Category: Advising Professionals

Who Needs What?

on By

In October of 1962, through a series of backchannel negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis came to an end when Attorney General Robert Kennedy met with Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin to broker a deal involving the removal of US missiles in Turkey. The US had planned to decommission the missiles in Turkey anyway, but including the removal of the missiles as part of the settlement allowed Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev to privately claim to officials in the Kremlin that he had won a concession from the US. The solution worked because it satisfied a web of needs and interests.

In my last blog post I described distinctions among three groups of stakeholders that we often consider as having homogeneous needs and interests: the consumer, the client and the customer. I defined consumers as the group who ultimately adopts a solution, the client as the individual requesting a solution, and the customer as the individual or group who authorizes or pays for the solution. I suggested that those of us in the business of designing solutions would be well served by paying attention to the distinctions.

Since presenting the distinctions at a community forum for learning and development leaders, I’ve had several conversations about the differences among customers, consumers, and clients, all of which suggest to me broader applicability of the concept. For example, in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Kennedy brothers and their advisors crafted a solution. The solution worked because the customer, Khrushchev (who authorized the solution) needed the consumers of the solution (The Kremlin officials including Khrushchev) to get something they needed (a demonstration of their sovereignty). The client, Dobrynin acting on behalf of the customer, requested and helped shape the solution.

Human centered design, but which humans?

For the last several years organizations have focused attention on helping their leaders become more innovative. Design thinking has been the methodology of choice for teaching leaders how to spur innovation. Design thinking is founded on the premise that innovative solutions depend on insights about people and their needs. Until an interesting idea or new invention gets adopted by people who see it as a way to get their needs met, you may have a novel creation, but you don’t have an innovation.

I now see that one of the challenges I have encountered in translating design thinking for organizational leaders has been assuming that the customer, the client, and the consumer all want the same thing. If you’re designing a consumer product for, say a packaged goods company, the client (who asked for your help) and the customer (the functional leader whose budget will pay for your help) want you to focus on the needs of the consumer. For the most part the interests of the client, customer, and consumer are shared.

If you’re designing a new manufacturing process, the needs of the client (my boss put me in charge of this project), the needs of the customer (my bonus depends on increasing throughput by 10%) and the needs of the consumer (The company is changing the way I do my job) may create a misalignment of interests.

Design thinking means starting with people and their needs, but it’s not always obvious which people to start with. When tensions exist between needs, whose needs take priority?

Three Examples

An HR business partner asks you to coach a leader

In this case, your client is the HR business partner. The consumer is the leader getting coached. The customer may not be obvious. Maybe the leader’s manager came to the HR business partner asking for help. On the other hand, someone responsible for talent development may have identified the leader as ready for promotion and sees coaching as a tool to prepare the leader for new challenges. If you don’t consider the needs of the person authorizing the coaching request, you may be missing important context for your coaching conversations.

A leader requests a training program for her team

In this case your client and your customer are the same person. The consumers are the team members being asked to attend a training program. If you develop a training solution by assuming that the needs of the customer are aligned with the needs of the consumers, your well-crafted instructional design may fall on deaf ears.

An executive team asks for an update on a project you’re leading

Your manager requested that you put together a few slides on the project and present at the next executive team staff meeting. The manager is your client. The executive team is both customer and consumer. They authorized the solution (your presentation) and they will use (as consumers) the information you present. It would be easy in this case to ignore the needs of your manager. After all, your manager reports to one of the executives you’ll be presenting to.  On the other hand, your manager reports to one of the executive you’ll be presenting to! What are the consequences of ignoring your managers unexpressed needs when designing your presentation? In what ways does the presentation represent an opportunity for you and your manager?

Consider a challenge you’re currently working on. Who asked you to take on the challenge? Who, ultimately will authorize and/or pay for your recommended solution? Who will need to alter their behavior in order to adopt your solution? To what extent are three stakeholder groups’ needs aligned?

A Customer, a Client, and a Consumer Walk into a Bar…

on By 2 Comments

The consumer said to the customer, “I could really use a cognac.” The customer told the client, “I can only afford a beer.” The client asked the bartender, “What do you have that tastes like a cognac for the price of a beer?”

If, like the bartender you sell solutions (sorry), some off-the-shelf and some customized, you would be well served (again, my apologies) to recognize the difference between the needs of a client, a customer and a consumer. In the case of an actual bar, the three roles reside most often in a single thirsty person with money. When it comes to pitching organizational solutions, the roles are spread out and sometimes obscure.

Let me stop belaboring the metaphor and define my terms. I will use the example of selling learning solutions, but the same distinctions apply whether you design and deliver technology solutions, organizational change solutions or solutions in the form of expert advice.

Consumer (of a learning solution): The learner or participant in a learning process

Customer (of a learning solution): The person(s) who will fund the design and delivery of the learning solution sometimes called, “the sponsor.” By “fund” I mean they are literally paying for the solution or have decision-making authority to direct resources to the design and delivery of the solution.

Client (of a learning solution): The person authorized by the customer to identify solution providers and work with solution providers to get the solution designed and delivered.

When responding to requests for learning solutions, we often presume that the client and customer have equivalent or at least aligned needs and interests. We also presume that chief among their interests are meeting the learning needs of the consumer.

Often, and especially in larger organizations, neither the client nor the customer will receive the learning solution. Furthermore, the client is often more beholden to the customer than the consumer even though they are making design decisions on behalf of the consumer. If you want to increase the odds of having your solutions see the light of day, you’ll want to identify who is listening to your proposals as a client, who is listening as a customer and who is listening as a consumer.

Here are some questions you can pose to better understand the needs of each role:

Questions for the Customer

  • How will successful implementation of the solution support your priorities and commitments?
  • What do you most fear could go wrong if we miss something important when designing or delivering the solution?

Questions for the Client

  • How does getting this solution implemented relate to your organizational responsibilities?
  • Who in the organization is approving resources for (paying for) this solution? How will they decide if you have served them well?

Questions for the Consumer

  • How do you experience the problem we’ve been asked to solve?
  • Describe the type of solutions you find most helpful and easiest to adopt?

Ideally the needs of the customer, the client and the consumer of your solutions overlap. If not, you may need to dig deeper to find areas of shared interest. Otherwise, the consumer will be served something they don’t want, the customer will only focus on the budget and the client will give you mixed signals as you try to concoct a suitable solution.

How to Scope a Business Leader’s request without being Annoying

on By

A leader walks into a bar. She says to the bartender, “I’ll have a beer.” The bartender replies, “What problem are you trying to solve?” The leader walks out.

A couple of weeks ago, I worked with an aerospace company whose Human Resources department was shifting to a new service delivery model. Like many HR departments, they want to alter the way line leaders see the role of HR and make use of HR services. For the last several years, HR departments in large organizations have restructured, retooled and retrained so that business leaders stop viewing HR professionals as order takers and start collaborating with them as strategic business partners.

HR professionals aren’t the only experts who feel constrained by requests from decision makers. IT professionals are often asked to build solutions without due consideration of systemic impacts or even a conversation about more efficient non-technical options. I had breakfast with a marketing professional the other day who was working on a new template for creative briefs submitted by internal clients requesting design support. Her team felt the template needed updating so that business leaders stop submitting lists of specifications and instead describe desired impressions and the intended audience.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Consultants have been taught to ask their clients, “What problem are you trying to solve?” as a way to shift the conversation away from order taking. Asking about the nature of the problem rather than discussing how to implement a request allows the expert to problem-solve with the leader rather than simply enact the leader’s solution. Programs, task teams and new processes that originate from uncritically implementing a business leader’s request, often result in wasteful activity and misaligned priorities. After all, even if you are experiencing familiar symptoms and you tell your doctor you need an antibiotic, you can bet that the doctor is going to ask a few questions and conduct a few tests before writing the prescription.

In theory, it makes perfect sense to slow leaders down to ensure the right problem gets solved. We want to make full use of our functional experts who may have interesting perspectives or an alternative the leader hadn’t considered. At the very least, a functional expert can gather data so that leaders make informed decisions before taking action.

In practice, many leaders feel as though they have given due consideration to their situation and feel confident about the efficacy of their request. As Peter Block pointed out decades ago in his pioneering work Flawless Consulting, the consultant might want to establish a collaborative relationship with the client, but the client might simply want an extra pair of hands to get work done. Some people who walk into a bar want a suggestion from the bartender. Some people know what they want. The best bartenders know the difference.

Try This

The next time you find yourself across the desk from a leader placing an order for a solution and all the while you’re thinking, “That won’t work,” buy yourself a little time to plan a scoping conversation by making the following proposal: I’d like to schedule 30 minutes with you to learn more, so that I don’t make the wrong assumptions about what needs to be done.

Design the scoping conversation around four questions. The questions make use of the Unstuck Minds Compass model and will help ensure that you walk away from the scoping conversation with an agreement on the strategic question that will guide the work.

As an example, let’s say the head of a manufacturing group made the following request, “I want to put all of my supervisors through diversity training.”

1. Contextual Inquiry: What’s changing?

You will need to understand the leader’s motivation for investing time, energy and resources to change the current situation. In particular, you’ll want to know whether the need has been building over time or if it’s in response to something new. Listen for and ask about factors outside of the leader’s functional area.

For our example, you might learn that the leader has been hearing about sensitivities of younger workers to things like implicit bias. Perhaps the leader has been paying attention to media coverage of topics like “White Privilege” and the “Me Too movement.” The leader may also be thinking about demographic shifts creating a wide range of generations all working together in a manufacturing facility.

2. Critical Inquiry: What’s holding things in place?

Next, you’ll need to learn about aspects of the current situation that have become the source of dissatisfaction. Given what you learned about what’s changing, what is it about the status quo that has become unsustainable? What existing habits or routines will create tensions between the way things are and the way things are going?

For our example, you might learn that many of the plants have inadequate locker room facilities for women. You might hear a story about an argument that broke out about which cable news channel was being broadcast in a break room. Maybe the leader received an anonymous complaint about a plant supervisor who starts his weekly safety meetings with a prayer.

3. Collaborative Inquiry: Whom will we organize around?

Now that you understand the context of the situation and its relationship to the status quo, it’s time to focus the assignment. Any solution that depends upon people altering their behavior must consider the specific population being asked to change and how the change connects to their needs.

In our example, we might determine that focusing on all people managers in the manufacturing group makes the most sense. Maybe we learn that there is a wide disparity of comfort with the topic of diversity and inclusion among the managers. Deeper inquiry might reveal undercurrents of resentment and feelings of injustice below the surface of discussions about how we include and exclude people based on the circumstances of their identity.

4. Creative Inquiry: What question will guide our work?

Having a guiding question rather than a set of static outcomes allows for new information to emerge that can be incorporated into our definition of the challenge. A question points us in a direction. An Unstuck Minds question eliminates the thinking traps that limit and misdirect.

Our example started with a question about implementing a request: How do we get the manufacturing supervisors through diversity training?

After using the Unstuck Minds Compass to scope the issue, we might choose to ask ourselves a different question: How might people managers in our manufacturing facilities help our employees feel welcome and respected?

Once we have a strategic question to guide our work, we can describe success and identify the elements of our response. One element may include training, but we now know what needs the training should address and what other changes can be included that will put the training into a broader, more sustainable context.

Consultant, heal thyself

on By 1 Comment

Earlier this month I facilitated a meeting for a group of physicians who are members of a state medical society. The Governor of the state established a consortium for the prevention of prescription drug abuse in response to the national opioid crisis. The consortium in turn, reached out to the medical society to convene members for the purpose of establishing protocols, exchanging best practices, and aligning on a point-of-view to share with legislators that would ensure meaningful regulation.

My blood pressure goes up when I’m in a room with one doctor, so you can imagine how I felt about facilitating a meeting with 20 doctors. Nevertheless, I had agreed to help them tackle an important topic. We needed to make the most of a day-long meeting of professionals volunteering their valuable time. The expertise in the room wasn’t going to do anyone any good without a process that ensured shared understanding and produced actionable alignment.

Working with problem-solving groups is itself an exercise in problem solving.

Smart, highly skilled people who generally solve problems by themselves don’t automatically adapt to the challenges of collaboration. One of the challenges of collaborating during a problem solving exercise is slowing the group down enough to confirm that they agree on the problem before they start generating solutions. Doctors in particular, think fast and have been trained in a diagnostic methodology; they move from symptoms to causes and then prescribe or operate.

A challenge like the opioid crisis doesn’t present itself in the way a patient might show up with symptoms. A public health emergency is not just a more complicated set of symptoms requiring a differential diagnosis. Complex social problems can’t be outsmarted. Chasing down causes might help us feel more in control, but the causes are not static conditions waiting to be discovered. Asking what’s causing the opioid crisis is like asking what causes religion (no Marxist pun intended).

Upon reflection, I’ve come to realize that a tension between competing research methodologies hid below the surface of our work together that day. The doctors had been trained as scientists. Science presumes that objective observation and analysis can lead to universal causal laws. I had suggested a collaborative process based on a social theory approach called, participatory action research. Participatory action research presumes a dynamic relationship between understanding something and changing it. By contrast, science presumes we need to understand something before we try to change it.

While we made respectable progress and agreed to a few clear action steps, I am only now coming to realize the mistake I made in designing a process for the meeting. Because of my anxiety about showing up as an authority, I inadvertently acted like a doctor. I treated the group as a patient. I diagnosed their group dynamics and prescribed process fixes. Alternatively, I could have recognized that together we represented our own complex social network. I might have been more open to the way our challenges and shared understanding emerged through our dialogue. Had I been more attentive to and less judgmental about the group’s natural tendencies, we may have made even more progress.

Uncovering Your Client’s Requirements: Four questions for connecting services and solutions to wants and needs

on By

Changing the way we refer to things says a lot about our changing mindsets. For example, our organizations used to “train” people, now we “develop talent” through “blended learning experiences.” Companies that once employed “salespeople” responsible for closing deals, now have “business development teams” that form relationships with customers and clients.

Our changing descriptions of organizational roles and functions signify more than a gentrification of the way we talk about business. In the case of the interactions formerly known as “sales” and “training,” the change in language represents a shift from thinking in terms of transactions to thinking in terms of connections.

Once, we asked for coffee, received it and paid for it. Now we interact with a skilled and knowledgeable barista who assesses how much conversation will be required to meet our coffee needs, including the needs we didn’t realize we had: We can make your cappuccino frothier. Next time order it “dry.”

We no longer transact business. We connect services and solutions to wants and needs.

Our internal and external clients and customers no longer want our prefabricated widgets, our generic training programs, or our one-size-fits-all professional service methodologies. Even health care systems have started personalizing treatment plans to meet individual patient needs.

Sometimes, I have a very specific coffee order and I’m not interested in exploring my options. Similarly, sometimes, a client or customer simply wants to transact business with you. They know what they want and they’re looking for the best value. Before your scoping conversation, ask yourself (or even better, ask the client) about the importance of what Unstuck Minds calls, “The Four Imperatives.”

Find out the extent to which your client needs to…

  • Reduce the risk of missing something important

  • Avoid solving the wrong problem

  • Make it easier for people to take concerted action

  • Increase the novelty of their options

If the imperatives matter, you’ll want to walk into the scoping conversation with better questions. There are four primary questions that will change any scoping conversation from a business transaction into a conversation that connects services and solutions to needs:

What is changing? Start your scoping conversation with a question that demonstrates the importance of context. By the time you have been invited into a scoping conversation, your client has already decided that something needs to change or improve. To avoid being trapped by a discussion of the features and functions of your solutions, find out what has changed in the internal and external environment that triggered the scoping conversation. By asking. “What is changing?” you reduce the risk of missing something important.

What does it mean? After hearing about what is changing, find out how your client has interpreted the changes. Consider other explanations for the identified changes. Why has the client’s current interpretation of the changes become a priority? By finding out what the change means to your client you avoid solving the wrong problem.

How do others see it? You have heard one perspective on the context and rationale for the client’s stated need, now it’s time to find out about the thoughts and feelings of others in the organization. Be suspicious of a client who describes strong alignment on a consistent set of needs. The scoping conversation should include a discussion of what people may end up losing when the client’s needs are met, not just what people stand to gain. Finding out how others think and feel helps make it easier for people to take concerted action to meet the client’s requirements.

How else might we define the challenge? The client engaged you in a scoping conversation by framing a request. If you’ve had a productive dialogue prompted by the first three questions, it’s likely that new information and perhaps some new insights have emerged. In asking the fourth question, you are adding value to the conversation by broadening the solution set. You may even uncover needs that set the stage for future scoping conversations.

We are all Advising Professionals

on By

Colleen is a lawyer and works in the legal department of global retailing company. She wants business leaders in her company to consult with her earlier in their decision making process so she can mitigate risk to the company before agreements are finalized.

Jacob’s company produces advanced chemicals for use in manufacturing plants. The company has transformed its approach to selling. Instead of promoting the features and functions of his company’s products, Jacob now leads a sales team including chemical engineers who are expected to solve their customer’s problems with a combination of products, data analytics and on-going consulting support.

Alfie leads an agile software development team supporting the technology needs of his financial services company. Alfie often feels frustrated and overly constrained by requests from his internal customers. He wants to discuss options with business leaders before they become fixated on a specific solution.

One might presume that when it comes to their job descriptions, Colleen, Jacob and Alfie have nothing in common. Colleen is an attorney, Jacob is a salesperson and Alfie is a software engineer. They work in different industries. They have different functional expertise. Their success is measured in different ways.

Despite the obvious differences, they share a common mission. Like many of us, they want to help decision makers make better decisions. Colleen has expertise that would help her company’s leaders avoid costly mistakes. Jacob’s customers often miss out on valuable insights about how to use his company’s products and services. Alfie’s internal clients regularly overlook creative options for solving their technology problems.

Being the most skilled and knowledgeable lawyer, salesperson or software engineer does not necessarily mean that your expertise will be used. Professional expertise is necessary, but not sufficient. Professionals who want to help decision makers make better decisions also need advising expertise.

Advising expertise relies on the ability to influence and the ability to align. Advisors need a variety of tools and skills to influence and align. A Google search on “influence without authority” will turn up several books, articles and ideas for getting your professional expertise used by decision makers.

One promising and perhaps counterintuitive approach to helping advising professionals has been gaining traction lately: Instead of honing your ability to give advice, ask better questions. For example, the journalist Warren Berger has devoted his career in recent years to writing and speaking about the power of inquiry. The Right Question Institute hopes to create a movement that improves decision-making through the participation of stakeholders who learn to ask better questions.

In essence, a decision is an answer to a question. A decision maker looking at a menu is answering the question, “What do I want to eat?” A decision making team at a strategy offsite is answering the question, “Where will we invest our resources in the next three years?” A customer meeting with several sales teams is answering the question, “who do I want to do business with?” Let’s consider an example to highlight the difference between influencing the decision and influencing the question that the decision answers.

Imagine that a marketing executive in Colleen’s global retailing company brings her a contract to review. The marketing executive is trying to decide whether to commit the company to a one-year agreement or a three-year agreement with a vendor. Essentially he is posing the question, “Which agreement should we sign?” If Colleen reviews the contracts and renders an opinion, the company makes an informed, but limited decision. If Colleen focuses on influencing the question rather than influencing the decision, she might request a bit more context from the marketing executive about the vendor and their services. She might learn that the marketing executive has some concerns about using the vendor, but has a project deadline to meet. At one point in the conversation, Colleen might pose a different question to the marketing executive, “How can we use this vendor to meet your deadline without committing ourselves to a long-term contract?” After considering the question, perhaps the marketing executive would offer a new deal to the vendor: The retailer will sign the three-year contract if the vendor successfully helps the marketing department meet the deadline on the current project. A better question leads to a better decision.

When advisors think of their job as influencing the decision, they are limiting the value they can provide because they have implicitly validated the question being asked by the decision maker. When advisors think of their job as influencing the question, they are creating an opening for a breakthrough.