A little bit of a confession. I am just as guilty as any other consultant. I love putting things into lists. I love putting things into buckets. A lot of times the running joke, of course, is that any consultant will tell you that the answer to any problem is three things. It's true. Consultants are really good at breaking down complex problems and trying to make them simple. You might remember this picture or this slide from the very beginning of this specialization where we said that consultants by enlarge, they're in the business of helping executives to break down problems and make very difficult decisions and make change. One, that seems complicated. Number 2, that seems ambitious. Number 3, it seems like a lot of moving parts. That's exactly why consultants pride themselves on being very logically structured. Now, let's agree that consultants, we don't have a monopoly and all the good ideas and resources. Just not true. Clients are very savvy. They've lived in their business a lot longer than you have as a consultant. A lot of ex-consultants actually work at the client site. It's very common for your client executive to be an ex-consultant. Basically, they know all your tips and tricks already. What a consultant actually uniquely has to their advantage are things shown with the yellow triangles; being an outsider, being objective, being logical, being willing to do the hard work and do the analysis. Here at the bottom, you can see the green cap, which are the graduates, recently graduated, undergrad or MBA's. This is exactly the reason why they have this thing called the case interview. For those of you who maybe are already in corporate America, you're in the blue latter category and you didn't do a case interview. Basically, a case interview, the interviewer comes in and gives you a situation, and they recreate an environment where you're actually interviewing them. Not knowing much about the situation, in 25 or 30 minutes, you need to basically crack the case, and you need to figure out what's important, what's not important, and basically, how do you go through solving that problem. Once again, the areas that consultants are strongest in are objectivity, logic, and analysis. If you think maybe more broadly, not even in a consulting setting, look at this diagram of building a house. Building a house is not a simple thing. There's wood, there's plumbing, there's concrete, there's masonry, there's drywall. Even on the right-hand side, you actually have to pick out the granite color and the wall paint, so a lot of moving parts. Logical structuring sounds like something super fancy, but it's really nothing more than trying to think from the beginning to the very end of what this problem is. What I would say is for the red airplane, the solo consultants, the entrepreneurs out there, you're pretty good at what you do. You've been in this industry for a while. You've seen this problem before. The area that I feel that a lot of the solo consultants that I know, the area that they're weakest in is they may know the answer, but they're not so good at logically structuring out the project, and making it easy for other people to understand. What does happen sometimes is if you're really used to working by yourself, you know the answer, but you're not documenting stuff. You know the answer, but if somebody asked you, you come across as a little bit disorganized. The challenge I have for the red airplanes, the solos, the entrepreneurs is push yourself to be a little bit more structured so that if somebody were to just pick up your project plan, they would actually know what the next step is. Here's an anti example. Consultants confused, not really clear on the problem, A or B, not very clear on what the solutions could be to you. What happens when you have a poorly structured problem statement? It can lead to overwork because we don't know where we're looking, we don't know what we're looking for. You have consultants working on nights and the weekends, people are getting stressed. It can also be rework. Because we weren't clear about that stuff, we have to redo the analysis. Also, no good. When you're doing rework and you are working too hard, you end up missing deadlines, making mistakes, getting a little sloppy and that ends also with very unhappy clients. No Bueno, no good. What does this look like on the solution side? Maybe you've done the problem breakdown very well. You got the data, you did the analysis, you have hypotheses, it's all pretty good. The left-hand side of the page is fine, but now we're at the right-hand side of the page. This is really where the client scrutiny comes in, where since you haven't been very smart and clear and succinct and structured in the way that you've actually communicated it with the client As a result of that, the client is understandably a little bit resistant. They're like, "I guess that makes sense." Or they might say, "Explain that to me again because I don't understand." Or what sometimes happens is they don't really believe you. They're like, "Well, I don't think that's what the data says." Those are all bad outcomes when you just haven't been maybe as logically structured and clear and operationally transparent to the client as you could have been. Once again, on the left-hand side of the screen, you'll want to be smart and thoughtful just so you can organize your work and get it done quickly and high quality. On the left-hand side of the screen, you want to be organized and logical just so you don't lose the client. Because if you do great work and the client doesn't buy into it, you're actually just taking two steps back. A couple of ways that you may practice being logically structured. Because being logically structured sounds like a nerdy, geeky thing. But it doesn't have to be. Here are some very simple ways that you might be able to do that. Whether it's an email that you send or your emails easy to understand. When you call the client or the conversations very clear or you making it obvious what you're asking the client to do or find out, even in your conversations, are you doing answer first? When you have a conversation, do you find that for some weird reason, what should be a three-minute conversation goes 15 minutes. That means you're not being clear, you're not being efficient, you're confusing the other person. That same thing happens when you're gathering data and you're asking for data from the client site, do you have to ask and then ask and then ask? Or are you doing a really good job of organizing it and just sending it to them onetime only? Same thing with meetings. Are you finding that when you hold a meeting, you're inviting too many people and they're bored and they think it's a waste of time? Or are your meetings really well put together where they actually end early? People say, John, good use of our time. The last two things are maybe a little bit more serious and a little bit more formal. But if you are proposing work or putting together a statement of work for a future Client, is it easy to read? Is it easy for them to say, "You really understood us. You really are listening to us. Yes, we'd like to hire you." Then finally with presentations, just like this presentation here. Is it clean? Is it easy to follow? Are you getting lost? Or is the audience really following you every time you go along? I had lunch with a partner from one of the big four. When I say big four, it's Deloitte, ENY, KPMG, and PWC. I had lunch with a very senior partner at one of the big for about two years ago. We're talking about this and that. What he said was clear thinking is rare and it's very attractive. All for to say is that I love for you, even in the emails that you write or even in the conversations that you have with clients, anything that you do, try to spend a little bit more time thinking about, how can I do this in a very thoughtful and logical way that makes it very easy for people to understand what I mean? For key takeaways, one is, every project has a start, a middle, and an end. The reason I say that is, if you want to be logically structured in a project, there's some things that you're always going to see at the beginning of a project, like a kickoff meeting or doing research. There's always the same things that you're going to see at the end of a project. Having a final deliverable or knocking on doors and showing people, "Hey, we have a final deliverable next week, we wanted to share it with you." If you knew that every project has a start, a middle, and an end, and you know the kind of activities that you're going to be doing, that's an opportunity for you to think ahead. What should I be doing tomorrow? What should I be doing next week? One thing I tell consultants all the time is your goal is to really be two steps ahead of your client and one step ahead of your manager. If you can really anticipate the question that your manager would ask you tomorrow or anticipate the question that your client might ask you on your next phone call , you're going to be in great shape. Once again, practice logic and clarity all the time. You don't have to make it a very difficult thing. But even when you're organizing things, like your grocery list, for example, put all the vegetables together, put all the proteins together. Find ways to make your life a little bit easier by putting things into buckets. Then even with the meetings that you hold, is there any way that you can not have the meeting by doing something by email very effectively? Is there a way for you to ensure that the right people get to the meeting? Can you run a meeting and have the meeting end early? Those are all leading indicators that you're actually thinking and you're being very thoughtful with people's time. The last point is something that we're going to learn in this course and also you can learn it in many other places on Coursera. There are a lot of tools around project management and lean Six Sigma and running teams. There are tools that you can learn to use in your practice that keep both you and your team and the client on track.
