaps they, as well as we can start to see what isn't there by stepping away, by taking that pause.
Ian:And Columbo, by.
Ian:By the way, Mike, a guy that even you and me are better looking than Columbo.
Ian:Right.
Mike:But not as well skilled in interviewing.
Mike:He does that great.
Mike:Just so simple, easy, it's all there.
Mike:Ah, this guy isn't really zing.
Ian:Yeah.
Ian:And of course, we as outsiders see it as a trap, but to the people that he's talking to, it's quite a nice kind of empathetic, but quirky moment.
Mike:Right.
Ian:And it talks about a personality.
Ian:And I like to get into this idea of personalities.
Ian:The ideal consultant could therefore be one who can play a little bit like Columbo.
Ian:The person who's going to spot the missing thing is probably not everybody's best buddy, is probably not the smooth extrovert.
Ian:This is going to be somebody who's colleagues might charitably call them a maverick or who might more realistically call them a royal pain in the ass.
Ian:You need somebody on your team who's going to say, hold on a second.
Ian:Let's look outside the boundary of what we've been talking about so far.
Ian:Because that one extra thing might be the little extra perspective that opens up the project.
Ian:That means, for example, if everybody else has been thinking very logically and rationally and serially, then the person who'll help us right now is somebody who's irrational and a little bit random and unstructured.
Mike:Yeah.
Mike:And I think sometimes this is like a lot of people who are thinking rationally and serially, and a lot of the people whose thinking have shut down a little bit are the people who are so close to the problem, they're perhaps a little stuck in thinking and perceiving and looking outside.
Mike:And perhaps that maverick, if you will, or sometimes that royal pain in the ass is that person who is seen a little bit off kilter, but who actually starts to see what isn't there.
Ian:Right.
Ian:Which takes us all the way back, Mike, to our idea of perfect consultant.
Ian:Analytical or creative?
Ian:Well, the answer is partly here.
Ian:Analytical, but in a creative way, with a creative perspective.
Mike:Right.
Mike:Certainty and ambiguity.
Ian:This also gives us a lesson for our consulting work process.
Ian:If you go to the next level up, seeing what isn't there needs us to not get too excited about the completeness and perfection of our own work process, that can actually be a Blind spot for us.
Ian:Right.
Ian:And the advice here from Jerry Weinberg supports the notion that consulting teams and problem solving teams need to have cognitive diversity.
Ian: And the book is from the: Ian: at's absolutely current in the: Ian:We need people with a different perspective, with a different experience, with a different point of view about a problem in order to bring a new perspective.
Ian:Having a consulting process is not a bad thing.
Ian:We just need to be aware of its limitations, and we need to be aware of the impact of the kinds of people that we recruit into our consulting projects and that we should not look too much for today to be a replication of yesterday.
Ian:There's a famous saying, also referred to, I think, in Jerry Weinberg's book, that when you're a consultant, you have a hammer.
Ian:And when you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.
Ian:So maybe we need to add a couple of new things to our toolkit.
Mike:Well, and it's funny.
Mike:I remember so much of Jerry's stuff is paradox and a little satire and some joking, but it's so true.
Mike:So I had a team once that was really good at this thing.
Mike:It's like, okay, ah, we have a hammer.
Mike:Everything's a nail.
Mike:Ooh, look, we came across a bolt in this one.
Mike:You know what?
Mike:We're going to extend our methodology and add wrenches to it.
Mike:And we did a lot of learning and harvesting from every engagement until we had this incredibly long and complex methodology.
Mike:And we had to start now, balancing the paradox of.
Mike:Boy, we're so comprehensive, but we can't do all of this every time.
Mike:So how do we.
Mike:So the pendulum comes and the pendulum goes back.
Ian:Brilliant, Mike.
Ian:I've really loved digging into this book from Weinberg.
Ian:It's now on my Airplanes and Trains reading list.
Ian:I should have a copy by the.
Ian:Yeah.
Ian:I don't like to talk.
Ian:I don't like to go this crude.
Ian:But next to the loo, right?
Ian:I need to have a copy of this because you can dig into it.
Ian:So much of it.
Ian:It's funny and apposite and useful.
Ian:It's on Kindle.
Ian:It's in hardcover and soft cover.
Ian:You can still get it out there.
Ian:Sadly, there's not much web content from Jerry Weinberg.
Ian:He passed away a few years ago.
Ian:But there are some bits and pieces out there.
Ian:Mike, though there's more than just this one book, right?
Ian:What comes next in what Jerry Weinberg wrote about these topics.
Mike:It's fascinating.
Mike:I didn't realize until we got to talking about this book that he had, in fact, some years later, written More Consulting Secrets.
Mike:More Secrets of Consulting.
Mike:And interestingly, he had the same foreword for that book as he had for the first book from Virginia Satir, but he added one more forward.
Mike:And he was trying to say, this should not be thought of as a sequel.
Mike:This should be thought of as all the part of one main work.
Mike:So he had Virginia Satir's forward, and he had his forward saying this, in which he said, when I wrote the first book, I had started to get interested in and going through Virginia Satir's work, and I realized that some of my thinking, you know, paralleled her.
Mike:Well, between then and now, I've become very involved in her work.
Mike:And a lot of this content has evolved because of applying it and learning more deeply about what she was saying.
Mike:And so there's still.
Mike:It's still funny, there's still more laws.
Mike:And for those of you who have read that or when you first read it, you will read about spreading raspberry jam too thin.
Mike:So the opening, if you will, metaphor of book one is rewritten with an additional metaphor that continues upon it.
Mike:Because it's like the more you talk about these things and the more you go to a wider audience, the more you spread it thin, you can't spread it as thick.
Mike:So he's like, so why have a second book?
Mike:Well, because I realized there's also strawberry jelly, not just raspberry.
Mike:And no matter how thin you spread it, there's still really good lumps.
Mike:So, you know, maybe one day we'll circle back to the lumps of book two, maybe.
Ian:That would be fantastic.
Ian: plan in the month of February: Ian:We've got a list of book launches coming up this year.
Ian:We're going to put it up on our socials, particularly on LinkedIn.
Ian:If you go to the Consulting for Humans podcast group on LinkedIn, if you're not already a member, please join.
Ian:We'll post that list of books and help us pick one or two that Mike and I can take a look at and review and digest a little bit on your behalf.
Mike:And you may have spotted some coming that we haven't seen yet.
Mike:So we would love to hear from you.
Mike:Ah, now here's one I'm really interested in, or I've already read an advanced copy of that sort of thing.
Mike:So by all means, we want to keep diving forward in time, current time, and backward in time to pick out some of the best secrets for Consulting for humans.
Ian:Absolutely.
Ian:So you know where to find us.
Ian:Please tell us about those thoughts and those ideas.
Ian:Meanwhile, don't forget the Luminaries episode has advice from deeper in Jerry Weinberg's book, advice from someone called Dr.
Ian:Marvin.
Ian:And you're going to have to listen to find out more about Dr.
Ian:Marvin.
Ian:Let's just say that your seven day free trial of the Luminaries tier will be particularly worthwhile this week.
Mike:Thanks for listening.
Mike:Please join us again next time on the Consulting for Humans Podcast.
Mike:The Consulting for Humans Podcast is brought to you by P31 Consulting.
