art of gig archive

There is a saying in sales that customers buy only two things: happiness and solutions to problems. As an indie consultant, you’re very unlikely to be selling happiness (outside of certain types of speaking gigs where you might be the featured entertainment). Whatever the content of your services, whether it is corporate strategy, web design, M&A technical due diligence, survey design, market research, or copywriting, you are almost certainly selling solutions to problems.

And the problems external consultants solve always fall into two basic buckets: insufficient systematic confidence, and insufficient systematic doubt. If a problem does not fall into one of these two buckets, typically it will be solved by an employee, contractor, or a b2b product/service. Any consultants present will be seen as parasitic leeches to be exterminated rather than utilized more. A part of the problem rather than the solution.

Each of these two classes of problems can exist at two loci relative to the client: in their outer world or in their inner world. That gives us 4 basic types of clients (both individuals and organizations), and 4 kinds of consultant they typically hire, as shown in this 2×2. Take a look, tag yourself, and let’s unpack this.

The Four Types (Individual)

As a consultant, your identity and style are derived from your client’s identity and style: your persona is a shadow persona. So the four types of clients induce four different basic shadow identities and styles of consulting. Of course, no client is a pure or constant example of a single type, so no consultant is a pure or constant example of a single type of shadow.

1. The Explorer is a client who wants to build capacity for systematic doubt at an outer-world locus. They do this by constantly considering possibilities, alternative perspectives, and “refactorings” of world views. They tend to hire a sparring partner type of consultant who can constantly stress test their thinking and actions, and undermine their assumptions from unexpected new directions.

2. The Achiever is a client who wants to build systematic confidence at an outer-world locus. They typically hire consultants who take on roles as teachers or coaches, helping them develop specific functional capabilities and skills, such as public speaking, survey methodology, being more productive, architecting databases, running kickstarter campaigns, applying for government grants, or sourcing things from China.

3. The Integrator is a client who wants to build systematic confidence at an inner-world locus. Whether or not they choose to explicitly acknowledge it, they look for an element of therapy or life coaching in their relationships with consultants they hire. Whatever the nominal subject — better relationships at work, faster time to market, improved sales conversions — the actual focus for the Integrator client is always building a better integrated psyche.

4. The Tester is a client who wants to build systematic doubt at an inner-world locus. They do this by constantly testing their thinking, questioning their assumptions about themselves, and introspecting on their actions. Don’t mistake all the testing for an empiricist or exploratory orientation though. The Tester is primarily looking for meaning in a philosophical sense. The ambiguities and uncertainties they are probing are primarily within them. Their experiential experiments are about discovering themselves.

I estimate — and this is a pure guess based on anecdotal evidence and notes swapped with fellow consultants — that about half the demand for consulting services is from Integrators. The smallest market is Explorers. Achiever and Tester markets are in between. This is my read on individual demand (whether personal or situated within an organization).

The Four Types (Organizational)

The four types can also be used to anthropomorphically characterize organizational personalities in relation to the types of independent consultants they like to hire (large consulting firms serve a different kind of need, with a broader footprint, that doesn’t map well here).

This organizational personality is often, but not always, an extension of the personality of founders or powerful senior leaders (who may be long dead or retired).

1. The Explorer Organization tends to be future-oriented, and is likely to have people or departments devoted to activities such as scenario planning, futures, and market modeling (often called “strategy operations”). Explorer organizations hungrily consume forecasts and trend information, as well as historical analyses and industry reports. They believe they are curious organizations.

2. The Achiever Organization tends to be capabilities-focused, and is likely to have a well-developed and staffed training organization running various sorts of structured training and coaching programs for all employees right up to executive level. Achiever organizations love building out corporate habits-and-processes infrastructure ranging from Lean Six Sigma for everybody to media/PR training for senior executives. They believe they are winning organizations.

3. The Integrator Organization tends to be employee mental-health and “culture” focused. They love things like employee engagement programs, well-being initiatives, and diversity and inclusion programs. You will find a strong culture of listening habits inside such organizations: town-halls, manager-employee 1:1s, and effective communication training. They believe they are compassionate organizations.

4. The Tester Organization is a relatively new type, since it is not exactly easy for organizations (as opposed to individual employees) to be “philosophical.” Typically, in a Tester organization, you will find what Nassim Taleb calls a barbell organizational strategy: a strong focus on metaphysical values and manifestos one end, paired with a strong focus on data-driven skepticism and interrogation on the other. There is low patience for high-concept “middleware” between those two extremes. Within tester organizations, you will find habits of challenging and interrogating claims and data, strong belief in instrumentation and monitoring of operations, and a non-ironic, non-theater continuous dialogue around foundational values and principles. There will often be a culture of ritual adversarial thinking within. They believe they are rational organizations.

Of course, depending on how much they are actually winning or losing, the organizational self images may be more or less deluded in different ways. That’s where people like us come in, and where management jokes are born, but that’s a story for another day.

The market sizes represented by these 4 kinds of organizations for consulting services are hard to determine. I suspect, in terms of sheer population size, Achiever organizations are the most common. I’d guess as high as 70%, followed by Integrator, Explorer, and Tester organizations. At some point I might try to research this question.

The raw population statistics however, are misleading, since the actual market size needs to be weighted by:

1. The relative sizes of the organizations (revenue/market cap for private sector, operating budgets in the case of government/non-profit)

2. Profitability, which determines the discretionary funding available for hiring consulting support

3. Sectoral culture around hiring external consulting support versus relying on building out internal resources and capabilities.

For example, even though the Tester type organization is probably the rarest, the big tech companies are almost all Tester, tend to have tons of discretionary cash, but are almost always systematically averse to using that money to hire consultants (which makes getting hired by one of them a bit of a coup), relative to old economy organizations. They all love contractors though.

At the other extreme, individual government agencies at any level usually have very little discretionary money, but due to sheer scale there’s a lot in aggregate. But you have to run through layers of bureaucratic defenses and processes to get at any of it. To the point that there are meta-consultants who specialize in teaching small businesses and other consultants how to sell to the government.

Your Consulting Style

To determine your consulting style, ask yourself what is the easiest kind of deal for you to close, ideally via inbound leads. Do you find it easiest to convince an HR person to sponsor a training workshop on a particular skill, or do individual senior executives tend to reach out to you for a particular personalized need based on your blog posts?

I personally operate almost entirely in the top right quadrant, and almost entirely serving individual senior executives who reach out to me, rather than their organizations.

The organizations I have worked with so far have been a more mixed bag. I’ve worked with organizations of each of the four types.

The reason for the difference is subtle and worth understanding even if you typically serve one of the other quadrants. In general, the higher up in the organization your primary individual client or internal champion, the more their individual personality will override the organization’s personality. An Explorer type middle-manager in an HR department within an overall Achiever organization is unlikely to have the influence to find the budget to hire you for a scenarios-and-futures workshop. But an Explorer type Senior VP can pull it off, even if it goes against the organizational grain.

Also note a subtlety: outside and inside are relative. An “outer world” problem for an executive can be an “inner world” problem for the organization, and how you operate depends on the role you’ve been cast into in the drama: working for the organization as a whole, or for the organization as seen from the perspective of a particular executive.

So if you find it easiest to sell to middle managers, then your style is determined by the typical organization type you sell into, and the individuals you end up working with will be a mixed bag.

If you find it easiest to sell to senior executives or individual clients, then your style is determined by the specific individuals who tend to hire you, and the organizations you work with will be a mixed bag.

Take a shot at plotting yourself along both dimensions of the 2×2. Here’s my self-assessment.

• Along the confidence/doubt dimension, I’m so bad at serving people and organizations looking for systematic confidence, if I could reliably detect them up front, I’d run away every time.

• Along the inner/outer dimension, I’m generally better at outer-world locus consulting than inner-world. It’s not that I’m uninterested in others’ inner lives; I’m just uninterested/ill-equipped to help with the doubt/confidence dimension of inner life, which is where most people need the help.

Note that the same person or organization may have needs (and the money to pay for support in) all four quadrants. When I started eight years ago I was surprised by the percentage of clients who also hired people in other quadrants besides me. Now I expect it. Some spend thousands of dollars a month on an entire support suite. Relying on external consulting support is an operational orientation.

That said, the client’s personality generally favors one or the other of the quadrants, especially for individuals.

Classifying Your Client

How can you tell which kind of potential client you are looking at? Here’s a handy set of tells that work both at individual and organizational levels, mutatis mutandis:

1. The tell of the Explorer in Need is a sense of staleness and being in a rut evident in ways of talking, distractibility, and arbitrary pursuit of Next Shiny New Things. The situation need a dose of freshness and a shake-up of perspectives, and they know it, but don’t quite know how to address it.

2. The tell of the Achiever in Need is energy being dissipated “random acts of X” where they are thrashing and improvising behaviors in an area where skilled and disciplined behavioral precedents exist. Marketing is particularly full of “random acts of marketing” clients.

3. The tell of the Integrator in Need is endemic mental health issues across activities. There is too much anxiety. There are communication problems everywhere. Relationships are fraying and falling apart all over the places. Morale is plummeting.

4. The tell of the Tester in Need is toxic arguments that go nowhere, disagreements over facts and data that get weaponized along lines of control, big ego conflicts, and ideological battles. Behaviors are driven more by the need to feed ongoing beefs than accomplishing missions. In an organizational context, monitoring, instrumentation, and data governance are heavily politicized.

Notice something? In each case, you classify the organization by looking for a locus of either chaotic or dissipative energy expenditure in futile ways. That futility is your opportunity.

An important point to keep in mind, incidentally, is that both individuals and organizations can have two polar opposite reasons for hiring a consultant: to build on a strength, or to mitigate a weakness. And it might surprise you to hear this, but it is vastly more common for both individuals and organizations to be driven by a growth motivation (working on strengths) in retaining consulting support.

It usually takes a crisis situation to drive an individual or organization to seek external help for a weakness. The “crisis gig” economy is a whole distinct economy in its own right.

In each of the four cases, and whether the motive is growth-oriented or deficiency-oriented, the way the consultant addresses both the symptoms and root causes is by injecting a much-needed dose of disinterested systematicity in the right place.

I’ll cover that concept in a future post.

Previously on The Art of Gig

May 15: Making it interesting: Pricing for interestingness (subscribers only).

May 8: Always Be Strategizing: Every gig is a strategy gig (subscribers only).

May 2: The Shadow’s Journey: Every consultant has an origin story (subscribers only).

April 30: 42 Great Imperatives: The one true doctrine for all indie consultants (public)

<< Always Be Strategizing| Into the Yakverse index | The Two Shadows of the Hero >>

In indie consulting, some days are all about playing with fancy gadgets like strategometers, or jumping out of helicopters to make emergency deliveries of thought leadership, or hanging out with mystic monks. But most days are just about two minds quietly getting into deep subtleties over coffee. When it is two consultants getting into it, things can get particularly meta.

One such day in 2016, I was sitting across from young Bernie Anscombe in a coffee shop. He was not very happy with me. He had asked to buy me coffee to get some advice on some of his gigs that seemed stuck, and I had just offered him a diagnosis no consultant ever wants to hear, especially from another consultant.

“All your problems are due to one thing: your hourly rate is too high.”

Bernie is the brother of Arnie Anscombe, whom some of you have heard me talk about: the hotshot young consultant I’ve run into in several gigs, who does data-hackery magic with SQL, and sometimes manages to steal clients from me.

Still, I have no beef with the Anscombe boys. Though they make me look old-fashioned with my 2x2s and occasional Excel spreadsheets, so far I’ve managed to hold my own. The way I figure, if a client thinks SQL is the answer, they’re not asking any questions I can help with anyway. It is a market I’m happy to cede to the millennial young ‘uns with their software-eaten transhuman brains.

The Anscombes are an ancient consulting clan. Consulting is a calling that tends to run in families, with secrets handed down from generation to generation. Some consulting clans claim to go back to Ancient Egypt, and claim Pharaohs among their earliest clients. The Anscombe clan is not quite that ancient, but their history does go back to at least the Crusades, according to family lore.

Legend has it that the clan got started when Rexthor de Anscombe, a medieval French dog walker, sold a Capability Maturity Model to the Knights Templars back in 1306. When King Philip IV of France went took a torch to the Templar organization soon after, many blamed de Anscombe’s advice, so he had to flee for his life to England, where later generations of Anscombes slowly repaired the clan’s reputation and became known for their fine hand-crafted 2x2s and capability-maturity models. In the 19th century, the family migrated to the US and set up shop on the East Coast. Anscombes reputedly worked with all of the Robber Baron 100 companies.

Yeah, I’m a bit of a consulting history nerd I guess.

Bernie and Arnie, as it happens, are two members of a set of identical quadruplets, all of whom are indie consultants. The family has always frowned upon corporatization as a degenerative disease, and raises its scions to take pride in indie free agency. Young male Anscombes (yeah, they’re a bit patriarchal) are thrown out of their parents’ homes at age 14 and told not to come back until they’ve accrued at least 10 billable hours. It’s a harsh system, but it has produced some fine consulting talent over the ages.

All four, Arnie, Bernie, Chuck, and David — the Anscombe boys, or Anscombe Quartet, as they’re known along the Acela corridor — are regarded as up-and-comers in East Coast style data-driven gigwork. They can be hard to tell apart, but once you get to know them, they’re as different as four people who look exactly alike can be.  

Arnie’s the most established of the four, a relentless hustler who eats and dreams multiple regressions, but Bernie’s the one I like the most, which is why I always say yes when he hits me up for coffee. He’s got soul in the game.

Though he mostly toes the conservative family line, Bernie occasionally plays the family rebel, flirting with West-Coast style narrative consulting methods that would make his ancestors roll in their graves. Alone among his siblings, he dabbles in machine learning, and unlike them, calls himself a data science consultant rather than a statistician. I think he seeks me out for mentorship mostly to annoy his family. An indie consulting blue-blood taking advice from a first-generation upstart descended from paycheck types.

At the moment though, young Bernie was not happy with my mentoring. He looked at me coldly, like I’d slapped him across the face. 

“What do you mean my hourly rate is too high? I’m logging at least 20 hours a week at this rate. It’s not like it’s a vanity rate you know… people are actually paying me at this rate.”

I waved the thought away, “Not at all. Not at all. I’m not suggesting that. You charge more than I do, and you log more hours than I do. Whatever your problems, pulling in the money isn’t one of them.”

“And not just from family connections, mind you; I’m getting more inbound leads from random people on Twitter than through the family. And I’m constantly saying no to gigs too. I could log a hundred hours a week if I hustled a bit more like my brother Arnie.”

“Absolutely. Perfect seller’s market. Storm of demand meets pedigreed Anscombe supply. Product-market fit. Congrats on hitting that.”

“Exactly. I have a high-demand skill, and a strong tailwind, why shouldn’t I charge what the market will bear? Why should I leave money on the table, no offense, like you seem to?”

“Why shouldn’t you, indeed?”

“Maybe I will. Maybe I should go higher and cut back on my hours. Everybody else is telling me to go higher. You’re the only one telling me I charge too much.”

“So double your rate and do 10 hours a week. Or 5x it and do 4 hours a week. Live the 4-hour work-week dream. It certainly sounds like you could ride the demand curve anywhere you like, which is a luxury few of us enjoy. What’s stopping you?”

Bernie looked uncomfortable. “Now, hold on, that’s not what I’m driving at…It’s not the quantity of hours, but the quality…”

“So solve for 4 quality hours a week.”

“Well, like they say, you need the quantity to get to the quality. I don’t always agree with the family, but we Anscombes aren’t in it for free rides. We take pride in actually doing the hard work and putting in the hours needed to help make history.”

“Quality of hours, not quantity, and quality follows quantity, help make history, exactly! Couldn’t have put it better myself! In fact, I’m going to steal that line. Hold on, I gotta make a note of that…”

I made a little show out of pulling out my notebook and making a note.  Note-taking is the great status leveler in all consulting conversations, including mentoring conversations between consultants. It signals I too am learning from you, see? The gesture seemed to mollify young Bernie a little.

“…Is it though?” I asked, shutting my notebook with ritual deliberation, and putting my pen down.

“Is what it?”

“Is the quantity of hours leading to quality hours? Are you getting, like 2 quality hours for every 20 you bill?”

“I guess not. I mean, I’m getting all this inbound, and more work than I can handle, but none of the gigs is actually, you know… interesting. And that’s what I want to solve for. I’m not overworked or underpaid, I’m underpurposed.”

I opened my notebook again, “…not overworked, underpurposed… you’re on a roll today. I’m stealing that one too.”

“Thanks, I guess. Can’t recall where I heard that line.”

“…So underpurposed… you find yourself wondering whether you should just take a regular job to find purpose, huh? Hang with all the missionary types with cathedrals in their eyes?”

“Well don’t tell my family that, but yeah. I guess I’ve always been the black sheep of the family. I think they already half-expect me to dishonor the clan name by taking a paycheck job. No Anscombe in history has ever had a paycheck job.”

“Your family is right on that one. That’s just grass-is-greener thinking. If you can’t find quality hours as a consultant, you’re unlikely to find them as an employee either. So what makes your hours low-quality? Why isn’t quantity leading to quality?”

He considered this. “I like the actual core of the work. You know, diving into the data, trying out models… it’s putting it into glossy TPS reports and stuff, that’s what I hate.”

“So why not stop doing that? Do the fun part, and let them write their own damn TPS reports? I mean, isn’t that why you don’t want to be an employee? They’re the ones with health plans and job security. Let them earn it by writing the TPS reports. You and I live dangerously so we can have some actual fun between cash crunches.”

“That won’t fly. The reports are what they’re paying for…. Though it’s not like they really read them. Once the executive summary says what they want it to say, they’re happy.”

“Exactly! And they forward the reports with their comments to their VPs, right? Proposing to do what they wanted to all along?”

He looked depressed. “Yeah. It’s just the usual cover-your-ass fodder my family’s been churning out forever I guess. Did you know, one of my 17th century ancestors wrote a report for a pope titled, Dealing with the Protestant Disruption using Logarithms? I’m doing basically the same thing in 2019, just with machine learning.”

“Fascinating family history there, but to get back to you, how might changing your hourly rate change the quality of your billable hours?”

“Yeah, yeah, I see what you’re getting at. It would be weird, but I suppose if  I told them I’m cutting my rate in half, but that I wouldn’t do the report writing, that might fly. But it seems wrong somehow, lowering my rates when the demand is up.”

“Demand for machine learning, or demand for reports with ‘machine learning’ in the title proposing the same ideas they’ve been pitching since 1988?”

“I get it, I get it. No need to rub it in. They’re just using me to externalize their risks of riding a fad.”

“Yes.”

“I’m playing in the shoot-the-messenger market.”

“Yes.”

“If it works, they win. If it doesn’t they can try again with the next fad.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m just riding the fad to pay the bills. I get it.”

“Do you?”

“My brother Chuck, all he does is feed that beast. Though somehow he manages to always cover his own ass as well, and never actually gets shot.”

“So what’s the opposite of being a disposable messenger?”

Bernie sighed. “Umm… a…pump-and-dump artist like my brother David I suppose. I have quite the family. Arnie’s a mercenary hustler solving for money, Chuck is a professional punching bag pretending to be a sparring partner, and David’s a pure predator sucking the marrow out of clueless middle managers selling them shit they don’t know they don’t need.”

“What does that make you?”

“The poet in the family I suppose. The one who keeps asking if there’s more to the game.”

“And is there perhaps a poetic hourly rate here?”

“Is there poetry in consulting at all? Either the client is dumping risk on you, or you’re dumping risk on the client. Externalize or be the externality.”

“C’mon! The ancient Anscombe clan didn’t survive since the Crusades without some poetry to its story! Are you and your client necessarily on opposite sides of a zero-sum risk hot-potato game? You can think of no way to get on the same side as your client? Is the game really that bleak?”

“Why don’t you drop this Socratic shtick and just spell it out?”

I gave him an injured look. I like my Socratic shtick. 

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll give you a formula: price to partner, raise with risk. It’s not really about pricing too high or too low, but pricing your time right to solve for interesting. Want me to break that down?”

“Yeah, that sounds clever but I don’t know what it means.”

“That’ll cost you another cappuccino…”

Bernie raised his eyebrows at me, “What?”

“You heard me. Touch of sugar in the cappuccino. And I’ll take a cookie too. Oatmeal raisin.”

Bernie shrugged, stood up and went to the counter to order. I checked my email and twitter, shot off a shitpost, and began idly scanning the crowd. The guy at the next table seemed vaguely familiar. He’d been glancing at us talking throughout. I couldn’t quite place him though. Oh well, it’s not like we’d been discussing NDA’ed state secrets.

Bernie returned with fresh cappuccinos for both of us, and two cookies.

I took a sip, and a bite of my cookie.

“Mmm. Good cookie. Where were we? Ahh yes. Price-to-partner means you set an hourly rate high enough that the client can see you as a partner in the risk rather than mere contract labor, but low enough that the client is not tempted to cast you in the role of a pure risk-sink, being paid to take a hit of some sort.”

“And raise to risk?”

“Raise with risk, not raise to risk. Raise to risk means you are moving risk around, or worse, adding risk by changing the price tag of the project rather than the substance of it. Raise with risk means you price your services in proportion to the risk level of the project itself. I’m not talking negotiating a cut of the rewards by the way. I’m talking pricing your services now in proportion to the rewards the client may enjoy later.”

“So if I want to charge more…”

“…You have to pick clients who are taking bigger risks, or encourage your current clients to do bolder things…”

“But what if they can’t afford it? Like an unfunded startup.”

“Then you look elsewhere. That’s why you’re a consultant. You look for the intersection of interesting and has a budget. And some places, there’s no elbow room to make the formula work. But there’s a lot of interesting in the world to choose from.”

“Price to partner, raise with risk, hmm.” Bernie turned the phrase over in his mind, trying it on for size.

“It is a formula for bringing your story and the client’s story into narrative harmony. Mere incentive alignment is shallow play. Narrative harmony is what anthropologists call deep play.”

“How can I tell whether I’m being paid more to absorb more of the risk, or paid more to partner in a bigger risk?”

“If I might rephrase your question, you’re really asking how you can tell whether you’re in shallow play mode or deep play mode. Well, have you ever had a client reject your advice?”

“Of course. Many times.”

“Then tell me this. When they reject your advice, assuming you think it’s good advice and the problem is with them, is it a failure of their imagination, or a failure of their nerve? Do they not get it, or do they lack the guts for it?”

“I guess… mostly they don’t get it. Or rather, they don’t care whether they get it or not. So long as I tell them I get it.”

“Then you’re a risk sink. You absorb their risks of riding a fad.”  

I could see him visibly struggle with this thought. He did not like it. I gave it a final shot.

“Think about the phrase, let’s make it interesting. Do you think that’s about imagination or nerve?”

But Bernie was done sparring. “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it…”

I grinned at him, “Yeah, we all know what that means. That’s fine. I already have my cookie!”

Bernie smiled weakly at me, and got up.

“Well, thanks for the conversation.”

I sat there for a few minutes after Bernie left, meditatively sipping my cappuccino and nibbling at my cookie. Sometimes you get through, sometimes you don’t. So it helps if you make sure the coffee is always fresh, and that there are cookies.

Just as I was about to get up, the guy at the next table, the one who’d been glancing at us curiously throughout, strolled over.

“Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing. That was an interesting conversation. Do you think your young friend will do it? Try charging less to make things interesting?”

I drained my cappuccino and shook my head, “No.”

“Why not?”

“The hourly rate, it’s The Number for us consultants. And if it’s not always going up, it’s hard to tell if you’re winning. It’s hard to ask a client for more money, but it’s nearly impossible to talk yourself into accepting less in pursuit of mere interestingness.”

“That seems wrong.”

I shrugged philosophically. “He chose money over interestingness. In consulting, a mistake nearly everyone makes.”

The guy smiled and nodded appreciatively. “That’s a good line, I’m going to steal that. I’m Frank Underwood by the way.” He pulled out a notebook to make a note.

“Nice to meet you Frank, here’s my card if you’re ever looking for a consultant.”

<< Always Be Strategizing|  Into the Yakverse index | The Two Shadows of the Hero >>

<< The Shadow’s Journey | Into the Yakverse index | Making it Interesting >>

Every true consultant is a strategy consultant. It’s not a title. It’s a state of mind.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re delivering SEO suggestions for a website to a middle manager, sparring free-form with a Fortune 100 CEO, or providing career coaching to a star individual contributor at a startup. If you’re not participating in shaping the organization’s strategy in some form through your client, you’re not a consultant. You’re merely an ersatz employee, without job security or benefits, to whom some work has been outsourced: a contractor.

Why would you want to participate in strategy?

What is so rewarding about strategy work that you might even want to give up job security and financial rewards to participate in it? Why is even a low-paid consultant sometimes better positioned to participate in strategy than a high-paid senior employee with an impressive executive title? Why might you even want to pick lower-paying gigs over higher-paying ones simply because a strategy component is present? Why does McKinsey fight to hang on to a “strategy” brand, and why do upstart IT firms and design agencies strive to claim a piece of the strategy pie?

Before you get to all those interesting questions, you must first answer a tricky question: how do you even know when you’re doing strategy?

The best answer is: using a curious device known as the strategometer. It looks like a battered wrist watch from the seventies, but instead of a clock dial, it has a blank 2×2 display with no annotations. It does one thing and one thing only: when it senses that you’re really doing strategy, a small crystal in the top-right quadrant lights up green.

I’d estimate there are only a few dozen strategometers left in the world, though it is rumored that there were once thousands in circulation. Nobody knows where they came from, or how they work. Some say the green indicator crystals are actually mystical gems that sense strategic élan vital in the body. That they were once set in neck pendants worn by members of the Order of the Yak. Others claim they were originally crafted by Swiss watchmakers after the Napoleonic wars, for use by political leaders through the century of European realpolitik.

And still others say both those stories are bullshit, and that strategometers are the product of a top-secret Cold War biometrics project, aimed at improving the strategic intuitions of senior military and intelligence officers.

Nobody knows for sure, and the remaining few are so priceless, nobody wants to do a teardown to find out.

The few remaining strategometers are passed on from consultant to consultant. Each one has a name, and an individual secret history that’s part of the consulting lore passed on from one bearer to the next. Some supposedly have legends attached going back hundreds or even thousands of years, which is perhaps evidence in favor of the older origin stories.

Interestingly, it is rumored that only indie consultants may possess one, and that they don’t work if people with paychecks try to use them. One even supposedly exploded in 1994 when a McKinsey partner tried to wear it. I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard there’s a McKinsey DarkOps team devoted to tracking down and destroying all remaining strategometers.

The only time I ever saw one was when an old veteran consultant friend of mine, let’s call her the Ancient One, let me try hers on in 2012. This was back when I was starting out. Her strategometer, she said, was known as Kongō Gumi, and was one of the oldest ones, at 1500 years old.

“How does it work?” I asked, strapping it on.

“Do you know the story of the three stonecutters?”

“Uhh… Yeah of course. Consulting 101. Drucker. We all know that story.”

“Tell me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Humor me. It helps the strategometer calibrate.”

“Fine. Well, there’s this guy walking around, and he sees three stone-cutters working. He asks them what they’re doing. The first one says he’s earning a living, the second one says he’s doing the best job of stonecutting in the world, and the third says, with a missionary glow in his eye, ‘I’m building a cathedral’. And the moral of the story is…”

The Ancient One interrupted, “Yeah yeah, the first one is okay, the third one is the true leader, and the middle one is the problem. Let’s skip the moral.”

“Okay…”

“What I want you to tell me is this: assuming they all offered to pay you the same, which one of them would you rather have as a client, and why?”

I stared at her and then thought for a minute. It didn’t seem like a trick question.

“Uhh… the third one I suppose,” I said finally.

“Why?”

“I guess, because there would be an opportunity to work at a strategic level, on an end-to-end vertically integrated cathedral business model.”

The Ancient One smiled. “Is the strategometer green yet?”

I looked. “No,” I said.

“Try again.”

“Well, I suppose the second one wouldn’t actually be that bad to work with. Maybe ‘best stonecutter’ should be understood as best-in-class horizontal player for a component…”

“Go on…”

“And come to think of it, the first guy isn’t that bad either. He’d be the low-cost commodity volume supplier in the market. That’s it, isn’t it? All three are worth working with, depending on what you want to learn.”

I looked down. Still no green. I still wasn’t being strategic enough.

“Here’s a hint,” the Ancient One said, “You’re thinking too grand. Think personal. In terms of your billing models for example.”

I pondered this. “Well, you said they’d all pay the same, but I suppose they’d have different expectations and preferred engagement models. I’d say the first stonecutter would probably want a project-style engagement model with clearly defined deliverables and deadlines, and an upfront ROI estimate. He’d probably talk about bang for the buck. Sounds awful, frankly.”

The Ancient One smiled slightly.

“The second one would get all clever about incentives, and spout profound-sounding BS about skin in the game and ‘measurable value-add’. He’d probably offer a performance bonus based on pre-defined quality tests and speed of delivery. Okay, that all sounds awful too.”

The Ancient One continued to smile and say nothing.

“And the third one… hmm… I suspect he’d be fine with simple hourly billing based on deciding he trusts me, and we’d figure out the what, when, and how as we went along. Yeah, that’s definitely the one. Final answer. I’d work for the third guy.”

“Why…?”

“I suppose because the greater the ambiguity and complexity, the more an over-structured engagement model gets in the way, and the more mutual trust between client and consultant matters. He’d trust me not to pad my hours, I’d trust him to keep things interesting and send enough billable hours my way to make it worthwhile for me.”

“And why is that important?” 

Enlightenment dawned.

“A more free-form engagement model means more participation in strategy!”

I glanced at the strategometer. Still no green.

“You’re almost there,” said the Ancient One, encouragingly.

Enlightenment dawned again (if you work in consulting, you must get used to enlightenment dawning multiple times an hour).

“Okay, how’s this. A missionary client navigates by a sense of what’s priceless and is willing to trust the serendipity of a free-form engagement with a consultant they find stimulating, to truly try and get to fresh insight, instead of getting too clever with the bean-counting, expectations structuring, and incentives. They acknowledge the fundamental ambiguity in the situation, and they embrace the uncertainty in the likely outcomes.”

“Boil it down!” said the ancient one, rapping my knuckles with her iPhone.

“They basically bet on the relationship!”

I looked down. The strategometer was glowing green.

The Ancient One smiled, and said, “I’d like that back now please.”

“When I first tried this test 30 years ago,” she remarked, as she strapped it back on, “I got to green by arguing that walking towards the light of a missionary purpose leads to the client casting the strongest shadow. The strongest shadow gives the consultant the most room to work with.”

“That’s fascinating, I’m going to steal that” I said. “A much more psychologically subtle analysis than mine.”

“We were much more into Jung back in the 80s,” she said. “But you did well; very few consultants get to green on the first attempt. And I’ve known veterans who’ve tried dozens of times but never gotten to green.”

“Does anyone ever get to green arguing for the first or second stonecutter?”

“Lemme put it this way. You’re the tenth person to I’ve seen get to green arguing for the third stonecutter. I’ve seen two get there arguing for the first stonecutter. I’ve seen none get there arguing for the second stonecutter…”

“That doesn’t mean it’s impossible though, does it?”

“But it is certainly suggestive, don’t you think? Well anyway, my helicopter is waiting, so I must rush. All the best with your next gig!”

I’m hoping she decides to pass Kongō Gumi on to me when she retires, but it may not be up to her. They say each strategometer chooses its new bearer when the previous bearer retires or dies. I’m not sure how that works. Maybe I’ll get a chance to find out some day.

As you navigate your own consulting career, perhaps one day you’ll run into a veteran wearing an oddly unfashionable watch.

Do a double take.

If it’s a strategometer, try to talk them into letting you try it on. They’ll know how to spar over a suitable parable or case study with you to calibrate your strategic intuition. And they may put you on the shortlist for possibly being the next bearer. Truth be told though, the really experienced ones are so in tune with their own strategic intuitions, they know when the strategometer is glowing green without even looking.

Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, those who bear the few remaining strategometers need them the least.

But realistically, most of us will never own a strategometer. Which means we have to rely on just an inner sense of when we’re genuinely participating in strategy, when we’re participating in some sort of bullshit theater or CYA operation, and when we’re merely playing contractor.

Simplicity in the engagement model — and an hourly billing model is as simple as it gets — often creates the most conducive environment for that to happen. It’s not that other, more complex models can’t get you involved in strategy, but the chances are lowered with every bit of added structure and incentive engineering.

Why would you want to participate in strategy? Is it the status? The money? The claim to a label guaranteed to attract contempt and hostility rather than esteem from many? We will explore the why in a future issue.

But in the meantime, trust me. Whether you charge $25/hour or $25,000/day, and whatever you’re delivering, at whatever client organizational level, you should Always Be Strategizing. And the best way to try and make that happen is to choose somewhat missionary types to work for (when you can choose; because there will always be times when you can’t). With an hourly billing engagement model.

Burn that idea into your brain. You’ll thank me later.

<< The Shadow’s Journey | Into the Yakverse index | Making it Interesting >>

<< Prelude: III | Into the Yakverse index | Always Be Strategizing >>

Employees have resumes and job titles, but consultants, like senior executives and entrepreneurs, have origin stories. Even the lowly $20/h ones have origin stories. But unlike senior executives and entrepreneurs, we are not ersatz superheroes within the mythos of the business world. Nor are we even regular heroes, villains, or antiheroes.

We are shadows. 

And we have shadow origin stories that begin, like superhero origin stories, with some sort of horrifying accident. The shadow’s journey though, unlike the hero’s journey, doesn’t end in either triumph or tragedy.

In fact, the shadow’s journey does not end at all.

At some point, it simply becomes billable. Living on billable time is a curious and shadowy existential state that we’ll say a lot more about in future issues, but let us talk about origin stories.

In my case, the accident happened late one night in 2010, while I was working at Xerox. On my way out of the building, I saw what I thought was a small blank 2×2 scribbled on the whiteboard of a conference room. Unable to resist, I grabbed a marker and reached out to fill it in. 

BAM! I felt a sharp pinch, and the 2×2 scuttled away and disappeared under the door.

Turns out, the 2×2 was actually a spider that had lost 4 of its legs after being trapped in a projector during an 8-hour strategy meeting, and had also turned radioactive from the RGB radiation.

When I woke up the next day, after a feverish, sleepless night, and got to my office, I found, to my horror, that I had gone organizationally blind. 

I could no longer see the organization that everybody else clearly inhabited. Everybody was behaving like they could see all the familiar realities of organizational life — org charts, titles, boundaries, protocols. So clearly things were still normal, except I’d gone entirely blind to things that were clearly still there. Things I too had been able to see, as clearly as anyone else, just the day before.

Now I could see people, desks, chairs, whiteboards, and documents, but I couldn’t see the organization itself. And this was a huge liability because, as a middle manager, it was my job to believe in the organization.

Yes, you heard that right. The job of the middle manager is to believe in the organization. A futures consultant friend of mine predicts that Electric Monks running deep-learning based belief engines will soon replace all middle managers by 2040, but until that happens, middle managers will do much of the believing-in-organizations necessary to keep them running.

But back in 2010, I was in trouble. I couldn’t do my job. I started saying truly embarrassing things in meetings, like “But why??”

So I had to leave in disgrace.

I bought myself a few henleys, a pair of distressed jeans, and a tactical backpack. Then I grew a stubble and went off to Bhutan to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life, now that I was organizationally blind and unable to do the only thing I knew how to do.

For several weeks, I got nowhere. Every night, tossing and turning in my cheap hotel room, I had nightmares about 4-legged spiders crawling over the walls. I spent the days wandering in the hills, bleary-eyed.

And then one day, after a long, hard, hike in the mountains, the nightmares suddenly stopped.

Quietly, and without ceremony or flashes of profound enlightenment (that’s for heroes, not shadows), the nightmares were gone. The 2×2-spider demons had retreated, and the fever had lifted. And just like that, I had turned billable (though I did not know it yet). 

I was able to sleep a dreamless, restful sleep for the first time in weeks. 

When I woke up the next morning, I found myself reaching for my notebook and drawing a 2×2.  Then another one. Then another one. 

For the next three days, I lived a steady, serenely energized life, sleeping soundly and dreamlessly at nights, spending mornings filling my notebook with the most poignantly insightful 2x2s I have ever seen, and afternoons practicing martial arts.

Sadly, I lost the notebook during a hectic covert gig in Budapest a few months later.

Those were the best 2x2s I have ever made, and I’ll never top them. They captured sublime answers to all the questions I had then, or have had to ask (or been asked) since. Now, I must painfully reconstruct the 2x2s I need out of dim memories of those in The Lost Notebook. When I come up with a particularly good one, I think to myself, “this is almost good enough to be from The Lost Notebook.”

Anyhow, on the fourth day, my notebook was full, but my pockets, after paying for what would be my last cup of yak butter tea, were empty.

And so there I was, sitting in a countryside tea shop, sipping my awful yak butter tea, and wondering how to make money, when a monk came in. I hadn’t seen him at the tea shop before.

He sat down across me and motioned to the waiter for a cup of tea. Then he smiled at me, and looked inquiringly at my open notebook. I shrugged and slid it across to him.

He sat there, sipping his tea, and gravely reviewing my notebook, for several minutes. Finally, he closed it and slid it back across to me. After a moment of thought, he took a rough-hewn silver coin out of his robe, and slid it halfway across the table, between us.

“Is that for me?” I enquired cautiously.

The monk nodded, with a slight smile.

“For my notebook?”

He shook his head.

“What do I have to do?” I asked.

In response, the monk got up and headed out the door, pausing at the doorstep to look back at me over his shoulder, and holding up a second coin for me to see.

I downed the rest of my butter tea, picked up my coin and notebook, and followed. A 50% advance was good enough for me.

We walked a mile. Though I was in decent shape from my weeks of martial arts practice and hiking, I found myself huffing and puffing to keep up with him. Somehow, he managed to stay several steps ahead of me with no apparent effort. 

Eventually, we arrived at a medium-sized monastery on a hill. Young monks were doing yard work. Through a window, I could see some sort of grand abbot monk in a special hat chatting on a smartphone. Christian Bale and Liam Neeson were practicing sword-fighting on the roof. A few motorcycles were parked in front. All in all, a regular modern monastery.

We walked around to the back, where there were a dozen enclosed pens, each with a large shaggy yak in it. The monk indicated one of the yaks, handed me a pair of shears, and stepped back, settling down beneath a tree. 

“You want me to…?” I began, but he had already closed his eyes and was deep in meditation. 

I got to it.

It took me two hours to shave that yak. It was a big yak. Fortunately, it was also a good-tempered yak that did not appear to mind being shaved. It was wholesome, tiring work, and it left me exhausted.

When I was done, I stepped back, admired my handiwork for a minute, and then walked back to where the monk was still meditating. Or, as it turned out, asleep. I shook him awake.

“Done!” I said.

He got up, went over to the yak, and inspected it and the pile of wool next to it. He seemed satisfied. He reached into his robe, pulled out the second silver coin, and handed it to me.

I said, “Good doing business with you. How about I come back tomorrow and shave another one?”

At this the monk looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. His slight smile broadened into a huge grin, and he spoke for the first time.

“We don’t have the budget right now, but circle back next quarter.”

And with those words, something terrifying happened. The monastery, the pens, the yaks, the other monks, the abbot in the window, all vanished, dissolving into black smoke. 

My monk — I suppose I should call him my first client — vanished last. He vanished quite slowly, beginning with his sandals, and ending with the grin.

I felt anxiously in my pockets. The two silver coins were still there.

I examined the coins more closely. Each had a yak on the front, and an inscription I couldn’t read on the back. It wasn’t Tibetan or any language I recognized.

Many years later, I met an expert who consulted on obscure languages, and showed him my coins.

“Where did you get these?” he asked, with a curious look on his face. “They’re not rare, but they’re not very common either. I haven’t seen one of these outside of private collections for years.”

“Why, what are they?”

“They are called yakbucks. They have no documented provenance. I’ve only heard rumors about them.”

“What rumors?”

“They are supposedly coins from an ancient global order of… well…”

“…assassins?”

He chuckled. “You’ve been watching too many John Wick movies. No, an order of what I suppose we’d call management consultants today. It was called the Order of the Yak. Died out in the 18th century I think.”

“Makes sense I found them in Bhutan then. What are they worth?”

“The history is all speculation and rumor, so probably not much, and there’s a fair number of them around. They just have curiosity value. You might get a few hundred dollars from a collector if you’re lucky. But you should probably just hang on to them. Good conversation starters. And maybe they’ll appreciate in value if anyone ever digs up some verifiable history on them.”

“Can you read the inscription on the back?”

“Sort of. It is in a curious language called Yaka, invented by 16th century Silk Road traders. Some people claim that’s the origin of the English word yakking.”

“And what does it say?”

“I’m not 100% sure, but I think it says, First you pay for your beliefs. Then your beliefs pay for you.” 

It would take me years of yakking to learn what that meant.

That was my first gig. I still have the two yakcoins. In fact, I have many more, buried in a few secret stashes around the world. And as for the Order of the Yak, let me just say the consultant on obscure languages was wrong. It did not die out in the 18th century.

If you build a career in indie consulting, you too may one day earn some yakbucks. Some people say you’re not a real consultant until you’ve earned some yakbucks. Perhaps they are right.

Yakbucks can’t be spent like regular money, but they are more than mere curiosities. They are worthless without deep knowledge of the art of gig. But the more you know, the more valuable they become. And curiously, the more yakbucks you earn, the more real dollars you earn as well. Perhaps there is some sort of mystic connection between he two. So look out for them and collect them when you can. They are silver, and about an inch across. You generally have to wander off the beaten path of gigs a bit to find them.

Those weeks in Bhutan proved to be the turning point. After my encounter with the monk, I made some regular money doing some thought leadership for a local travel agency, bought a ticket back home, incorporated my business as an LLC, and went into business. Shortly after, I found my first normie client, who paid me in dollars.

I had turned billable.

So long as I was getting paid, I found I could see, and believe in, any organization. My horrible accident had turned into a gift. Perhaps one day, electric monks will replace me too, but until that day comes, I suspect my gift will keep me billable.

We will talk more about this shadowy world and the billable life in coming weeks, but until next time, you may want to reflect on your own origin story. What horrible accident sent you down this path? What gift did it turn into? Have you earned any yakbucks yet?

And perhaps the most important question: are you billable yet?

<< Prelude: III | Into the Yakverse index | Always Be Strategizing >>

Well, here we go. Figured I’d make my first real post a public one so I can say hello to both free and paid subscribers at once. As of this inaugural post, this list has 319 subscribers total, and 161 paying subscribers. It’ll take me a few warm-up issues to figure out how I want to divide ideas between public and subscriber-only.

For starters, I’m going to drop this conversation right into the deep end, with a list of 42 Great Truths of gig work in general, and indie consulting in particular. Niels Bohr defined a Great Truth as one whose negation is also a Great Truth. I’ve framed these as imperatives for your comfort and convenience, but the same principle applies. The opposite of every Great Imperative is also a Great Imperative.

If you like, give yourself 1 point for each of these that you either strongly agree with OR disagree with, based on your own experience, and 0 points if it seems like an arbitrary or theoretical concern that you have no strong experience-based feelings about. Deduct 1 point if you can’t even figure out what the hell I’m talking about with a particular point.

Your total score is a measure of your Capability Maturity Level as a consultant. If you score less than 10, don’t quit your day job. If you score less than 5, see a doctor to check if you are alive and over 18.

1. Do not accept work when broke that you would reject when flush

2. Say yes or no to gigs against your instincts 10% of the time

3. Never assign homework the client didn’t ask for

4. Never accept homework you didn’t ask for

5. Solve for industry level questions, not organization or world level answers

6. Choose hunting-party clients over individuals or impersonal organizations

7. Never accept a deliverable request from an intermediary who can’t act on it

8. Create choices, not recommendations

9. Keep your bespoke models as simple as possible

10. Only use off-the-shelf models that you enjoy nerding out over

11. Avoid making up vanity models

12. Do not participate in execution except in ceremonial forms (like talks)

13. Do not participate in risk where you can manipulate the reward

14. Avoid anchor clients

15. Avoid polished deliverables

16. Document through communication (such as email), not documents

17. The work ends when the story ends, not when the last check clears

18. Keep your private identity amusing to yourself

19. Keep your public identity a 10-foot-pole away from your gig work

20. Keep your client-facing identity normcore

21. Do not claim unambiguous value addition amidst ambiguous outcomes

22. Retrospectives of whole outcomes over personal value-addition estimates

23. No more than 7±2 active “cases” at a time (and that’s pushing it)

24. Train your memory to remember an hour of conversation without notes

25. Don’t trust your situation awareness in a gig after 6 months of inactivity

26. Learn what’s unique about the sector and its history

27. Learn the sector’s paper-napkin math and unique measures of itself

28. Demystify the industry’s science and technology stack for yourself

29. Discourage use of purely internal jargon in how clients talk to you

30. Keep the game in your head, not your head in the game

31. Design your personal incentives to remove moral hazard

32. Avoid sending unsolicited pitches

33. Cost-plus accounting over value-based accounting

34. If a client asks for an ROI estimate, walk away

35. Do not accept money the client cannot afford to spend

36. In billing, bundle and unbundle line items for at-a-glance auditability

37. Avoid retainers and advances unless the client needs to use them

38. Hourly rate over project or piece rate, project or piece rate over outcome-based

39. Learn more from every client than they learn from you

40. Learn to play obfuscated chess postman* across gigs, live

41. Generalize what you learn for public consumption, but not too soon

42. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story

Why is this the deep end? Because you won’t encounter the substance and reasoning behind these Great Imperatives until you’re a few years and a half-dozen clients into indie consulting. So some of these will seem theoretical and/or unnecessarily down in the weeds to you. Others will seem arbitrary or overly philosophical.

I’ve violated every single one of these in the last 8 years, some of them multiple times. But I’ve followed each rule more often than I’ve violated it, so they are my defaults.

What’s more, they’re neither idiosyncratic personal defaults, nor are they common-sense defaults that work well for everybody.

They are good defaults that undergird a particular philosophy and approach to indie consulting. They are the the bedrock of the school of consulting I’m founding that will last ten thousand years and evolve into a Holy Order of Space Consultants, and whose Original Immutable Esoteric Truths I will be sharing on this list with those who prove themselves worthy.

Though of course the actual list of Great Imperatives is subject to Great Edits.

If I had brainstormed this list 5 years ago, it would have been different. If I brainstorm it again in 5 years, it will be different. But the Original Immutable Esoteric soul of the list would remain the same, through such regenerations of the verbal body. And there will always be exactly 42 Great Imperatives. No more, no less. Why? See Great Imperative #42.

So welcome to the Art of Gig. I will try to do at least 1 public post a month. Paying subscribers, look out for the first subscriber-only post later this week.

*Basically, obfuscated chess postman is applying learnings from one gig to another in real-time, by creating suitable abstractions to port your new learnings without compromising confidentiality. The entire consulting industry is built around this.

I’ve been flirting with the idea of somehow sharing my learning and thinking as an indie consultant for a while now. A few months ago, I got a flatteringly strong response when I asked on twitter if people were interested in learning the game from me. More recently, when I polled people about the preferred format, a subscription newsletter turned out to be the top choice (38% of 261 votes), followed by a recorded video course (32%). So I’ve decided to pursue a barbell model and divide what I have to say on the subject across these two channels.

This subscription newsletter (which I’ve priced at the minimum allowable $5/mo or $50/year for now) for an ongoing stream of nuggets of priceless weekly wisdom from me, plus a course on Teachable that I will launch next week for video deep dives into some of the core models and ideas I use (that will be priced at a few hundred dollars; I haven’t decided yet).

Check out the About page for what I have planned for this newsletter.

The first paid-subscribers-only post will be next week. I’m thinking Mondays or Tuesdays as the regular day for this newsletter. We’ll see where it stabilizes.

There is of course a lot more to figure out, so bear with me as I figure that out over the first few issues.

<< Prelude II | Into the Yakverse index | The Shadow’s Journey >>

I exited the AspireKat building at a slight trot. Time was of the essence. Anscombe was scurrying to keep up with me, trying to type with one hand on his open laptop, balanced on the arm of his Starbucks-mug hand.

“Figure out Donna’s home address and get us an Uber. I am going to have Guanxi open up a line.”

He reluctantly folded his laptop under his arm, pulled out his phone and fiddled briefly with it. “Okay. ETA three minutes for the Uber. Looks like Donna lives about twenty minutes away.”

“Good.”

“So why are we going to see her? Why would she know about the acquisition bid?”

“Hold on. I’m texting Guanxi here.”

Unlike young digital natives, I can’t text and talk at the same time.

Things under control?

All good. Bainies getting set up for the initial goat sacrifice.

Khan?

Trying to get to Saul, but the Bainies have him.

We need a live feed.

On it. Periscope.

I pulled up Periscope on my phone. It looked like Guanxi had managed to position his phone strategically by the window ledge near the display. Almost the entire room was visible in a fishbowl view. At the far end, Saul was standing regally, in a gown the Bainies had put on him. Three Bainies were doing a slow, ritual snake dance in a circle around him, waving incense sticks and chanting.

Guanxi wandered briefly into view and nodded imperceptibly at the camera before wandering out if view again. I handed my phone to Anscombe.

“Could you monitor that? I get a headache if I stare at a screen while moving.”

Anscombe promptly forgot about the question he’d asked. His gaze latched onto my screen.

“Firehose time. I’m going to have to reconfigure my setup a bit to handle this.”

Handing your phone to anyone born after 1985 is an incredible gesture of trust. So in consulting, it is increasingly important to maintain your phone in a state of plausible shareability to form alliances. It’s also a good way to keep digital natives busy so you can think.

And I needed to think about an important question: what did Donna know?

***

The Uber arrived.

Anscombe got in first, opened up his laptop and tapped a button on the handle of his Starbucks mug.

It said, “Welcome, Titanium Card Member. Reconfiguring for mobile work now. There are three Starbucks stores on your route. Would you like to order a drink pick-up along the way?”

Anscombe said, “No Siren. Just reconfigure.”

“Are you sure? We are offering a three-point bonus for a breakfast sandwich purchase today.”

“I am sure. Reconfigure.”

The coffee mug and laptop beeped briefly at each other. Two slender robot arms and a coffee-mug holder emerged from the sides of the screen. Anscombe put my phone in one gripper, his own in the other and the mug in the holder. A tiny dish antenna unfolded like a little steel flower from the lid of the mug and hummed and twirled like a tiny ballet dancer to find a signal.

Anscombe tapped the side of his glasses. The left side transformed into a monocular display, the right into a laser sight, and the nose bridge to a grill that covered his nose and mouth. He tapped his watch and it turned into a sheath that enveloped his forearm.

He turned to me and rasped, “Reconfiguration for Grande Volume, Velocity and Variety Firehose Complete. We are Transcombe. Transcombe would like more data. Can you provide more data?”

I stepped around and got in from the other side, making sure to yield as much space as I could to Transcombe.

“I think the weather in Kuala Lumpur and activity on the #Pharell hashtag might be salient.”

“Acquiring feeds. Would you like to add two more feeds so Transcombe can reconfigure for Venti Volume, Velocity and Variety?”

“Not yet,” I said, and to the driver, “Let’s get going.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes. What did Donna know?

If I could just come up with one clue, I could unleash Transcombe on it. Normally, it wouldn’t be a match for the full-scale McKinsey  on-site consulting compute cluster, but with the Bainies running interference, and just a little bit of inspired guesswork, we stood a chance.

Now, if you’re new to the consulting game, you might assume that since Anscombe was now an ally in the Little Three alliance, I should have just answered his question and kept the alliance at the level of good, old-fashioned human-to-human trust and avoided triggering his transhumanist mode. More old-fashioned indie consultants — including some much younger than me — won’t even work with transies in their human state, let alone their transformed states. They think it is the human, personal touch, without all that alienating technology, that sets us small, indie consultants apart from the big guys.

They’re wrong. They’re also prejudiced bio-bigots. Indie consulting isn’t about low-tech, high-touch HumanOps. Even the venerable 2×2 can benefit from infusions of technology. Humans and transies can not only get along, they can learn from each other as we all work towards a better world.

When dealing with data-driven types like Anscombe/Transcombe, it is a mistake to offer up summary views of a situation as you would with a human ally. I could have explained the state of play Guanxi and I had engineered, and launched into an explanation of why my gut instinct suggested Donna’s ‘flu could not be a coincidence. I could have described the determinacy illusion and Situational Control Structure™ I had set up.

It would have been a waste. The data-driven are not like you and me. They do not understand these conceptual things. Trying to explain conceptual things just leads to guys like Anscombe to challenge you with way too many dumb questions and remarks. Back in the day, the only way they knew to push back against conceptual types was to yell “correlation is not causation” whenever you poked them in the belly. These days, they often come with as many as a dozen pre-recorded messages:

How do you know? What are you priors?

What’s your confidence interval?

Coincidence is not correlation.

Why are you overfitting that? Please stop, it hurts.

You’re p-value fishing! That’s pure Fisherian bro-science!

You’re mean. Why won’t you let me run a regression on that?

Hey, that’s my laptop you’re smashing, Bayes curse you!

Tee Hee!

Sacrilege! Thou shalt not use System 1.

How dare you challenge the Authority of the Priory of Bayes?

I am more convex than thou!

That’s not Solomonoff Induction, that’s just bullshitting.

Instead of building trust, as sharing candid subjective opinions and intuitive assessments usually does, with the data-driven, it simply drives up suspicions and creates walls. So the right way to build trust is to hand them your phone and accept their transie state as just as human as the rest of us, if not more so.

Guys like Anscombe feed on firehoses of raw data. Preferably flowing with the volume, velocity and variety of untreated coffee-flavored sewage.

I prefer scotch and as little data as I can possibly get away with. To each his own.

Transcombe interrupted my train of thought.

“ETA 16 minutes to residence of Donna Dauntless.”

“Insufficient signal recovery to assess situation at AspireKat HQ. Continuing to monitor.”

Good. The FUD was holding. I turned to the question of what Donna might know. Clearly she knew something that Saul didn’t, and was using it to broker the acquisition deal to benefit herself somehow. I began running through the options in my head.

AspireKat has a patent portfolio KlongleWorks needs.

AspireKat has some sort of licensing foothold in the Chinese market.

AspireKat has an engineering team worth acqui-hiring for some reason.

Donna has come up with a Radical and Disruptive play KlongleWorks was interested in running.

I chuckled to myself at the last one. You have to allow yourself your little private jokes.

No none of the options sounded plausible. AspireKat had no meaningful patents that I knew of. KlongleWorks already had much better entry points into China. AspireKat’s engineering team was too big and mediocre to be a bargain acquihiring prospect.

Then it hit me.

I opened my eyes and exclaimed, “Donna has a Neo up her sleeve!”

The Transcombe turned to me, a look of puzzlement visible behind the mask.

“Transcombe does not understand. What is a Neo?”

“Never mind that. Movie reference. Before your time.”

“Should Transcombe incorporate twentieth century cultural history archives into priors for analysis?”

“No, never mind that. But here’s something to try: look for AspireKat employees who have been communicating a lot with Donna in the last few months. Exclude her long-time direct reports.”

“Analyzing. Eight candidates found.”

“Hmm. Narrow it down to people who recently started reporting to her or transferred to her organization.”

“Analyzing. Two candidates found.”

“Okay. Pull up their bios. And you can stop monitoring the other stuff now and power down.”

There was a brief hum as Transcombe withdrew and Anscombe re-emerged, blinking slightly.

We looked at his laptop screen together. Two intranet profiles were showing side-by-side.

One showed a picture of a young man with a vacant look, captioned David Dauntless, Director of Customer Co-Creation Initiatives. Clearly her talented genius son had graduated college and she’d gotten him a job well-suited to his considerable talents.

The other showed a picture of a  young, awkward-looking bespectacled woman, probably in her mid-twenties. It was captioned Cassandra Hadoop,Assistant Engineer.

I stabbed at the second profile with my finger.

“That’s her. That’s our Neo.”

“What’s a…”

“Never mind what a Neo is. Dig up everything you can about her.”

***

We stepped out of the Uber and headed up the front door of Donna’s house. We could hear soothing drumming through the open window on the left. Dancing figures were visible through the partially drawn curtains.

For a moment, I almost panicked. Had the Bainies somehow gotten here before us? I did a double take through the window. No, drums weren’t their style. Plus, these were mostly older women, dressed in flowing hippie robes.

Donna opened the front door. Cheerful, relaxed, steel-gray hair in a neat bun. Same as I remembered her from our last encounter.

“Oh, it’s you, I was expecting someone else. I suppose Ben called you in? Nervy kid. Come on in, how have you been? Who’s your young friend here?”

I ignored the question and said, “So who were you expecting?”

Donna grinned widely and ignored me in turn.

“Come on through to the living room, my friends were just walking me through their creative leadership workshop. It’s great. It’s called Drumming Up Market Dominance.“

Four women were seated at drums in the living room. Two more were dancing. The oldest, clearly the leader of D.U.M.B, waved cheerfully at us and nodded at her companions. The group lowered the drumming intensity to a pleasant background murmur.

Hippie consultants. Was there a species not represented in this damn circus?

I said, “Creative leadership workshop?”

“For RADIR, my group’s annual Radical and Disruptive Innovation Retreat. Starts this afternoon and goes through the weekend. These guys do this inspirational three-hour workshop where you alternate 15-minute drumming and dancing sessions with 15-minute creative visioning exercises.”

I frowned. This wasn’t making sense. Maybe Donna was hopped up on NyQuil.

“You’re preparing for a group retreat right now?”

“Oh, didn’t Ben tell you? I have the ‘flu so I’ll have to miss most of it. It’s been scheduled for weeks, so I didn’t want to postpone it. Hopefully I’ll be able to join at least the last day, but my son can lead the retreat without me.”

“You don’t look sick, plus you’re working now. Isn’t the Thought Leadership crisis a higher priority?”

“Oh, I am sick alright. I am just feeling slightly better this morning, so I figured I’d keep this one meeting. Are Saul and the boys handling the Thought Leadership crisis okay? Isabella leaning-in as usual? They’re a good bunch, they’ll deal.”

So she was brazenly sticking to her influenza act. There was no time to dance around. Leverage time. I turned to the D.U.M.B leader.

“You there. What’s your name?”

The women stopped drumming and the leader stood up and bowed.

“Namaste. My name is Joanne Running Water. You might have heard of my company? Aquarius Center for Yoga, Pilates and Creative Leadership? We’re in a strip mall off the highway? About an hour south.”

“How much is Donna here paying you for this workshop?”

“Money is secondary. Our values…”

“HOW MUCH?” I asked, more firmly.

“Ten dollars  for the session plus a free lunch, but we are really grateful for the exposure and opportunity for…”

“I’ll give you $100 and get you a meeting with Whole Foods if you leave right now.”

Donna interrupted, “Wait, you can’t just…”

I turned to look at her, “Drop the act. We’re here about Cassandra.”

Donna shut up and gave me a dirty look.

The D.U.M.B  team filed past me. I handed the leader her $100 as she left.

“Now Donna, how about we sit down and talk about what’s really going on here.”

***

Donna retreated to make tea and returned with a tray. I did not object. I needed time to gather my thoughts as well, and Anscombe was still digging. More time meant more usable intel.

We all sat down with our cups.

“What about Cassandra?” she demanded cagily.

“KlongleWorks. We know.”

This is the one part about business maneuver warfare movies and television shows get right. When you know very little, you must use it suggest you know more than you do, in order to bait your opponent into revealing more than they should. Nine out of ten times, it does the trick.

Donna was too experienced to fall for it though.

“You know what exactly?”

I looked at Anscombe.

This was the moment of truth. The leap of faith. That one live-fire situation in every gig for which you cannot prepare. The situation where you cannot retreat to discuss in private with allies before acting. If Anscombe did not step up, she’d know we were bluffing.

Anscombe looked up with the unnerving, preternatural calm of the data-driven.

“Project AspireElephant. You’ve spent two million worth of compute time on it in the last two months alone. Eidetic memory, huh? Impressive.”

Donna seemed to deflate. Suddenly, her face looked much older, more haggard.

“Have you told Saul?”

“Not yet. So if the deal goes through, Saul is out, you’re in?”

“AspireKat can’t  take a corporate eidetic memory product to market. Not with Saul at the helm. You know that. So what do you want?”

“To come along for the ride. Anscombe here, Guanxi and me. We can spin up a larger practice to handle all of KlongleWorks strategy needs.”

That seemed to amuse Donna. She recovered her normal cheer.

“You clowns? Even if I could convince them, you couldn’t manage an intern among you, let alone staff a major account. I’m not going to risk queering the deal with that sort of thing.”

“Would you rather have McKinsey joining the party? Or Bain perhaps”

“What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously, her eyes narrowing.

“I mean they are at AspireKat right now. Only a matter of hours before they figure out what’s going on too.”

That seemed to do the trick. Donna sank back into the sofa and closed her eyes. After a moment, she opened them again.

“How about a three-month transition-management advisory gig? If you can keep Saul and his Big Three buddies distracted through the weekend while I wrap up the deal. I can do that much. It’ll go through on Monday.”

Foot in the door. 

“Deal.”

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m tired and need a nap. I actually do have the ‘flu as it happens, and I have a lot more diligence to wrap up today.”

She did look tired again. Maybe she did have the ‘flu.

***

 We were Ubering back to AspireKat. I texted Guanxi the good news that we were in on the deal with Donna. He texted back,

No worries, I’ll keep them occupied. 

“That was nice work back there. Didn’t think you’d figure it out in time.”

“I didn’t. All I had was the project name and budget. I threw in Cassandra Hadoop’s PhD dissertation topic on a hunch.”

I sat back, impressed. This was not just bullshiting. It was data-driven real-time bullshitting. Young Anscombe had a bright future.

“So if I understood what happened back there, she’ll take a lowball offer from KlongleWorks to Saul next week?”

“Correct. It will include a can’t-refuse exit deal for Saul.”

“And in a few months, when the dust settles, Donna gets a nice, juicy deal for herself, maybe a senior corporate VP job at KlongleWorks, and they announce the new product.”

“Yup, and we get three months to work our way in ourselves.”

“So how do we keep Khan and the Bainies distracted through the weekend?”

I frowned. I was forgetting something. Then I remembered.

“Where do you suppose Cassandra is right now?”

“At the retreat I suppose.”

“And where is this retreat?”

Anscombe tapped briefly on his laptop.

“Some sort of retreat center in the woods. About six hours away looks like.”

I closed my eyes to think.

The retreat was to last through the weekend.

The deal was to go through on Monday.

Saul and his team believed Donna had the ‘flu.

Donna had been genuinely spooked when we mentioned Khan.

The deal hinged on Cassandra Hadoop’s work.

I opened my eyes, leaned forward and yelled in the driver’s ear.

“Turn around. Go back to where you picked us up.”

Anscombe said, “What’s going on?”

“She played us.”

“What do you mean?”

The Uber had turned down Donna’s street again. Her driveway was visible several blocks away. A silver Lexus was backing out.

“Slow down, follow that car. Don’t get too close.”

I turned to Anscombe, “Why do you think she has a retreat scheduled at the same time as a major deal going through?”

“Umm…”

“She’s going to get Cassandra. That’s whom she was expecting at her house.”

Donna’s Lexus had turned down a road heading out of town.

“Where does this road go?” I asked the driver.

“County airport a few miles down. Dead-ends on the waterfront.”

“Alright, go with the flow, but don’t lose the Lexus in the traffic.”

***

The Lexus turned into the airport as I expected. We had the Uber drop us off at the terminal, while the Lexus continued past it towards the parking lot.

Anscombe asked, “now what?”

“Look around, see if you can spot Cassandra.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on…?”

“Donna isn’t brokering the deal. Saul is. Donna is stealing the crown jewels.”

Anscombe frowned. Then enlightenment dawned on his face.

“Without Cassandra, there’s no deal…”

“Yes, she engineered the thought-leadership crisis as a distraction while she worked the steal.”

“What about Khan? Was that her too?”

“No. That’s what spooked her. She thought she could handle us, but wasn’t expecting McKinsey gruntforce and Bain telepathy loose on the AspireKat Intranet. She’s afraid they might find out Cassandra is gone too soon, through brute force.”

“So when Saul finds out Cassandra is missing…”

“…he’ll learn about the retreat and rush there, yes. What do you want to bet the retreat center has no phone or WiFi connectivity? That will buy her another day. Except she didn’t think he’d find out until Friday, after the thought leadership crisis.”

We had both been scanning the waiting area as we were talking. There were only a couple of dozen people there. There was nobody who looked like Cassandra.

“She isn’t here.”

“No she isn’t. Any chance you could trace her online?”

“I can try hacking into NORAD and triangulating from cellphone tower pings using the blockchain…but it’s going to take a few minutes.”

“Dammit man, do it.”

Something was wrong. We had been in the terminal for five minutes and Donna had not yet walked through the doors. And Cassandra was nowhere to be seen.

“The trace is working. It will take a few minutes to run. So what can she do with Cassandra? Wouldn’t AspireKat own all the IP for the project anyway?”

“It’s just incomplete code written by one engineer. If she has Cassandra, that will be worthless. And if I know Donna, she has probably arranged to have her lackeys trash the repo with junk code or something.”

“So she’ll just…”

“…sell the actual clean code and Cassandra’s services to some obscure Russian hacker group, yes.”

“And the AspireKat-Klongleworks deal…?”

“…Will fall through at the last minute, and they’ll both just have to watch as some Russian oligarch launches the product in America.”

Anscombe’s computer beeped. The screen showed a map with a large blinking red dot.

“What the hell? According to this, she was here at the airport just minutes ago.”

Shit. I ran to the information desk.

“This is the only terminal at this airport, right?”

“Yes sir. Unless you’re boarding a helicopter. In that case you should head directly to the helipad. Can I get you gentlemen a cart?”

I ran back and grabbed Anscombe by the arm, dragging him with me to the door.

“The helipad. They’re at the helipad,” I yelled.

We could see a helicopter landing the moment we exited. The helipad was fenced in separately, right by where the curving sidewalk ended, about a hundred yards away, past the end of the terminal. In the small parking lot next to it was the silver Lexus. Two figures were standing at the edge of the helipad.

We ran as hard as we could, but it was too late.

Donna was fastening her seatbelt as we got to the helipad gate. Inside, already strapped in, was a young woman I recognized as Cassandra.

Anscombe and I watched despondently as the helicopter lifted off and disappeared from view over international waters.

“Oh well,” I shrugged.

“Yeah,” said Anscombe.

“I suppose we can still bill AspireKat for some hours today.”

“Maybe we should head back? Help Guanxi drag it out longer?”

“I suppose.”

We stood in silence for a while, watching the sun climb higher in the sky. It was almost noon.

“So,” I ventured. “You got any other good gig leads?”

“Well, I heard they’re looking into Holacracy at one of the big studios down in LA. Know anything about it?”

“Hah, I was doing holacracy consulting before they invented a term for it. Let’s talk about it over lunch before we head back.”

“I saw a Taco Bell on the way here.”

“Sure. I’ll buy.”

<< Prelude II | Into the Yakverse index | The Shadow’s Journey >>

<< Prelude: I | Into the Yakverse index | Prelude: III >>

I shut the door of the conference room gently behind us. We could still hear Khan and Isabella out in the reception area, but their voices were now muted. Saul seemed to be in some sort of philosophical reverie as he made his way to his chair. Guanxi looked at me with narrowed eyes and nodded significantly. I narrowed my eyes as well, and nodded significantly in turn. A look of mutual understanding passed between us.

It’s a consultant thing. We call it the Significant Look Protocol.

Scientists have tried to figure out precisely what information is exchanged and  during these narrowed-eye-nod exchanges, and have come up with nothing. What is known though, is that about 1% of the time, a Significant Look results in a subtle, but unmistakable situational change known as Going Meta. Nobody knows what that is either, but it is a documented fact that when things Go Meta, cartels form and billables increase by a factor of 10.

This means a great many Significant Looks are exchanged at management conferences, but most lead to nothing. Some lead to sexual harrassment lawsuits.

This was one of those 1% of times. We had just gone meta. We both knew it, and knew the other did too.

You need to burn stronger coffee to fly at meta altitudes.

Guanxi went over to the coffee machine and began making coffee. It was now 7:15 AM. About 6.25 billable hours into my already-long day.

Saul settled into his chair, leaned back, and studied his steepled fingertips with quiet gravitas for a moment. Then he looked up and pondered the 2×2 on the screen with a look of sharp appraisal in his narrowed gray eyes.

He clearly had no idea what was going on.

So my first meta problem was this: how could I stow Saul safely away from Khan while Guanxi and I tried to figure out why McKinsey had rappelled into  AspireKat, chasing a measly $100k gig? Optimistically, Guanxi and I had about 15 minutes before Khan realized we were gone, and manufactured an excuse to butt back in.

We had 15 minutes to create leverage.

***

I sat down next to Saul and leaned back, mirroring his posture, and stared gravely at the screen.

“It is the job of a leader to define and interpret meaningful external reality for others,” I quoted, with an air of studied reverence.

“A. G. Lafley,” said Saul, and turned and smiled at me.

“From What Only the CEO Can Do, right?” I said, and smiled back. “One of my favorites.”

I gave him a Significant Look, but added just a dash of helplessness and a pinch of admiration. The aim of this maneuver is not to create mutual understanding or Go Meta, but to create a certain distance and trigger a state of mind only leaders are capable of: Courageous Solitude.

A brief flicker of loneliness appeared on Saul’s face, and was immediately replaced by a look of Aurelian courage and resolve. He returned to staring at his steepled fingers.

I shot a look at Guanxi. He brought over the three coffee mugs, put them on the table, and sat down next to me.

“Saul, I am sensing you need a moment alone to gather your thoughts,” I said.

He smiled gravely.

“We won’t be offended if you feel like stepping out on the balcony to listen to your heart.”

“You know what? I think I will.” He stood up, picked up his coffee mug and smiled at me. “You might be a little too authentic for this game, young man.”

Guanxi and I stood up as well. He stepped out onto the balcony to look at Meaningful External Reality. Bingo. 

The listen-to-your-heart bit had been a calculated risk. Your off-the-shelf CEOs only come in a few varieties with well-documented vulnerabilities. I hadn’t dealt with an Aurelian in a while — the turtleneck and goatee had had me confused for a bit and I’d been playing him like an Auteur, but he was clearly an Aurelian through and through. And the Aurelian’s main vulnerability is that they are suckers for a Glimpse of Emotional Authenticity.

The moment the balcony door shut behind him, I swung around immediately towards Guanxi and got up.

“Get on the phone, now! We have fifteen minutes tops,” I hissed through clenched teeth.

Guanxi nodded, executed a practiced speed-dial stab at his phone, retreated to a corner, and began whispering urgently in Cantonese.

I sat down again, in the chair Saul had just vacated. I leaned back, steepled my fingers, and looked at my 2×2 with quiet gravitas and sharp appraisal.

***

It took Guanxi exactly three minutes to turn up something. Bless him.

The stream of Cantonese stopped. Guanxi had put away his phone. I stood up and walked over to him.

“Sounds like there’s an acquisition bid in the works.”

Finally. “Who?”

“KlongleWorks.”

The ten-billion-market-cap-and-counting Unicorn! 

“Why?”

Guanxi shrugged.

I frowned. It made no sense. What would the fastest growing Silicon Valley startup want with a mediocre, mid-size, Connecticut-based maker of really bad insurance software?

“Do you know anything about them? I’ve never worked with them.”

“Me neither. They’re pretty secretive, their people are too scared to talk, and they don’t hire consultants so…”

“…nobody you or I know  is likely to know anything either,” I finished for him.

Then it hit us both at the same time:

“Khan doesn’t know anything either…” I exclaimed.

“…he’s just trying to Trojan Horse his way into KlongleWorks!” Guanxi finished.

We stared at each other. This is the moment consultants live for. This wasn’t a routine Thought Leadership MacGuffin gig. There was an actual known-unknown in play. If we could figure out what it was before Khan, we would have the leverage we needed.

See, there is a particular kind of idiot who goes around proclaiming that consultants just steal your watch and tell you the time, as though that were a deep revelation about how we evil consultants scam Good, Honest Corporations That Are Merely Trying to Create Wealth.

This interpretation is from not-even-wrong land.

The idea of bringing in an outsider to tell you what you already know is actually an idea that was invented by the first totally evil clients of strategy consulting, at a secret conference of neoliberal CEOs, chaired by Jack Welch, in an underground bunker in North Dakota in June of 1982. Reagan was due to attend too, and they even had a futon set up for him, but he didn’t show.

The future of consulting was created at t this conference. Many consultants of the period died in the crocodile moat around the bunker trying to break in, but none made it in. All we know about what transpired at that fateful event is this: the CEOs concluded that since they suddenly had about 1000x more agency than just a few years ago, they would need a scalable  way to manufacture plausible deniability for the future. They would need paper trails by the wholesale ton. They would need a cheap source of unbiased and independent third-party validation for decisions they would have had already taken.

Yes, Going Meta is mainly about quasi-atemporal subjunctive mood tense constructions.

Overnight, a sleepy, backwater boutique industry was transformed into a behemoth of a services business built around a game entirely designed by CEOs. Worse, they thought of a way to make it sound like our idea and to our benefit. They called it the stealing your watch to tell you the time business and acted like they were the victims of it. It was a master stroke.

In the consulting world, this service offering of telling clients what they already know is what is described in the service brochures as decision support. 

Even though this can be a high-margin business to be in when switching costs are high, consultants don’t like it for one simple reason: if everything you can offer is based on what the client already knows, and knows they know, you are replaceable. This means you have to rapidly sink your claws deep into the client and figure out some other way to protect your position and margins. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before some other 2×2-and-Excel hackshop steps in with a lower bid, triggering a race to the bottom that ends with analyst reports.

The key to turning the tables is to be the first to pounce on any known unknown that appears in the local picture. Not macroeconomy, not sector economy, but local. 

“If we can figure out why KlongleWorks is interested before Khan does…”

“We need to buy time…”

“We need to slow Khan down…”

“Isabella won’t hold much longer, we need someone running interference.”

For the second time in five minutes, we both had the same thought at the same time.

“Bainies!” we shouted together.

At that moment, the balcony door opened and Saul Marcus Aurelius Serene stepped back in with the glow of a CEO who has just had an Executive Insight.

“What was that shout?” he inquired, sitting down.

And before either of us could respond, the door to the reception area flew open, and Khan burst through, followed by a harried-looking Isabella.

“Aha!” he said, triumphantly.

I said, “Come on in Khan, we were getting some coffee. Saul was just about to kick off the strategy session.”

Guanxi said, “I just need to make a quick call” and stepped out into the balcony.

***

The room was only about half full now. Half the executives seemed to have stayed back to work with Khan’s men.

Ben and Anscombe were back in the room though.

Moment of truth for Anscombe. I caught his eye, gave him a Significant Look and jerked my head almost imperceptibly towards the balcony door.

A look of mutual understanding did not pass between us, and we clearly did not Go Meta. He did, however, get up with a bewildered look and head for the balcony door.

Khan had noticed, and tried to nod imperceptibly to one of his own men to follow, but I managed to interrupt the Significant Look by suddenly exclaiming, “Of course! The Value Chain!” (a term guaranteed to make any McKinsey person look your way).

Saul got up.

“Take a seat Mr. Khan. I believe I now have a handle on what we need here.”

He took the stylus from Khan, walked up to the display, pulled up a fresh sheet, and began writing. Khan sat down, glowering.

I pulled my phone out under the desk and began texting Guanxi.

Anscombe?

He’s with us

Anything?

He says they’re trawling the entire Intranet for something

So they’re flying blind too

Yeah, it’ll take them hours even with their equipment

Bainies?

ETA twenty minutes

Alright, tell Anscombe to get back out there to dig. You get back in here. You’ll need to take over in a few minutes.

I looked up. Saul had written three words on the display and underlined the first letter of each. As Executive Insights go, this one was almost as good as a Consultant Insight. He’d even figured out an alliterative phrasing.

Many beginner consultants are threatened when their clients start doing what they think is their job.  In fact, the more of your job the clients do themselves, the more they need you.

Product

People

Partnerships

I made an appreciative noise, nodded slowly and thoughtfully, and leaned forward with just enough ceremony to get everybody looking at me again.

“I see where you’re going with those themes….” I said, and paused for effect. Then I continued, as though thinking aloud.

“Yeah, products out there in the world, our people in here, partnerships to bridge the two. Using external realities to bridge strategy and culture. Hangs together. That’s a pretty neat synthesis.”

“Ah, precisely,” Saul said, somewhat tentatively.

I had offered what, in the business, is known as a build. The entire purpose of the literary-industrial complex is to keep up a steady supply of construction material for this kind of building. On bigger gigs, I often have to trade my nerd-normcore look for construction overalls.

The basic skill you need in consulting is the ability to maintain a huge inventory of such building material in your head, ready to be deployed, at a moment’s notice, to buttress any point that has just been made. Ideally a point that acts as the stone in the stone-soup of consulting: the Executive Insight.

It takes at least two to play this game, though as many as six can play at once. When an executive wants to accept a building bid, he or she focuses on the parts they recognize and like. When the collaborator focuses on the parts they recognize and don’t like, it means the bid has been rejected. If the bid is being evaluated — something you don’t want because it means you’re not in control of the narrative — the potential collaborator asks clarifying questions.

Saul said, “A bridge, yes, I like that, it is a strong metaphor. Our business is really a set of bridges. Every new thing we learn in the marketplace creates or destroys bridges among Products, People and Partners.”

This sort of metaphysical maneuvering is not the same as telling executives what they already know. Instead, it is about using brain-cached copies of the Harvard Business Review and other reliable sources of cheap construction material to dress up what executives think they know, in real time, to make their thinking seem at least 3x more substantial than it actually is.

If you think it is all about going away and thinking in private, and putting out a polished report  few months later, you’re playing a very different and much less interesting game. Live-fire mental-model building in a hostile Big-Three environment is the game for Real Independent Consultants.™

I said, “Whoa, I didn’t think of that. That’s much more powerful than what I was thinking about…It’s kinda like an advanced version of Gareth Morgan’s brain metaphor in Images of Organization. Is that where you got it?”

A critical factor in collaborative building exercises is that executives by and large are not just poorly read, but very insecure about it. And not because they are afraid they might make mistakes without the Wisdom of Books and Scholars to guide them. They are insecure because they recall being sandbagged by a snooty bookish types sometime early in their career. And despite making more money and getting more women — let’s face it, we’re mostly talking about men here — than the bookish types ever do, they never quite get over it. It’s an unchecked item on their list of Things to Totally Dominate. Until they either achieve dominance in the game or undermine it entirely in their immediate environment (by burning libraries full of HBR back issues, or if they’re thinking more clearly, banning all consultants from the premises, for example), it is a source of exploitable resentment and restlessness.

So whenever possible, it is important to suggest that their Executive Insights are rediscoveries of Profound Academic Ideas, or better still, that they knew about said Profound Academic Idea and are actually innovating beyond it.

Saul said, “Vaguely rings a bell, but I can’t recall if I read that one. But let’s keep building on that theme. How does employee disengagement cash out in the bridge or brain metaphor?”

Khan was looking suspicious. He could see what I was doing, but his look suggested he was not familiar with the construction material I was trucking in, and couldn’t see an opening to insert himself.

Just as I thought.

McKinsey people are — if you will forgive the mixed metaphor — structuralists. They are most comfortable with things like supply chains, microeconomics, growth shares, market segments and other things that make for complicated block diagrams that can be backed up by macro-heavy Excel sheets. You do not want to race against them in deploying building material in the form of say, SWOT analyses or value chains.

Their weakness, however, is construction material from the People School. Throw obscure qualitative management ideas from psychology, sociology or cognitive science idea at them, and they hesitate. Their responses get fractionally slower. If I could nail down the conversation firmly in People School land, we’d at least slow them down.

Saul was looking serene and thoughtful. The rest of the table was either looking at me or one of them. The FUD landscape was almost where I wanted it.

Anscombe, in a gorilla suit, quietly entered through the balcony and vanished through the door to the reception area. Nobody noticed.

Guanxi came in a few seconds later and sat down in empty chair just behind Khan, even though there was an empty chair next to mine.

I was about to respond to Saul when Khan finally spoke, with a magisterial frown.

“I don’t follow. Did I miss something?”

Next to being sandbagged by actual new information, this is the second most dangerous situation that can occur during Structured Conversation Operations:™  somebody acknowledging what they don’t know in a way that seems like a magisterial call for information sharing rather than an apologetic admission of embarrassing ignorance.

***

I looked at Khan and said, “I’ll email you a couple of links. Important, but not urgent. I think we’ve actually been missing more cooped up in here.”

See, the thing about control of the narrative is that you need to immediately spot and interpret any pattern in a way that flatters the sagacity of the people you want feeling more sure of themselves and confuses the people you want feeling less sure of themselves.

To do this well, you must prevent people from asking for information that they think they don’t have. Because then they might realize they aren’t missing anything because there is nothing to miss. If they do manage to sneak in a question, you must deflect and immediately change the subject.

I turned to Saul,”Speaking of bridges, before we develop your three-P’s strategy further, perhaps Isabella can get us up to speed about her operational readiness?”

Giving things names and assigning ownership makes people feel more certain of themselves. Putting somebody into a state of information limbo with a defensible information-blocking move makes them less certain of themselves. Isabella gave me a grateful look, turned to Saul and began talking.

“Yeah, I can do that, basically…”

In the trade, the people you’re making more certain of themselves are called patsies. The people you are making less certain of themselves are called schmucks. Usually, but not always, you’re temporarily playing for the patsies and against the schmucks. Because higher certainty creates more relative momentum.

So the three step process is:

1. Create information asymmetry deltas so people know different things

2. Situate new patterns you call out with respect to things known by the side you want feeling more certain

3. Exploit resulting stable FUD differential

I call this CSE™ or the Create-Situate-Exploit™ model.

So the way you set up the playing field for a gig is:

1. Pick a working Determinacy Illusion Engineering™ goal by deciding the pattern of FUD you want.

2. Induce an appropriate Situational Control Structure™ using well-chosen cue words like quarterback and pineapple.

3. Commence Structured Conversation Operations™ to maintain and grow the engineered illusion by controlling the agenda and who speaks, when, and about what.

4. Take control of critical information flows via careful divide-and-conquer using the Significant Look Protocol judiciously to Go Meta with the right people at the right time.

5. Use  Create-Situate-Exploit™ approach to Always-Be-Channeling-attention, ABCa away from wherever you suspect actual new information is. 

Isabella and Saul were talking, with Khan trying to interrupt. I pulled out my phone again.

Take over when they come up for air

Okay, Bainies should be here any moment

I’ll slip out when they do.

There was a lull. Saul, Khan and Isabella all leaned back.

Isabella said, “…but is it exhaustive enough to backstop the rest of the Thought Leadership? Are there any gaps?”

Guanxi stepped in.

“Ben, you mentioned a 3-point email. When was in the last one?”

Before Ben could answer, a sudden darkness descended on the room, and a quiet chill, accompanied by a smell of incense, rippled through the room.

There was the sound of elevator doors opening, followed by a low, sonorous chant.

“What now?” said Saul, in an exasperated tone.

Khan, a look of comprehension spreading across his face, said “I think…”

Guanxi interrupted, “I’ll go find out.”

But there was no need. A single file of chanting monks, their faces shaded by cowls, began streaming into the room. They began forming neat rows of four each in the back of the room. When the last of them had taken his place in the phalanx, the chanting stopped.

With a single motion, they raised their heads and pushed back their cowls. The exact same smile of disarming friendliness appeared on all their faces at once. They chanted in unison.

“We are the Bainies.”

Saul, frowned. Khan began to slowly turn red.

“We will increase shareholder value.”

Guanxi stepped up smiling, his hand outstretched.

“Welcome! Glad you guys could join us. Allow me to introduce you to Saul.”

“Hello Saul. We are pleased to meet you. We will add Real Value.”

I had worked my way to the door. Guanxi had this well in hand. Though he was not an ex-Bainie, he had once done them a good deed and had been initiated into their fold as an Honored Ally. He would know how best to direct their rituals and rites to our best advantage.

I stepped out.

The reception area was deathly quiet. Every one of the McKinsey troopers seemed to have collapsed into a coma. There was a powerful smell of licorice.  Anti-McKinsey Bainspells. They’d be out for three hours at least.

Damn, they’d brought along a High Wizard at the very least. They were not holding back. I wondered how much Guanxi had told them.

He must have at least told them there were friendlies on the ground for them to have have deployed with McKinsey-specific counter-measures.

I hoped I hadn’t created more FUD than I could stay ahead of myself.

I sought out Anscombe. He was unaffected, as I expected, and hammering away at his laptop in a corner, completely absorbed and oblivious to what had just happened.

“Let’s go!” I hissed.

“Where?”

“To find Donna Dauntless.”

Influenza my ass. Ten to one she was a few steps ahead of Saul. I strongly suspected she had created the Thought Leadership crisis as a decoy maneuver. She probably knew about the acquisition bid in the works.

The question was: did she know what it was about?

And could Anscombe and I get to her and get her to share her edge with us before the McKinsey trawling operation or Bainie telpaths figured it out?

<< Prelude: I | Into the Yakverse index | Prelude: III >>

Into the Yakverse index | Prelude: II >>

I don’t talk about my consulting gigs much on this blog, since there is surprisingly little overlap between my money-making work and my writing. But many people seem to be very curious about precisely what sort of consulting I do, and how that side of ribbonfarm operates. Unfortunately, it’s hard to explain without talking about actual cases, and I can’t share details of most engagements due to confidentiality constraints. But fortunately, one of my recent clients agreed to let me write up minimally pseudonymized account of a brief gig I did with them a while back.  So here goes.

It all began when my phone rang at 1 AM on a Tuesday morning a few months ago. The caller launched right into it the moment I answered.

“Oh thank God! Donna has the ‘flu…I tried calling Guanxi Gao, but I can’t reach him. I left a message but… omigod, we’re going to run out of inventory by Friday, what are we going to do?”

If you aren’t used to the consulting world, this is how most engagements begin: you’re dropped into a panicked conversation in the middle of a crisis that has already been unfolding for sometime.

Luckily, I was not yet in bed, but doing some routine Open Twitter Operations from the Ribbonfarm Consulting Command Center.

I hit the red alert button on my desk, which turned off all but one of the 16 flat-panel displays that line one wall of the darkened main room of the RCCC. The one that stayed on showed a blank 2×2 grid with a flashing lemon-yellow border. The speakers switched from Mongolian throat singing to a steady pip…pip…pip. 

Many consultants today use more complicated first-responder protocols, but I am old-fashioned. One clean vertical stroke, one clean horizontal stroke, at most 10 quick labels, and you’ve got your Situation all Awared-Up in the top right. 75% complexity reduction in minutes.

Ten seconds into the call, and I was already set up to Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. This is the sort of agility my clients have come to expect from me.

I interrupted the frantic speaker firmly. You have to interrupt panic calls to do a basic assumptions check. Many gigs get derailed simply because somebody does not take the time to figure out who they are talking to, and about what.

“Who is this? Do you mean Donna Dauntless, VP of Radical and Disruptive Strategery at AspireKat? We haven’t worked together in years.”

“Yes, sorry, I found your name in her emergency contacts list. This is Ben Bean, her admin.”

“And what are you running out of, Ben?”

“Thought Leadership. We only have enough inventory to last through another 24 hours and… omigod omigod, I forgot, we have a projected  312% Employee Disengagement Spike on Thursday because of that Pharell concert in the evening. Omigod, what are we…”

“Now calm down. Where is Donna and what is she doing?”

“I swung by her house. She’s all hopped up on Nyquil and making still-life paintings. I don’t think she’ll be in again this week.”

I sighed and moved a slider under the 2×2 all the way to the right. The border turned to a steady red. There goes my week. 

“Okay Ben, now l want you to calm down. I am going to send you a triage 2×2 and you’re going to put that up on all the displays on the executive floor. Can you do that for me? Then I want you to take a nap right there in the reception area. We’re going to have a tough few days. I’ll head over as soon as I can, and we’ll get on top of this.”

There was an audible sigh of relief from Ben.

“Oh thank you. Should I try Guanxi Gao again…?”

“No, never mind that, I know him well. We’ll rope him in later if necessary. Just put up the 2×2 and seal off the executive conference room until I get there.”

You booze you lose, Guanxi. It felt good to steal a gig from the jerk after a long time. Hah!

I stood up, stepped back, and stared at my empty 2×2 grid. After a few minutes, I decided to go with one of my standard first response 2×2 templates, the one I call Magnum Red: Morale vs. Strategy, Short-Term vs. Long-Term. 

With a quick flick of my wrist, I spun it around to put the Morale/Short-Term in the top right, added a large X there, changed the caption to AspireKat Situation Response 1:10 AM, and hit Send.

That should get them breathing again. I leaned back and did a quick 30-second Refactoring Meditation.™

I was Oriented and ready for action.

***

If you have never seen a live Consultant First Response unfold, you probably don’t know just how ugly things can look before people like me step in to clean up the mess created by incompetent leadering.

In retrospect though, I should have chartered a plane and flown in, as I sometimes do on high-value gigs, instead of riding my bicycle. That might shaved two hours off my trip, and made all the difference, as you will see.

Anyhow, things were not looking pretty when I stepped out of the elevator on the executive floor of the AspireKat headquarters at 6:30 AM.

The entire senior leadership team was gathered in front of the reception area monitor on the left, staring at my Magnum Red 2×2 and nodding to themselves occasionally. Good. Several were nervously fingering their Apple iRosaries. They were breathing heavily and sweating, but mostly seemed to have regained their composure.

Nobody was lying down on the half-dozen or so mattresses that somebody — probably Ben — had thoughtfully laid out along the far wall, across from the elevator.

That much I expected.

What I did not expect was Guanxi Gao. By the glass wall on the right, next to the large potted plant, a red-eyed, unshaven Gao was talking earnestly to the CEO, Saul Serene. Saul is balding and about 60. We had never interacted in person, and he’d grown a goatee since the last time I’d seen him, when I was working with Donna Dauntless. He was dressed in a calming black turtleneck, slacks, and rimless glasses.

He was looking through the glass wall at the dawn skyline view with noble, stoic dignity. Not entirely Dead White Male. At least 1/128 Native American, I guessed.

Guanxi, in a cheap, wrinkled suit, was swaying slightly, holding a large travel mug of his coffee in one trembling hand. He was trying to get Saul to look at a piece of paper in his other hand. I couldn’t make it out, but it looked like a list of names.

Goddamit. I thought I had that handled. You do not expect Guanxi Gao to be up and sober enough to operate this early. Oh well, I could handle him sober. He is mainly a threat when you’re shadow-boxing for a gig after the fourth drink. After the fourth drink, who-you-know people win 90% of the time against what-you-smoke people like me. I don’t smoke of course. I’m one of those rare natural imagineers.

There was one more surprise for me as I finished my scan of the reception area. In the waiting area on the right, on one of the comfortable armchairs, sat young Arnie Anscombe, tapping away rapidly at a laptop. Charts and tables were flying around on his screen. He seemed to be using a lot of keyboard shortcuts, always a Dark Magic danger sign.

Now this I had not expected at all. This had just turned into a three-way battle. There was a what-you-know player in the ring.

Worse, like me, he was impeccably turned out in doer-stubble and a nerd-normcore sweater. Except that he could actually wrangle data, while I was, truth be told, faking it and exploiting Standard Assumption About South Indians #17.

I’d have to play the Indian card differently now to stand out, with him around. I ran a hand through my hair to make it look more curly, and mentally reset my accent to 23% more Indian. Enough to come across as International Management Bagman of Mystery, but not enough to be mistaken for lowlife outsourcing broker.

I had run into Anscombe before. He was at least 15 years younger than either Guanxi or me, and hadn’t yet found his niche. But the last time I’d run into him, in a dirty skirmish in the solar cell industry, I had discovered how dangerous he could be.

He could crunch entire Big Data stores in the time it took me to rotate a 2×2. Real-Time Falsification ran through his damn digital-native-born veins.

Technological leverage. That was the key to his value over aging Gen-Xers like me. Guanxi, sober or drunk, I could mostly handle. Anscombe, not as easy. He represents a new breed. They form a sort of ISIS-like threat in the indie-consulting world.

But you know what was ironic? Anscombe stole that solar cell gig from me not with a data-driven insight, but with a 2×2 based on dummy data! One whose axes did not even make sense. This was not going to be easy. I should have had Ben lock down the IT system too. Oh well.

I looked around for Ben. Clearly, that would be the anxious looking young man standing by the locked executive conference room door with yellow caution tape across it.  His gaze was darting fretfully back and forth between the main huddle and Guanxi and Saul. He seemed to be ignoring Anscombe, another bad sign.

I cleared my throat, preparing to announce myself. But before I could, Anscombe looked up from his laptop.

“I’m in.” He announced.

The reception area monitor flickered, and then switched from my Magnum Red 2×2 to a split display with two graphs. One showing real-time employee engagement, the other showing real-time customer sentiment mined from Twitter. There were also two scrolling feed columns, showing Twitter mentions and a Slack #general channel.

Double damn. Derailed by Dynamic Data yet again.

This called for decisive action.

“Alright everybody, let’s get going. Ben, you can open that door now. And hold it open please! Nice little headstart you’ve gotten us there Anscombe, thank you. Great to have one of you young analytics gophers on board! Should help add a little extra kick here!”

***

To my relief, Magnum Red was still showing on the conference room display.

I managed to maneuver Saul to the head of the table and position myself by the display at the other end of the long room, with the stylus prominently visible in my right hand.

The rest of the executives seated themselves around the conference table. Guanxi and Anscombe were left standing by the back wall. Fortunately, we were exactly three chairs short. Sometimes the universe works for you.

“Thank you Ben. Saul. Gentlemen. Ladies.”

I looked around the room, then stepped to the side with my stylus raised and looked expectantly at Saul.

“You want to get us going, Saul?”

See, this is the critical moment in consulting. Executives of course have no idea what they are doing, ever, so the economy really runs thanks to consultants like me. And if I am being fair, professional alcoholics like Guanxi and analytics-gophers like Anscombe.

Without us, the world would crash and burn within minutes. Trust me. I’m telling the truth. Not like some of those other consultants out there who won’t tell it like it is.

But you have to let executives think they are in charge. With the right cues, they do the right thing.

Saul, however, did not do the right thing.  He hesitated, looked uneasily at Ben (who was sitting in the chair closest to me, looking relieved) and then pulled the one CEO move that strategy consultants have nightmares about.

He swiveled his chair away from me, triggering a cascade of swiveling.

Double Deadly Damn it to hell.

And as I had immediately dreaded, he swiveled, not towards Guanxi, with whom he’d been chatting, but towards Anscombe. 

“That graph…”

Goddamit. I had misread Saul. His security blanket was not models, not relationships, but numbers. 

Fortunately for me, Anscombe’s inexperience betrayed him. Incredibly enough, he looked away from Saul and turned to look at me. That, my friends, is the power of being The Guy with Control of the Whiteboard. Even if you’ve put the wrong first response up on it.

I bestowed a paternalistic smile upon him. Candy from a baby. I turned to rapidly work on the board.

I erased the big X in the top right quadrant of the Magnum Red, wrote BACKSTOP in large red letters and double-underlined it. Beneath it, I put, in parenthesis, (employee engagement?).

In the bottom left quadrant, I wrote: customer sentiment — Anscombe?

I made sure the lettering in that quadrant just a little bit smaller and harder to read.

The room had gone quiet while I was writing, and everybody had swiveled back to face me. I stepped back to admire my handiwork, then turned around and smiled at Saul.

“So…shall we talk priorities?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again uncertainly.

That was the opening I needed to take control. I jerked my head upwards and to the right, and put on the expression known in the industry as Real Time Insight,  Executive Suite Edition.

Back when I was a rookie, I used to get things mixed up. Sometimes, I would turn sharply and take a few decisive steps across the room, which is what the industry calls Real Time Insight, On-Stage Edition.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter if the room is large enough, but in a small room, even a few decisive steps can have you stopping abruptly and awkwardly at a wall, which just makes you look like an idiot. So a professional performance really requires you to have the entire contents of the Consultant’s Complete Body Language Reference (2nd Edition) in muscle memory.

I now had their complete attention. Whether they realized it or not, they had just subliminally reacted to the arrival of an Insight in the room, via yours truly.

I held up my hand dramatically.

“Wait a minute… I think I have an idea about how to structure this!”

I paused, then very deliberately turned my back on the room to face the display. Always Be Channeling attention. ABCa. 

I pulled up a clean sheet in the whiteboard app, and drew a large green circle in the center. Then I paused, and drew a larger dotted triangle around the circle, in blue.

I labeled the circle Executive Team and added Saul at the center. Then I added Rao, Guanxi, Anscombe at the three vertices of the triangle, being careful to put Rao at the left vertex and Guanxi at the top vertex. In the past, I would have labeled the vertices Ideas, People, Data as well, but I’ve learned that you never want to put yourself in a boxed-in structure, no matter how attractive and conceptually elegant it is.

You only do that to other people. Otherwise people start classifying themselves into being for or against you. You want to leave people free to do pattern-spotting and self-classifying to their heart’s content, but not call out any patterns or classifications that make you more legible.

The key with effective whiteboard work, especially when you’re using FUD-wrangling constructs chosen because they are unfamiliar to the audience, is to recognize that even if people think the element near the top is the most important, they behave as though the leftmost one is most important.

Because they read left to right.  I once lost a major gig in Dubai because I hadn’t yet figured this out. The Sheikh was very nice about it, and gave me an oil well as a consolation prize, but it stung.

I stepped back with a satisfied look, smiled benevolently around the room, and looked at Saul.

“You’re the backstop here of course Saul, and the buck stops with you, but I suspect it would be useful to have your team first sign up for whatever pieces they can turn around quickly.”

See, the key to working with the nominal Top Dog in a situation is to craft a Situational Control Structure™  or SCS,™ within which they can feel powerful, like they have both authority and authoritah, and appear to have accountability and humility as well, but not actually do anything.

A good leader, when asked, “Do you want to be perceived as a Strong Big Man Leader or a Humble Servant Leader” will always reply “both,” and mean “neither.”

If you can keep the Top Dog happy, everybody else falls in line. At the same time, you do not want to lose the subtext that keeps you really in charge, but not accountable to anyone. But this is much easier than you might think.

The key is to deploy a calibrated amount of Buzzword-Bingo Lingo™ to both direct attention to the right places and trigger conditioned responses. Too much, and people check out. Too little, and you have chaos.

The maneuver I used, reinforcing the single world Backstop across two whiteboard panels, and connecting it to a Heroic but All-Sacrificing Lonely Leader stance role for Saul to occupy, is what is just one of many used in the business. The overall maneuvering of people into situational roles and events into plotlines, the core of consulting tradecraft, is called massaging the narrative. 

The purpose of this is to ensure that everybody except you loses the plot, but feels like they’ve actually grasped it better.  The first few bits of massaging you do should be designed to create the right level of urgency. Backstop is a word that suggests a situation that is somewhere between an unmanaged crisis and a tough, but in-control war-room. It is a word that wakes people up and makes them feel all virtuously focused, but doesn’t incite any actual precipitate action.

This is called Determinacy Illusion Engineering™, or DIE.™  Together, SCSing and DIEing constitute 60% of all consulting work.

I tilted my head at Saul and got the nod of assent I was looking for.

“Let’s go back to the situation matrix. How about we start with…?”

I looked at the woman to the right of Saul.

“Lopez. Isabella Lopez. EVP of Operations.”

We need to stop and unpack what I did there.

See, you should always begin Structured Conversation Operations™ or SCO™  (another 30% of strategy consulting) with a gesture of transparent, but not overt, inclusion signaling.

If you start the SCOing in a logical place, such as with the person who knows the most about what is going on, people might start actually thinking so much they no longer need you.

But if you start with a gesture like this, people turn on a socially appropriate ritual mind, which involves a certain useful level of thought suspension, compliance and self-censorship. You can stop entire lines of second-guessing and unfriendly counter-proposals dead in their tracks by creating the right ritual context. Of course, you can’t go nuts with this stuff and expect it to work. Asking the token black intern in the room taking notes to get the ball rolling would be way too transparent a move.

If you know what you are doing, you can deweaponize Social Justice Warrior techniques and turn them into useful civilian management tools.  And identity performance is just one of the many useful and powerful cultural forces you can harness for use in modern management.

But it’s a mistake to trigger ritual cultural behaviors openly, with ceremonial cues like “let’s make sure everybody feels heard here.” You want to cue socially programmed robotic behavior without people realizing they’re behaving with 34% more ritual circumspection than they intended to. Here, I started with the person on Saul’s right, but I could have gone left, started at the other end of the table, or used any number of other defensible starting points, and people would have explained it to themselves as a logical choice using any creative rationalization except race-and-gender.

“Great, Isabella. Let’s start with you, and since us folks on the triangle looking in from the outside haven’t met all of you, perhaps you could all introduce yourselves too? What we need is for you to estimate how much Thought Leadership you can generate quickly…Ben, how much do we need to get us through the next week? I assume Donna will be back by Friday?”

Ben looked up, startled. He had been anxiously looking at a calendar on his phone.

“Err… I don’t know. We have a dozen slides to get us through the rest of today and tomorrow, which should just be enough… but Thursday, with the projected disengagement spike… I really don’t know.”

“Give us a guesstimate. You are going to have to quarterback this, and you’ve done it before, so think.”

See, here is a subtlety that many rookie indie consultants miss when it comes to SCOing. You have to figure out who is going to be conscripted to take point on a situation, and it usually can’t be one of the executives. Because if there’s one skill people invariably pick up on their way to the Executive Suite, it is the alertness to never take point on a situation that they do not have the freedom to define. 

Even the greenest of new VPs gets this instinctively, even if they cannot articulate it. They will resist Responsibility without Autonomy with all their might.

So the key is to tag someone who does not recognize the age-old anti-pattern of asymmetric tactical contracting (a bastardized version of what consultants intent on using Big-German-Word-FUD call Auftragstaktik): You decide how to lead, I’ll decide what sort of control structure you’ll be using. 

You also have to make sure the person you maneuver into position has the right mix of haplessness, suggestibility and susceptibility to flattery. If you operate in the United States, the phrase you’re going to have to quarterback this does the trick. Even with women. Especially with Leaning-In Women. Picks out the right person every time. The metaphor is not a useless flourish: it is just as much a part of the Situational Control Structure™ as the role-casting you do with executives.

Clueless consultants use explicit, abstract and functional role and responsibility definitions. They even think it’s their job to make these up. The worst ones even go so far as to draw block diagrams to illustrate theirideas.

No, no and NO.

That’s HR-sideshow stuff somewhere in the middle of the staff hierarchy. The lowest kind of consulting.

The strategy consultant’s job is to prime senior executives and their staff with just a hint or two, so they end up using Situational Control Structures™ that benefit you, while imagining they thought of it themselves. Not only does it work better, it buys you more plausible deniability if things don’t work out, since you can’t be blamed for a documented process suggestion.

That does not mean you don’t have meta-control over the process of getting an SCS™ off the ground through the Structured Conversation Operations™  that you’re using to drive things. Quarterback gets people thinking along very different lines than priming words like say, Captain or Consigliere or Steward.

In India or the UK, you’re going to open the batting will work. In continental Europe or China, this sort of hard-charging Anglo-culture maneuvering does not work, so you need other moves that are much more collectivist in spirit and more we and us pronouns liberally thrown around. Soccer metaphors help, but I am not very good at those. But whatever the local culture, there are always appropriate metaphors and triggers you can use to massage the narrative.

One way or the other, you need to find a Ben and get them out in front of the crisis, ready to be The Face of the Situation.

Ben looked uncertain for a second. I smiled encouragingly. He sat up straighter in his chair, leaned forward with his fingers steepled and spoke confidently for the first time.

“I’d say we need about 34 Thought Leadership slides by Thursday morning. The disengagement spike is going to be pretty big, so we might even want to consolidate them into a Vision Deck to cascade through the whole organization before lunch. And possibly a three-point communication email from Saul. Donna always has Saul do a three-point communication email during disengagement spikes.”

Perfect.

I turned to look at Isabella. She opened her mouth to speak, and at that point, all hell broke loose.

First there was the din of a helicopter coming in really, really close.

Next, there was a loud sound of breaking glass.

Before I could say a word, everybody began rushing out.

***

The entire glass wall of the reception area, with the panoramic view, had been shattered.

Men in gray suits and combat helmets, carrying genuine leather messenger bags, were rappelling down a rope dangling just outside the broken windows, and swinging into the reception area.

Three had already taken off their helmets and set up their laptops in the waiting area. A fourth, an immensely tall man carrying a large Viking battle-axe, was barking orders at the men streaming in, directing them to different setup locations.

We all stood,  mouths agape, as the last of the dozen or so men swung in. The rope vanished upwards and out of sight. The helicopter dropped down into view for a moment. The pilot gave a thumbs up to the tall leader of the suits and stylishly banked the helicopter away, with thoroughly unnecessary drama.

The din subsidized.  The immensely tall leader put aside his battle-axe and stepped forward towards Saul, with a reassuring smile and his hand extended. His suit looked just a little bit classier than the others’ suits, and he was not carrying a messenger bag. Just a large phablet in his left hand.  Could he be…

“Hi Saul, Ulysses Alexander Khan. McKinsey Engagement Manager. You can call me Khan. Let’s head back in there and get started.”

KHAN! I had heard of the legendary McKinsey EM before, but had never met him. It was rumored that he had undergone gene therapy that allowed him to structure conversations just by staring down people in a particular order, without saying a word. I didn’t believe these rumors, but I had to admit: the man was impressive.

Before I could speak, he had steered Saul back into the conference room, with a reassuring hand on his back. The rest of the team followed them immediately, glancing back over their shoulder at the now buzzing reception area, their eyes wide with wonder.

Guanxi, Anscombe and I looked at each other. Then we turned to look at the McKinsey team, who were ignoring us.

Anscombe said, “What the…? Why the hell are they crashing such a small gig? This isn’t even going to break 100k in billables…”

Guanxi looked uncertainly at the busy team, who had now occupied the whole reception area.

“Should we just join…?” he began uncertainly.

I cut him off. “Of course not. We’re not hanging with the flunkeys. We’re going back in there.”

Saul looked relieved when we walked in. Khan was looking at the screen with amusement, twirling the stylus in his hand, waiting for the room to settle down. He smiled sunnily at us and gestured us towards the back of the room.

“You’ll have to stand for the moment, I’m afraid. I’ll have one of my people bring in more chairs in a bit.”

Bastard.

He turned back to the display.

“A 2×2, how charming!” He swiped to bring up my triangle-and-circle graphic.

“Wow, a Type 9c circle-triangle Platonic! Haven’t seen one of those since consulting bootcamp back in ’88. Very creative. I am constantly impressed by how well the little rag-tag indie outfits manage to get by with so little. We professionals could learn a thing or two from them.”

He turned around to look at Saul.

“Very nice work under the circumstances. The VP of Radical and Disruptive Strategery getting the flu in the middle of a Thought Leadership crisis is nothing to sneeze at. I suppose it’s one of those gentlemen at the back who has been helping you frame things so far?”

Saul looked uncertainly at Ben, who looked uncertainly at me.

“Dr. Rao here is helping us structure the conver…”

Jeez, thanks Ben. Way to just HAND the guy the Ignore-the-Impractical-PhD card.

“Not anymore, he’s not,” Khan interrupted, his tone was friendly, but with an edge of hard blue steel showing through. “McKinsey is in the house. We’ll take it from…”

Now, I can generally hold my own even when open hostilities commence, but I am not very quick on my feet right after a shock-and-awe entrance by one of the Big Three. If you’ve never experienced one of these, being on the receiving end is a little bit like being suddenly drunk.

Close up, helicopters are really loud. They know this, which is why, back in the 90s, the Big 3, along with most of the larger boutique firms, switched to rappelling down from helicopters instead of parachuting in from planes.

Rappelling also has the advantage of being more accurate. Back in the day, the Big 3 used to lose a lot of deals simply because half the Engagement Team would sometimes lose control of their parachutes and land miles away from the client site. They’d just give up and head to the nearest restaurant offering a three-martini power-lunch (a thing in those days). The big firms found themselves losing more and more engagements to jumped-up IT consulting outfits, while accumulating power-lunch expenses that could not be billed to any client.

Now they have it down to a science. They know that in the first few minutes of shock and awe, even the most battle-hardened CEO can be counted on to go along with the laziest of Big Three framings.

Fortunately, it was Guanxi’s moment to shine. He stepped forward, staggering only slightly.

“I think,” he said with the raspy and over-careful enunciation of the still-hungover, “Isabella was just about to give Saul her situation assessment when you guys joined us.”

Khan looked nonplussed. He had overplayed his hand. Guanxi had bought me just enough time.

I lightly stepped around to where Saul could see me.

“If you agree Saul, since we now have the resources of a full-scale McKinsey tactical team here, we should perhaps have Mr. Khan explain their operational set up out there to Isabella first, and have her decide how they can be integrated into her operations?”

Saul nodded immediately. I had finally begun to anticipate his responses correctly. Saul was fundamentally a chain-of-command guy.

“And it might be useful to have Mr. Anscombe here join them, since he’s already got a handle on the relevant disengagement spike data?”

I figured I might as well use the opportunity to test the youngling’s alignment instincts. If he managed to work himself out of the safe but low-leverage box I had him parked in for now, and choose sides wisely, interesting things could probably happen. And I needed wildcards in the picture now.

When faced with overwhelming force, start building unpredictability into the situation at every opportunity. Momentum is your enemy. FUD hurts everybody involved, but it hurts the biggest, highest-momentum guy the most.

It was also important to keep Anscombe safely in play, since it was already clear that Saul needed a Data security blanket.

See, in a FUD-and-counter-FUD situation, many people think the key is knowing who needs what kind of security blanket.

That’s a key, but not the key. The key is knowing who can provide any given kind of security blanket that might be needed, even if it isn’t you, and getting your candidates front and center at the right times. Saul was comfortable enough with People equations to stay on top of Guanxi by himself. He was a question mark on Ideas.

But he clearly needed to know where he was with Data, and needed help doing so.

He had been been looking baffled for several minutes. Now he switched to looking dazzled.

“Great idea. Brilliant!” he said to me, getting up decisively. “Lead the way Bella.”

Khan looked at me and glowered. But he had lost the plot for the moment and could do nothing, and he knew it. I had even managed to stick the tactical label on him, and he hadn’t been able to react quickly enough to prevent that. That had to sting, especially for a McKinsey vet. Shock and Awe aside, it was Little Guys 1, Big 3: zero. But I knew that wouldn’t last.

We filed out again, with Khan leading the way and Isabella and Anscombe right behind him.

Guanxi and I brought up the rear, straggling a bit.

He leaned over to me and whispered, “We should get a drink next time we’re in Hong Kong at the same time.”

***

Khan’s team of suits was now lined up in a row, at attention, saluting stiffly. Their helmets were back on.

“ASSOCIATES, Report!” Khan barked.

The suit on the far left of the row  goose-stepped forward.

“Sir, Spreadsheet Team is Go, Sir!” he yelled.

The rest began stepping forward in turn.

“Sir, Primary Dazzler Systems are Go, Sir!”

“Sir, Secondary Baffler Systems are Go, Sir!”

Anscombe was staring at the equipment bank in the waiting area with his mouth open. I could see why he was impressed. They’d brought in a full-scale 128-core Welch-Jobs Dazzling Scenario Generator and a state-of-the-art Mitsubishi Baffler 3000, capable of piping customized FUD into 3000 screens at once.

As Anscombe had observed, this made no sense. It was overkill.

With this setup, they’d blow through a standard 72-hour Thought Leadership Crisis consulting budget in about 12 minutes. Clearly they had smelled something bigger.

Khan and Isabella were now by a bank of screens with several spreadsheets open, and he was BigThreeSplaining something to her. This was going to take a while.

I sidled up to Saul.

I whispered, “Looks like Isabella is on top of operational preparedness, and looks like Khan and his people are tactically set up to execute on any creative ideas we might throw at them.”

Saul nodded. Twice labeled. Khan was safely in the tactical box for the moment.

He said, “How about we get back in there and work the strategery in parallel? Get ahead of this thing instead of reacting to it?”

BAM! 

The first sign Saul was not entirely averse to Ideas. And he’d gone there entirely by himself, without me having to work him there.

Things were looking up again.

See, in strategy consulting, the greater the quantity of resources you deploy into an engagement, the lower down the hierarchy you go. Pyramids are bottom-heavy, so resources are not necessarily an advantage, since they need a certain amount of pyramidal breadth to operate within. They get you in quicker, but they weigh you down later.

The guy who gets control of narrative is often the guy operating with just a whiteboard, right at the top. No Big Data. No spreadsheets. No PowerPoint.

Just a man and his whiteboard, armed with nothing more than a germ of a 2×2 in his head. Consulting in all its elemental rawness.

Saul stepped back from the group and headed back towards the conference room.

I gestured to Guanxi to follow. We were on the same side now and we both knew it. If he passed the test, I’d reel Anscombe back to our side too, after he was done being Tech Dazzled.

Us little guys were down for the count, but not out yet.

Into the Yakverse index | Prelude: II >>