My biggest consulting mistake and the systematic development of informed consent

A presentation slide with a picture of Adrian Segar wearing a dunce's cap. The slide text reads, "Learning from the biggest consulting mistake I've made — and that you probably have too."At edACCESS 2008 I gave a 90-minute presentation entitled “Learning from the biggest consulting mistake I’ve made — and that you probably have too”.

OK, the formal title was “The Systematic Development of Informed Consent“, which sounds much fancier but requires explanation.

17 years have passed, yet I think the blunders I made while working with a client during one of my past careers—IT consulting—are still relevant and instructive. So, I’m going to ‘fess up to the world. And as a bonus, I’ll introduce you to the people who taught me the biggest reason worthy projects don’t get implemented, and what you can do about it.

The Systematic Development of Informed Consent

The story begins

The story begins in November 2007, when I was invited to a two-day training given by Hans and Annemarie Bleiker. There were about forty of us. Here is a photo of our merry group.

While teaching at MIT in the 1960s, Hans and Annemarie noticed the dismaying reality that many public projects never get implemented or even started. They decided to research to find out why, and if there was anything people could do to improve their chances of success. She’s an anthropologist, he’s an engineer. Since then, they have presented their findings and unique methods for improving matters to more than forty thousand professionals around the U.S. Here are some of their clients…

[Click on the image for the current list.]
…and their mission.

Mid-morning on the first day of the workshop I had a major aha! moment. I understood a core mistake I’d made eighteen years earlier. That mistake led to my failure to successfully implement an organization-wide IT system for a major client.

During the workshop, I discovered that the mistake is so common that the Bleikers have spent decades teaching people how to avoid it.

So, I want to share what I learned with you because you have probably already made the same mistake.

My Harrowing Story

The following story is mostly true, though I’ve changed all names to confuse the innocent.

In July 1989, I was hired by a client I’ll call Seagull School. The school had two campuses, North and South, that were three miles apart and housed slightly different academic programs. The key personnel I worked with were Mr. Head, Mr. South (head of the main campus), Mr. North, and the Tech Director.

biggest consulting mistake

From 1989 – 1998, I wrote custom software or adapted commercial software for Seagull’s administrative needs. It was all hosted at South. South’s computer labs included both PCs and Macs; North decided to only use Macs. At the time, I didn’t think much about it.

In 1999, I was asked to develop an integrated administrative system that would eventually be used at both campuses. It took about a year to develop. During the development, North was asked repeatedly to define what system functionality they would like, but they didn’t want to talk about specific data elements. Over the next couple of years, it slowly became clear that they wanted something that could be changed on a whim. North wouldn’t consider the ramifications for the whole school. For example, North wanted the school registrar, based at South, to create transcripts, but wouldn’t specify what might be on them for North’s programs.

Finally!

In 2001, Mr. Head decreed at a meeting with all the administrators that the system I’d developed should be used at both campuses. Yay!

But…no.

A few days later, Mr. Head called me into his office. He had just met with Mr. North who had presented him with a large packet of documents expressing his view of the current state of affairs. Mr. North claimed that the integrated system solution had been developed without talking to people at North. So, he had just purchased another system from a neighboring school (without talking to anyone at South). He told Mr. Head that he thought Seagull School should use North’s system for both campuses and have the existing integrated system be an archive of past data.

Everyone at South whom I talked to thought this was ridiculous.

However, for some reason that I was never made privy to, Mr. Head left that meeting feeling it would be impossible to make my integrated system a viable solution for Seagull School right now. So, Mr. Head told me to keep the folks at South campus happy and leave North to its own devices for the present.

Well, what about…this?

A year went by and I had a bright idea. Why not develop a web-based system that would be platform-independent? I gave the Tech Director a quote, but the school decided it was too expensive.

North decided to hire its own consultant to develop a custom system. As I expected, the consultant didn’t do much because he was incapable of pinning North down to say what they wanted.

By 2003, Seagull administrative staff at South were complaining that they couldn’t do the work that North wanted them to do because North’s data was still in a separate system.

So, Mr. Head hired two more consultants to advise on what Seagull School should do. Eventually, the second consultant concluded that the “strongly recommended” scenario was to use my system, with North accessing it via remote control software. The next best option was to develop the web-based system I’d recommended. The third option “difficult to justify”: was to keep using two systems.

For another year, Mr. North ignored the report, and Mr. Head did nothing.

Finally, in July 2004, Seagull asked me to create a web-based system.

I told them, “No, I’m retiring from IT consulting in a couple of years, and I don’t want to start a new project for you now.” <Muttering under my breath: “You should have said ‘yes’ two years ago when I suggested it – I would have done it then.”>

More dramatic twists and turns ensued, which I will spare you because they aren’t germane to the topic of this post. I’ll just add that Seagull School kept using my system for another five years.

So, what went right?

As a fan of Appreciative Inquiry, I think it’s important to spend a moment summarizing what I did well for Seagull School.

  • I successfully devised, created, updated, and supported easy-to-use custom software that handled the core administrative needs of Seagull School for almost twenty years.
  • The core Seagull School staff, based at South, appreciated my work and were strongly supportive during this time.
  • The investigations of several other independent consultants upheld my recommendations.

So, what went wrong?

I was unable to get Seagull School to adopt a single integrated administrative system for both North and South.

You might ask: “Why did I fail?” But “Why” questions are not especially useful in cases like this.

A better question is: “What could I have done differently?

I’ll answer this question after telling a fairy tale…

The Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, there was a baby princess, born into wealth and privilege. Everyone who’s anyone was invited to her christening.

Unfortunately, the invitation email sent to a wicked fairy with an AOL account bounced back to the palace mail server, and the bounce never made it through the palace spam filter.

You know what happened next. Although guarded carefully, the princess, grown to a young woman was one day accidentally tased by a palace security guard.

Nothing would wake her.

She had to sleep for a hundred years with her crown on until tech support finally showed up and rebooted her.

The Wisdom of The Bleikers

So now we arrive at The Wisdom of The Bleikers. Here’s their answer to the question “What could I have done differently?” It was the following explanation that provided my aha! moment halfway through the first day of the Bleiker workshop.

Setting the stage

You’re trying to implement a Good Thing for a constituency. It could be a new water treatment plant for a town, a program to reduce the number of unhoused, or—dare I say—the adoption of a single organization-wide administrative information system.

When we do this, invariably some folks are against our Good Thing. Our constituency is divided.

[An important caveat: The Wisdom of the Bleikers is not a panacea for developing consent for a poorly thought-out plan or proposal.]

The Bleikers’ research found that just about everyone thinks of a divided constituency they’re working with like this:

biggest consulting mistake

The Bleikers reframe this common view in the context of a scale of agreement, like this:

The key Bleiker addition that the above diagram omits.

Almost every major constituency faced with a significant change includes NIMBYs (“Not In My Backyard” aka “Over My Dead Body”) who, even if they are a small minority, have a great deal of power to torpedo implementation of the Good Thing.

Mr. North was my NIMBY. And, as I’ve related, he succeeded in preventing the implementation of a single administrative IT system during my entire consulting gig at Seagull School.

The Bleikers have found that the single most effective way to improve the chance of implementing the Good Thing is to focus on the NIMBYs.biggest consulting mistake
And the heart of the Bleiker strategy is to move NIMBYs to 0+%.

The Bleikers have found that this strategy works. Though it’s not 100% guaranteed, they have successfully helped hundreds of organizations to implement complex projects despite the existence of considerable NIMBY opposition.

Why don’t people follow the Bleiker strategy?

Why didn’t I talk to Mr. North as soon as I started to realize that not all was well?

Fear.

Remember that everyone at South who worked with me was very happy with my work. It was easy for me to hang out with the folks at South and join them in complaining about how unreasonable the folks at North were. It would have been scary to go and listen to Mr. North. I felt scared to hear what they might have to say. So, I played it safe. For years.

It’s really easy to hang out with the folks that agree with you. It’s hard to go into the lions’ den and talk with people who are highly opposed to what you, and perhaps a majority of a constituency, think should happen.

My mistake was to focus on developing support at South for a single administrative system at both campuses, rather than developing what the Bleikers call Informed Consent at North. I never really thought about who might be affected by my work. If I had, I might have realized that I needed to spend a lot more time listening to Mr. North. If I had successfully implemented what the Bleikers eventually taught me, Seagull School might have had a single administrative system by 1999, instead of nine years of countless meetings, expensive outside consultants, and school-wide frustration.

This was my biggest consulting mistake. (That I’m aware of.)

Informed Consent, and an introduction to what you need to do to move NIMBYs to 0+%

The Bleikers identify three kinds of consent:

  • Informed
  • Uninformed; and
  • Misinformed

And they define Informed Consent as the grudging willingness of opponents to go along with a course of action they are opposed to…

So, if you can develop Informed Consent, you can get your proposal implemented!

You can become what the Bleikers call an “Implementation Genius”!

Implementation Geniuses:

  • Don’t concentrate on developing support for their proposals
  • Focus their efforts primarily on the bottom of the Agreement scale
  • Aim to develop their fiercest opponents Informed Consent

The Bleikers spend most of their workshops teaching how to develop the Informed Consent of NIMBYs. I’m not going to try here to reiterate or summarize what they teach. I recommend you go to their workshops for that! But I want to end with five Bleiker “pearls” that give you a taste of what to expect.

Pearl 1. Why versus What

  • Telling your constituency:
    • WHY you exist…
    • WHY you do what you do…
  • …is ten times more important than just telling them WHAT you do.

Pearl 2. The mission is not the mission statement

Your mission is a bunch of responsibilities. It resides in people’s guts.

Your mission statement is a bunch of words, a verbal sketch of the mission, but just a sketch.

You need many different mission statements, some long, some short, some technical, some non-technical – but many, many…

Pearl 3. The Bleiker “Life-Preserver”

Repeat often!

  • “There really is a problem.”
  • “We are the right entity to be addressing this problem; in fact, given our responsibility, it would be irresponsible for us not to address it.”
  • “Our approach is reasonable, sensible, and responsible.”
  • “We do listen, we do care.”

Don’t say “we want to” or “we would like to”.

Say “we need to do this!” or “we owe it to you”.

Pearl 4. The Null-Alternative

  • The Null-Alternative is the sequence of events that, most likely, will come to pass if you don’t implement a workable solution.
  • It is the consequence of your failure to implement a workable solution.
  • Write it as a story.

Pearl 5. Use stories

Conclusion

I titled this post “Learning from my biggest consulting mistake”. There aren’t really any dumb mistakes. Mistakes are integral to learning. They only become dumb if you don’t learn from them and consequently repeat them over and over again.

Have you ever avoided people who have the potential to torpedo important work because you feel scared of what might happen if you do?

I have, and I believe such behavior is understandable and, unfortunately, common.

I hope that by sharing my story and the Bleiker approach to developing Informed Consent with you, you learn how our natural unwillingness to listen to those who vehemently oppose something we think is a Good Thing can be overcome.

To your and your constituency’s benefit.

Has something like this happened to you? Please share your stories, experiences, and thoughts about anything in this post in the comments below!

Image attribution: – Illustration of The Sleeping Beauty by Ruth Ives from Wonder Books’ “Sleeping Beauty” by Evelyn Andreas, Copyright 1956.

Achieve success one small step at a time

achieve success with one small step: a black-and-white photograph of a small child walking away from the camera on a brick-paved street. The child is followed by an adult whose step mirrors the child's.
I’ve written frequently about facilitating change. Despite attempting to practice what I preach, I still sometimes fail to create a desired change in my life. Here are two recent examples that led me to realize that I need to achieve success one small step at a time.

1) Meditation and gratitude practice

For 29 years, I’ve been a member of a small local consultants group that meets monthly. Recently I’ve been facilitating a set of meetings to work on changes we want to make in our lives. This involves figuring out what they are, and supporting each other in making these changes a reality.

To model the process, I went through it myself first with our group. Two of the changes I wish to make are maintaining a daily meditation practice (something I’ve struggled with for years), and creating a daily gratitude practice.

My group made two good suggestions for creating these desired changes:

  1. To maintain my daily meditation practice, I committed to meditating for a minimum of five minutes per day without fail. This was much shorter than my prior time goal. I also gained a group buddy who wanted to meditate more frequently. We would send each other an email when we’d completed our daily meditation, helping us to keep on track.
  2. For a gratitude practice, I decided to write down daily three things for which I was grateful. I found some small cards and a box for them and kept these on my desk.

I have been able to faithfully maintain my meditation practice since our last group meeting. Hopefully, this change will become a habit for me. However, I started to miss days for the gratitude practice. This was a little upsetting, and I kept trying, unsuccessfully, to get back on track.

I realized that attempting to make both changes simultaneously was a barrier to complete success. So I’ve dropped the gratitude practice writing. (I still try to notice moments for gratitude when they arise, and I’m getting better at this.)

My goal now is to work on maintaining my daily meditation practice until it becomes a solid and permanent change. At some point, I may increase the minimum time I meditate. Once I feel secure in this change, I will begin to work on maintaining a daily gratitude practice.

One success out of two is an improvement! One small step at a time.

2) Tying my shoes

Don’t laugh! OK, laugh if you want; I don’t mind.

My physical therapist recently showed me a cool new way to tie my shoes. (If you don’t want to learn it, feel free to skip the next bit.) When I was a kid, my mum taught me the most common method, as shown in the first 30 seconds of this video.

one small step
click to watch

The above knot is easy to untie by pulling either lace end. However, over the years, I found that it would occasionally unexpectedly untie. So I added tying the two loops in a half knot. The resulting knot doesn’t spontaneously untie, but you can’t just pull a lace end to untie your shoe; you have to untie the half knot first.

Last month, while fitting some orthotics into my brand-new running shoes, my physical therapist saw how I was tying my shoes. She suggested a better method with one extra step. Watch it in the second half of the same video.

click to watch

Changing something I’ve done the same way for 60+ years isn’t a piece of cake. But I found it fairly easy to get in the habit of tying the thick laces in my running shoes the new way.

However, the skinny laces in my everyday sneakers are another matter. For some reason, it’s much harder for me to add the extra step with these laces. I got frustrated trying to tie my sneakers in the new way, and it was affecting my running shoe-tying muscle memory.

So, instead of trying to make the change in two different places, I decided to give up the new method for my sneakers. Using the new method, but only for my running shoes, is becoming increasingly automatic. I have no problem staying with my childhood method for my sneakers.

Over time, I hope that typing my running shoes the new way will become completely automatic. I’ll have successfully made one small change. Then, it will be time for me to work on adding the change to tying my sneakers and achieving success one small step at a time.

Jerry Weinberg’s take

I’ve learned so much from my late mentor, Jerry Weinberg. And he had something to say about achieving success one small step at a time. Jerry was a consultant to Ford on the ill-fated Edsel. As he recalls in his jewel of a book, The Secrets of Consulting, the Edsel project was a great triumph. Ford “…installed some terrific new computer systems that ultimately were adopted by the entire auto industry.”

Twenty-five years later, Jerry realized that the Edsel was a flop because Ford, scared of all the “better ideas,” put all of them into one car. “That approach guarantees that even if each one of the individual ideas is terrific, the result will be a debacle.”

From this experience, he derived The Edsel Edict.

“If you must have something new, take one, not two.”

In other words, achieve success one small step at a time.

One small step

Have you tried to make changes in your life and, like me, sometimes failed? Perhaps reducing the number of simultaneous changes you attempt may help you achieve success one small step at a time.

Image “one step behind” by Andreas Schalk under CC BY 2.0 license

Successful event outcomes, unusual web traffic, and the psychology of motivation

better event outcomes: Two Star Wars Lego stormtroopers doing gym exercises. Photo attribution: Flickr user chrish_99Understanding the psychology of motivation can help us create better event outcomes. I’ll illustrate with a story about unusual traffic on this very website…

The other day, I noticed a weird periodic surge of interest in one of my blog posts. Every January 1, page views for this post—but no other—spiked way up. They stayed high for 7 – 10 days. Then they went back to normal year-round levels.

It took some head-scratching before I finally realized what was going on. The article describes an obscure method for quickly deleting all emails on Apple devices—something Apple didn’t make easy until recently. Apparently, every January thousands of people all over the world stare at the 6,000 emails stuck on their iPhones. They resolve that this is the time they’re finally going to clean them up. So they Google “delete mail”, and find my highly ranked post (currently, out of 228 million results I’m #2). They click on it, and, voilà, lots of page views.

Well, lots of page views for a week or so. Then, what I call the New Year’s Resolutions Effect becomes…well, ineffective. People forget about their New Year’s resolutions and go on with their lives.

Why we are so poor at keeping resolutions

Why are we so poor at keeping resolutions? While scientific research into the psychology of motivation doesn’t currently offer a definitive explanation, there are some plausible theories. One of them, nicely explained by psychologist Tom Stafford, is proposed by George Ainslie in his book Breakdown of Will (read a forty-page “précis” here).

As Tom puts it:

“…our preferences are unstable and inconsistent, the product of a war between our competing impulses, good and bad, short and long-term. A New Year’s resolution could therefore be seen as an alliance between these competing motivations, and like any alliance, it can easily fall apart.
Tom Stafford, How to formulate a good resolution

And to make a long story short, he shares this consequence of Ainslie’s theory:

“…if you make a resolution, you should formulate it so that at every point in time it is absolutely clear whether you are sticking to it or not. The clear lines are arbitrary, but they help the truce between our competing interests hold.”

For years, I’ve used this observation to create better event outcomes. Here’s what I do.

If you’ve done a good job, by the close of your event participants will be fired up, ready to implement good ideas they’ve heard and seen. This is prime time for them to make resolutions to make changes in their professional lives. So how can we maximize the likelihood they will make good resolutions—and keep them?

A personal introspective

Close to the end of my events, I use a personal introspective to give every attendee an opportunity to explore changes they may want to make in their life and work as a result of their experiences during the conference. (For full details of how to hold a personal introspective, see my book The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action.)

At the start of the personal introspective, each attendee writes down (privately) the changes they want to make. Before they do so, I explain a crucial question they will need to answer later in the process: “How will you know when these changes happen?” I give them several relevant examples of vague versus measurable goals and actions, like those below.

PI Goals and Actions 2

It turns out that including the question “How will you know when these changes happen?” and giving relevant examples beforehand is very important. If you don’t, I’ve learned that hardly anyone will come up with measurable resolutions that make it crystal clear whether you are succeeding or not.

Even with the directions and support, some people find it very difficult to come up with measurable, time-bound answers. This is one of the reasons why every personal introspective has a follow-up small group component. There, they can share and get help on their goals. But that’s material for another blog post.

Over the years I’ve received enough feedback about the effectiveness of personal introspectives to know they can be a powerful tool for better event outcomes. As predicted by the psychology of motivation, helping participants make specific, measurable, and time-bound resolutions that are easier to keep is a vital component.

Photo attribution: Flickr user chrish_99

Conference size and “success”

conference size and success: photograph of hundreds of attendees facing a distant and indistinct stage. Photo attribution: Flickr user markizayWhat’s the relationship between conference size and “success”?

Here’s the beginning of a blog post by Seth Godin with every occurrence of the word “organization” replaced by the word “conference” and the word “traditional” added to the first sentence.

As a [traditional] conference succeeds, it gets bigger.

As it gets bigger, the average amount of passion and initiative of the conference goes down (more people gets you closer to average, which is another word for mediocre).

More people requires more formal communication, simple instructions to ensure consistent execution. It gets more and more difficult to say, “use your best judgment” and be able to count on the outcome.

Larger still means more bureaucracy, more people who manage and push for conformity, as opposed to do something new.

Success brings with it the fear of blowing it. With more to lose, there’s more pressure not to lose it.

Mix all these things together and you discover that going forward, each decision pushes the conference toward do-ability, reliability, risk-proofing and safety.
—Seth Godin, Entropy, bureaucracy and the fight for great

I think it still works, don’t you?

Small is beautiful

Judging by their favorable evaluations, conferences that use the Conferences That Work format are highly successful. Yet they don’t grow significantly bigger, even though some of them have been held for years. Participants discover that effective intimate learning and connection that occurs requires a small event. The maximum number of attendees is capped. This ensures that the attractive conference environment isn’t lost by the consequences Seth describes.

I once spoke to a veteran of large medical conferences who bemoaned the time she had wasted attending such events. She told me that the talks were invariably on already-published work, with people presenting for status or tenure reasons. In addition, apart from the schwag and meeting a few old friends, she did not enjoy or find her attendance productive. She was looking forward to a much more rewarding experience from the small conference I was planning for her group.

Her comments are typical, in my experience. Unfortunately, people usually assume that the size of a conference is a metric of its “success”. From the point of view of organizers and presenters this is true: the bigger the conference, the more status you receive. But from the point of view of the customers of the conference—the attendees—after 40+ years of attending and organizing conferences it’s clear to me, both from my own experience and from that of hundreds of attendees I’ve spoken to, that, all other things being equal, smaller well-designed conferences beat the pants off huge events in terms of usefulness and relevance.

What do you think? What redeeming factors make larger conferences better? Are these factors more important than the learning and connection successes that smaller conferences provide?

Photo attribution: Flickr user markizay

One way to build a movement at a conference

Here’s an illuminating example of how to build a movement at a conference.

build movement at a conference: a photograph of some USGBC sticky note ideas

“On Wednesday, I walked into our boardroom at USGBC for our Green Building & Human Health Summit and I got goose bumps.”
—Rick Fedrizzi, CEO of the US Green Building Council

One of my greatest challenges and pleasures is creating “just-in-time” process that meets the evolving needs of an event.

Last week I was invited to consult on a two day, one hundred participant “turning-point” summit for the US Green Building Council (USGBC) in Washington, DC. A much wider range of organizations were convening than at previous USGBC events in order to explore a major long-term expansion of the green building movement. So, good process was vital.

During the event, we dreamed up a simple yet powerful exercise to uncover and communicate participant expectations for the meeting. I say “we”, because at least three members of the summit working group contributed to what became an effective and dramatic way to expose and share what participants saw as successful outcomes for the event.  Here’s what happened:

What would success look like?

We designed the summit around a set of “shirtsleeve sessions”. We began some short stimulating talks by expert “igniters”. Next, participants divided into small groups to discuss three principle goals and formulate key strategies to address them. At a working group meeting at the end of the first day, we had to decide how best to use the thirty minutes that had been scheduled the following morning before the next shirtsleeve session.

Someone proposed that we ask participants to share their answers to the question “What would success look like?” either from a personal or group perspective. The working group liked this idea. I suggested that answers be written on large sticky notes and displayed in a central location during the day. This allowed the group to view all the responses during breaks, rather than hearing just a few of them in the limited time available.

The participants liked this activity. Soon, a large grid of answers was posted on a lobby wall outside the breakout rooms, available for all to see.

During the afternoon, another working group member had the bright idea to review and categorize the sticky notes’ contents. At a subsequent working group meeting we agreed that during the closing session she would briefly share seven groupings she had devised that covered just about all the definitions of success that participants had proposed:

The seven groupings

  • A “trail map” for the future. During the event, one participant said the meeting was more like a base camp than a summit. The metaphor stuck. We started thinking of our journey as an expedition that needs a trail map to be successful.
  • Inclusiveness. As the organization adjusted to working with a broader community of interest, issues of how to expand connections and social equity are important.
  • Public relations and messaging. Successfully framing USGBC’s messages is key. This helps people understand that choices they make in their home and business can enhance their family’s and employees’ health.
  • Standards. How do we emphasize and integrate knowledge and actions that improve well-being into existing standards?
  • Definition and valuation of health and well-being. We need to define and value health and well-being in USGBC’s and the related community’s mission.
  • Research. What do we know, what are the research gaps, and how can we obtain funding to fill them?
  • Paradigm shift. How do we get to a place where the green built environment is synonymous with health?

Building a movement at the conference

USGBC audience 2Providing summary feedback at the close of a “turning point” event is very important. Participants have put a lot of time and effort into their work together. They need to feel heard and receive assurance that what has happened will lead to significant next steps.

At the USGBC summit, the complexity of the issues and constituencies involved, plus the reality that not all key players were able to attend, meant that detailed trail map outcomes would take some time to formulate.

The sharing of participant’s seven categories of success was, therefore, an important way for participants to feel heard and know that others shared their goals and aspirations. As a result, this simple focused sharing of major insights and common agreements became a key ingredient for “building a movement”, a phrase heard frequently during the high-energy closing session of the summit. After offering a next-step communications plan and an impassioned closing speech by Rick Fedrizzi, USGBC’s CEO, many participants shared that the summit was a milestone moment in the development of green building.

Do you have examples of how to build a movement at a conference? Share them below!

Photo attributions: US Green Building Council