She authors pieces like this as part of our weekly newsletter, sharing stories so that more technologists can be seen and heard in the public domain.

This one here is for more of you to benefit from what we've learned building this community over the past six years.

Here’s Olivia’s story:

I remember the first conference I ever attended. I’d only just started my career when my internship offered to pay for me to go to one nearby. It felt like an enormous opportunity.

I arrived determined to learn as much as I possibly could, moving from room to room, notebook in hand, trying to absorb every keynote, every breakout session, every conversation.

Talks were what I considered as the most important part of the day.

Years later, the opening keynote is erased from my memory.

But I still remember how one person made me feel.

Mid-morning came, and with it the coffee break. Being there alone, the thought of making small talk with a room full of strangers suddenly felt much harder than sitting through another presentation. By lunchtime, I was looking for somewhere quiet to eat on my own. Preferably outside away from the crowd.

Standing in the lunch queue, another attendee smiled, introduced herself, and asked if I’d like to join her.

We chatted about our work, exchanged ideas and experiences, and before lunch was over, she’d introduced me to several other people.

I doubt she ever realised how much that small act changed my day.

Years later, she’s still the person I remember most clearly from that conference.

Simply because she noticed someone standing on their own and chose to make them feel welcome.

Reflecting on it now, I wonder what she thought would make her memorable that day.

Maybe, like many of us, she was focused on saying the right thing, meeting the right people or making a good impression. I doubt she imagined that, years later, someone would remember her simply because she noticed them standing alone and invited them to lunch.

We spend so much time thinking about how to be memorable. But often, the people who stay with us are remembered for something much simpler.

They listened. They encouraged us. They introduced us to someone new. They made us feel we belonged.

And often, they probably had no idea they were doing anything memorable at all.

When we look back on conferences, workshops, and community events, we rarely remember every slide or every statistic. We remember the conversations. The kindness. The confidence somebody quietly lent us when we needed it most.

Those moments rarely make it onto LinkedIn. But they’re often the moments that stay with people the longest.

So perhaps, the next time you find yourself wondering how to be more memorable, ask a different question instead.

How do I want people to feel after they’ve met me?

Because the talks eventually finish. The slides get forgotten. Conference lanyards end up in drawers. But the way someone made you feel can stay with you for years.

The best tip…

…If you can make someone feel something from your presentation, you’ve hit the target.

and I run a global community that helps technologists be seen and heard in the public domain.

If you want to join the 1200+ members of our community in 62 countries more details are here.

It was Monday 7.30am on my usual walk to work when the phone rang.

Seeing the caller ID, I picked up immediately.

It was from Sanjeev*, the exec running our part of the business. He’d got to know me through a project we’d worked on together three months earlier.

“I’ve got a Board strategy update tomorrow. It needs your help. Are you free at 10?”

I moved a delayable meeting and checked my diary for the rest of the day while waiting for my takeaway coffee order.

There was nothing left I could do by way preparation.

Much of the strategy and our progress was easily accessible. I’d regularly been a sounding board for Sanjeev and other much more senior colleagues, when they needed to pull together some communication at short notice. I had an inkling of what might have been behind the Board’s update needs, but had been wrong about such things in the past.

So it just needed a clear diary, a clear mind, and another double espresso.

By 10am, I was at the meeting room. The usual round table, blank whiteboard and marker pens. No time for the usual pleasantries, just straight into the topic.

Sanjeev started talking without any particular message or structure. This was thinking-out-loud time.

For 10 minutes he downloaded: a scattered list of thoughts on what he wanted to share, ideas for facts and evidence he’d need to support his messages, and things he felt specific Board members were worried about.

I just asked questions.

A bunch of clarifying points on hygiene factors about the audience, likely timing and format. Then, what outcome/s he was looking for from the conversation.

We were 20 minutes into my allotted half hour. For the rest of the time, we riffed on what might go into the materials and visuals he’d use as the prompter for his conversation.

It needed to fit on a single page of A4.

I tested a couple of ideas with him and he made a few squiggles on the whiteboard.

This was work that a big name consulting team might have needed two or more weeks to pull together. Specific information and evidence from different tech teams and business stakeholders gathered and distilled into a narrative for a constructive conversation with his board.

Fortunately, my network and experience within the organisation meant I could navigate internal teams, terminology and timetables quickly to get to the people and information I’d need at short notice.

I had a slot in his diary for 15 minutes to review it at the end of the day. And six hours to do the work.

This was work that had to be done alone. Some of the content could have distracted or been misunderstood by colleagues, who needed focus on running the day-to-day. There’d be no time for questions and explanations.

So I got to work. Crafted a slide that would support Sanjeev’s input to the conversation. He had a few suggestions as updates which we finalised half an hour after the meeting.

The next day Sanjeev let me know how well the Board conversation went. They’d had an efficient conversation that focused on the top priorities of the moment. Both he and the Board members got the outcmes they wanted.

So how did I use those six hours of time to convert random thought bubbles into a clear message?

Through learning by doing, and repeating over years what has become part of what I call board whispering.

It shows up as five lessons you can apply when you’re preparing a talk, a presentation, or how to be ready for your next important meeting.

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Lesson 1 | Know if you’re author or speech writer.

Crafting someone else’s slides, is like being a speech writer.

You need to be close enough to the way they think and the language they use for the message to seem to come across from them, but you need to sprinkle some spice and fresh angles into the narrative so that it feels fresh and original.

This isn’t something that AI naturally helps with. If anything, it can be a distraction.

If you’re delivering the talk or information, then you’re the author.

But how about if you’re not there to on-share the information, say from your contact in the company speaking or recommending your findings to their colleagues or stakeholders?

Then, need to think a step beyond the person you’re writing for: what their audience will want to hear.

Lesson 2 | Always start with the audience.

A younger me used to panic about getting detail together at short notice. I’d focus on the content—the facts, evidence, and the key recommendations or discussion points.

Frankly, I was worried I might get shown up if asked a question I couldn’t answer.

Whether I was being truly honest to myself or not, I’d want to show my value: how hard we’d been working; and all the thinking we’d done.

But this missed the whole point:

What did the Board audience really want to know, learn, or be asked about?

Moreover, how did Sanjeev want to stamp his mark on the conversation?

Spending a dispraportionate amount of time on getting behind the audience’s motivations and intentions is key to getting the message

Lesson 3 | Resist worrying about what to put in: focus on what to take out.

One of hardest parts of my brain I’ve had to rewire over the years, has been to go from being rewarded for the rigour and volume of output… to the speed and synthesis of a message.

This is a prevailing pressure for people. To produced ever more content, more sales, more analysis, more lines code…more, more, more. Add AI as a multiplier and it’s clear everyone is overloaded and drowning under detail.

The hardest part of answering a request like this was far from finding and shaping the information to support his message. It was working out what to take out.

It’s the age-old message that less is more.

The more information you put into materials such as slides or reports, the greater the potential to confuse your audience.

Detail also risks distracting from where the attention should really be: on the speaker and the audience, and the conversation the material is helping to support.

For Sanjeev, I had plenty of potential material to cover—updates and metrics on progress, prompters for some healthy conversation on latest progress, and things to share and inform—but it was getting to the essence of what was important that was the main thing. And I had very little “space” for visuals and words. To support his story and message.

This called for ruthless pruning.

Making sentences into bullets. Removing every unnecessary word or generic icon. Culling images to those that did the work of adding to the message.

These days AI can help, but it can also make it harder for you. The simpler the message you’re giving, particularly to time-poor audiences, the more important it is for you to provide a message that is not something your audience could work out for themselves.

Lesson 4 | Be kind to your audience.

These other four lessons have a theme behind them.

I call it being kind to your audience.

Fewer words, bigger fonts and pictures that truly speak 1000 words, all speak to your audience as humans. They reduce the reader’s or listener’s cognitive load. They save time: in your delivery and in their understanding.

Content structured in a logical flow that makes it easy to consume, is another way you’re being kind to your audience.

The larger and more diverse the audience, the more important it is to help your audience bounce from idea to idea; think suitably spaced stepping stones to safely bridge the river of your thoughts and arguments.

When I was preparing the killer one-pager for Sanjeev, as his speech writer, I knew he was a natural communicator and storyteller. He only needed a few key points and visual cues to emphasise key points and make sure his content didn’t distract from the important conversation he wanted to have with the Board.

If he’d been sharing some of the same information—for example to later brief his leadership team, or host a discussion with a strategic vendor/partner, or have a conversation with investors or regulators, or headline an all hands event for the thousands of people in his team—Sanjeev would need a different angle and be able to pre-empt different types of questions and answers.

He might call on injecting appropriate stories to raise a laugh—to relax an audience or change the mood of a room.

He might elaborate on specific facts and data to respect the analytical people in his audience who need evidence and insights to understand a position.

In each case, it’s about thinking first and foremost about the audience for a particular situation, and remembering they are just other people: fellow humans wanting to get the most out of the time you have with them. To help move things forward in a positive direction.

Lesson 5 | Leave your ego at the door.

This can be the hardest lesson. At least it was for me.

It’s certainly something I feel I learned the hard way; possibly from feeling a need to speak up… coupled with that trait of working out what I’m thinking by speaking or writing it out.

The very nature of preparing a talk, or a report, or presenting any kind of deliverable or message feels naturally like it’s a reflection on you and your team.

You want to give it your best shot at making a positive impression.

Being advised to cull unnecessary content and make it all about the audience, can feel like a missed opportunity.

“But I need to show we’ve done the work!”

It’s too easy to forget the content is about what the audience wants to know, rather than what you want to tell them.

Trust them to trust you: that you and your team have done the work.

Have the detail ready if you get asked the question, but keep it for an appendix or later handout at best.

Focus on really thinking about the essence of the information you’re trying to get across on any one slide. If it’s trying to cover more than one idea, then add a second, equally simple slide.

Same lessons, different applications.

Focus on these five things and you’ll be able to apply them to many different kinds of talks, presentations, and convresations.

1. Know if you’re author or speech writer.

2. Always start with the audience.

3. Resist worrying about what to put in: focus on what to take out.

4. Be kind to your audience.

5. Leave your ego at the door.

My writing is 100% human-written. If that’s your thing and this article resonated for you, then subscribe here for more.

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* Names and circumstances changed for privacy. Opinions and ideas are my own rather than those of specific clients or previous employers.

I recall the feelings of frustration early in my consulting career in my 20s.

“Isn’t it obvious that ____ needs fixing?”

“Just make the decision about ____ , then everything will fall into place.”

“Problems all point to ____. If he/she was out of the picture, we’ll make real progress.”

Even if I wasn’t expressing them out loud, my feelings were probably written on my face. Poker’s never been my thing.

Over time, when no longer advising on how to lead change programs, but actually leading them, I grew to understand the need to soften one’s stance.

To appreciate nuance and find balance between competing, but equally good, ideas…or choose between two equally compromised options for a way forward.

• Where to push forward with the project that will streamline the customer’s mobile app experience…while adding cost and complexity to security controls and downstream compliance reporting.

• How to qualify the merger that mad commercial sense for broadening product portfolio and market coverage…while underestimating how to consolidate multiple tech stack choices, competing pricing models, and different cultural norms for day-to-day teams trying to work together.

• How to push forward on an AI agenda and mitigating the fear of being left behind or left out all together…while managing the commercial, technological, and human change factors that will make it successful, while running successful operations at the same time.

Problems don’t get solved with a binary choice, an “either/or”.

Investments and projects with overly simplified objectives fail due to what’s missed.

• This is broken. » Choose this. » It’ll be fixed.

• Invest here or Hire there = Successful result.

Problems are solved with “and” and “while”.

I learnt this over time and it’s one of those things that once pointed out, you can’t un-see it.

The need for balance and compromise is everywhere. While the prevailing winds of management and leadership thinking encourage a single direction, the reality is harder.

“Focus. Streamline. Go faster.” are all easier said than done.

So giving people time and space to see the big picture—the fuller impacts of their choices in focusing, streamlining, or going faster before their latest project or idea explodes in scope, backfires, or just fizzles—means getting good at helping them see the impact.

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You need to get good at storytelling, while being anchored to metrics.

Your audience might remember your story. But is it enough to get the result you want?

To deliver with conviction, your story needs facts. Facts that can stand up to scrutiny.

It’s never been more so than now in a digital world ablaze with wild fires of AI-generated questionable facts. And worryingly questionable insights.

My happy place has always been connecting, and making sense out of ambiguity.

But it’s come with some tough lessons from misfires along the way.

The easy part:

• Translating a strategic concept into something relatable for a customer or colleague.

• Connecting a request for tech investment with genuine “transformation” goals.

• Spotting the higher order cultural problem, metric or OKR that’s getting in the way of results.

The harder part has been bringing others along.

Because the most powerful connections—the ones that open up new markets, products, ways of thinking, or systems opportunities—rarely show up in organisation charts and departmental or product budgets.

Stories—as short, sharp anecdotes with a message—help people connect. Strategy to operations. Macro economics to local budgets. Long term to here and now.

Stories can pepper talks, presentations, training programs, or proposals: they add colour, humour, and a touch of humanity.

But good storytelling can only take you so far.

If stories connect to your audience’s hearts, it’s the numbers—the data, the evidence, the facts—that connect with their heads.

Returns on investment, revenue growth, productivity savings, and moves on metrics: they seal the deal.

Numbers get noticed.

As long as they make sense for the context.

With AI everywhere in any strategy and discretionary investment, and while tech cost baselines are in significant flux—due to tokens, new licensing arrangements, new workflows, new tools—the numbers need context.

This might mean:

• Recognising that the level and pace of change senior leaders can absorb and be comfortable with, is quite different from that where the teams are trying to get the work done.

• Backing the architecturally important tech investment choices that make sense in the long term, and then seeing them thru’, to avoid the Shiny New Toy Syndrome.

• Supporting the case that bandaid solutions and workarounds only fix the immediate problems in hand, that they compound over time, and facing into the cultural, behavioural, and incentive models is where root causes hide. Often in plain sight.

These are the situations that need nuance.

Where a crudely set, departmental level budget can no longer be the baseline for “pure” revenue growth, or process efficiency, or cost savings.

Instead, we need to recognise that the basis for metrics is likely to move; and will keep changing at a faster pace that traditional annual and quarterly planning cycles.

Which is when stories come back into their own: as the way to connect in an otherwise increasingly disconnected world.

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All opinions in this article are those of the author (rather than any colleagues’ or client’s). If you want to talk more about this subject and the thinking behind it, get in touch with Claire Barrett, Gentle Consultant and Board whisperer.

There’s plenty of good advice out there on how to communicate with senior leaders: lead with your recommendation, structure your argument clearly, and commit to your position.

For consultants, this matters acutely because presenting to senior decision-makers is a core part of the job. If you haven’t read our companion piece, on Board Whispering, take a look for more on how to frame and position a compelling argument.

But that advice rests on an assumption: that a well-structured, well-delivered message will be received on its merits, regardless of who delivers it. The evidence says otherwise.

As a woman whose career has zigzagged between consulting and leadership in and around the technology industry, I have direct experience of this dynamic. Admittedly for the first half of my career, it just “came with the territory”. Over time, I learned to understand and observe more closely what was really going on. And ultimately, develop a view and “a voice” on what can be done about it.

My co-author ’s own perspective is shaped by research, observation, and the uncomfortable recognition that he openly suggests have benefited from some of the patterns this article describes.

The evidence is hard to argue with.

Research on gendered perceptions of leadership behaviour reveals a persistent issue: assertiveness that reads as confident and decisive in a man often reads as aggressive or unlikeable in a woman. This Forbes article on being either too bold or not bold enough sums it up perfectly:

Be confident, but not cocky. Be direct, but not aggressive. Be ambitious, but not intimidating.

No matter how carefully women navigate the leadership minefield, they are judged by a different standard - one that rewards assertiveness in men but penalises it in women.

Mary Ann Sieghart’s The Authority Gap (2021) synthesises evidence from across the social sciences to show how this plays out in professional life: women are routinely more likely to have their expertise challenged, and their authority resisted even when it has been formally granted. Sieghart labels this persistent undermining of female competence “mandermining“ - something many readers are likely to have witnessed (whether consciously or not).

In a TED Talk, Sieghart recounts a telling moment from her research: a transgender professor who transitioned mid-career and was astonished to find colleagues began treating his contributions with noticeably more respect after transitioning. The same ideas and expertise were received differently once they were perceived as coming from a man.

Similarly, Joanna Wolfe found that women who push back on interruptions using standard conflict-resolution tactics (e.g. naming the behaviour, expressing how it made them feel) often face a social penalty, and colleagues find them less likeable. The approach that minimises this penalty is what Wolfe calls “positive future focus”: acknowledging the interrupter’s point, then redirecting toward shared goals. It works for men too, but the social stakes are asymmetric.

My own experience bears this out.

I regularly host, speak at, and moderate events and tech conferences across four continents.

This includes talks and side-events that address “the gender agenda”.

I’ll been known to ask the women in the audience to put up their hands if they’ve ever been in a meeting where they’ve made a suggestion and it’s been ignored, until one of the men makes the same suggestion a bit later and everyone thinks it’s a great idea.

Invariably, every woman in the audience puts her hand up without hesitation.

Then I ask how often this has happened in the last week. Usually half the group still has their hand up.

It’s the answer to the second question that gets men really thinking…

These are three different lenses on the same problem. When you can triangulate a finding through academic research, lived experience, and a room full of raised hands, you’re looking at a structural issue, not mere perception.

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Organisations and leaders can make a difference.

It calls for education / learning, building a case that you can connect to, and then doing the work.

A recurring—and justified—ritique in the gender equity conversation is that, for too long, the focus has been on what women need to change. The evidence strongly suggests this framing is not enough.

If the same quality of thinking lands differently depending on who delivers it, then the system is what needs to change.

Senior leaders have specific responsibilities here, and there are concrete things they can do. We recommend starting with these two:

• Audit meeting dynamics. Pay close attention to who speaks, who gets credit, who gets interrupted, who gets follow-up questions, and who gets silence. This might feel like a lot, but these patterns are observable and measurable - and most organisations simply aren’t looking.

• Train senior leaders to notice and correct these dynamics in real time. This includes redirecting credit (”I think Victoria made that point a few minutes ago”) and actively managing airtime so the same few voices don’t dominate every discussion.

This dynamic extends beyond gender: introverts, non-native speakers, and anyone whose natural register doesn’t match the loud-and-certain template faces a version of the same disadvantage. The narrower the acceptable template, the narrower the range of perspectives the leadership team will actually hear.

And for readers in that position - people who chair meetings and decide whose proposals get airtime - the most powerful thing you can do is pay attention to who you’re hearing, and who you’re not.

Ask yourself whether your instincts about who is competent are tracking the quality of the thinking, or the familiarity of the packaging.

All opinions in this article are those of the author (rather than any colleagues’ or client’s). If you want to talk more about this subject and the thinking behind it, get in touch with Claire Barrett, Gentle consultant and Board whisperer.

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I was consulting to an financial asset management company.

Their team had a brilliant and talented employee who worked in the actuarial team. She’d accidentally found herself with a business-managed IT (“shadow IT”) target on her back.

She’d invested some work—and many personal hours—building a rules engine. It was a multi-dimensional calculator that her immediate colleagues and key users were happy with. Self-sufficiently, without any IT team support.

However, to the teams in charge of solving enterprise-wide tech problems this was a problem.

This was the early naughties (2000s) and Big Was Beautiful when it came to systems programs. The leadership focus was elsewhere: an organisational commitment and major investment in a core system overhaul.

There was no place in the strategy for a rogue “point” software solution, crafted in an out-of-date and unsupported language, and with Key Person Risk written all over it.

To these enterprise teams—and their program executives and sponsors—her rules engine looked like a technical wrinkle to be ironed out as the new system rolled through.

I was asked to come up with the plan to absorb (i.e. replace) her application and roll its function into the wider project.

So I suggested we went for lunch.

I’d watched her in a couple of meetings, where she’d been clearly struggling to get her message across. People were writing off what she was trying to say before really trying to understand it.

It was a sunny day, so she and I took takeaway sushi to the park opposite.

I started with the fundamentals. I quickly learnt that while her job title was actuary, most of her work was software engineering, and yet these were roles she’d taken out of necessity rather than genunie interest.

She had a PhD in nuclear physics from her home country, in the former Soviet Union.

This wasn’t someone who had any problems with conceptualising, and executing the maths and logic behind actuarial models. She’d crafted a piece of software—from base principles and the operating system outwards—that was so elegant in its apparent simplicity, it was misunderstood by the majority of her colleagues.

They understood linear processes with handoffs from requirements, to design, to build and test, to deployment. Many people involved. Many safety gates to ensure compliance with regulation, security, software architecture compliance and so on. Many days and dollars to support any change.

She believed she had the secret ingredient. That would make the tech platforms on offer to their users and customers a high end dining experience: a customised system offer without compromising on quality, using her business rules and calculations at the core.

Her enterprise and IT colleagues saw instant noodles.

It was clear to me that her stakeholders hadn’t understood what she was really offering.

Her model (the calculator at the heart of her solution) could be called from different types of systems and she could maintain the business rules in real time without needing to get others involved.

The solution was straightforward. The stakeholder management to get everyone on board was less so. Even thought it was already working, in production.

Over a few weeks—insignificant on an overall program measured in years rather than months—we turned the situation around.

I crafted a simple one-pager to describe the “architecture”. It supported our one-on-one briefings and presentations and answered myriads of questions such as: How will we test any change? How can we report the risk? What is the backup? Who will support what?

Ironically, it was the program leaders and solution architects on the new system project who took the longest to get on board. They had the most to lose with accepting something they hadn’t designed for themselves (with all the financial and human resources they’d fought hard to fund).

This was the Yusuf Dikeç Olympic shooting meme in action.

Getting our PhD actuary’s simple solution accepted, meant operating model changes for the tech function and support team. The result looked like the kind of micro-service team that came into vogue decades later.

The business outcome: pricing changes had previously taken 9 months. They went to 2 days. It didn’t even need to wait for the new system to be fully implemented, as it worked with legacy.

The nuclear-physicist-turned-actuary-turned-software engineer hero of this story just needed a chance to (a) be listened to and (b) communicate clearly.

What to her seemed obvious, was opaque to her colleagues.

But she also needed to eat some humble pie of her own.

The software she’d chosen to write her rules engine in needed porting across to a safer, and more widely used code base. New infrastructure, testing methods, and service levels needed to be put in place to meet resilience and scaling targets, and support ongoing feature growth and development.

Success called for putting bias aside and embracing new ideas. For all.

Versions of this story pop up at our consulting clients and within my professional network regularly.

It’s why I find myself now spending more and more time helping people—and ntoably technologists, scientists, and engineers—to communicate differently.

And to educate the people they’re talking to, on how to listen better.

Since the last time I worked in a corporate / enterprise environment, I’ve doubled down on integration (and APIs specifically).

APIs are an area of tech enablement that can get the instant noodle treatment from others in both tech or commercial / strategic disciplines.

“They’re old news!” > True, but still not everywhere.

“They’re just for developers.” > Not true, as digital products they can be revenue generators; they become the ways AI agents discover your business; they speed up your tech delivery and capability; and so on.

In an AI-everywhere world, people are waking up to the relevance of APIs (even if thinking they’re replaced by MCP…for another conversation!), with companies who’ve invested in APIs and disciplined API management and governance, are able to capitalise on their AI investments.

It’s a case of being able to explain them sensibly. And for the API-curious to listen more closely to those who are working on/with them daily.

As we accelerate our AI adoption creeping into all aspects of our digital lives, there are takeaways to apply to any situation, particularly the parallels for “shadow AI” which is pervasive in all organisations today.

1. Listen to the people with the radical ideas, the quieter voices, and the unobvious solutions. There can be gold in ‘dem hills.

2. The unending operating model question of What to centralise vs what to federate / do locally? never has a perfect answer. Work with it, while expecting it to change.

3. Communicating complexity in a way that is time-efficient and relevant for your (stakeholder) audience/s has never been more important than now. Avoid the AI overload versions and stay ever-curious about what could be missing.

So the next time you’re at risk of missing the simplest, most elegant solution to a problem, give it a second look. But don’t expect it to be instantly translatable, let alone scalable, across an enterprise.

Until you bring everyone on board.

All opinions in this article are those of the author (rather than any colleagues’ or client’s). If you want to talk more about this subject and the thinking behind it, get in touch with Claire Barrett, Gentle consultant and Board whisperer.

AI is everywhere.

It’s seeping—or leaping?—into every conversation work-related or otherwise.

It’s not just everywhere on online platforms, although it feels like less of a flood here on Substack than feeds on other platforms.

AI is the topic for board rooms, war rooms, newsrooms, and courtrooms. It’s being discussed around the policy-setting table, the dining room table, the theatre operating table, and the negotiating table.

Everyone’s got an opinion and a viewpoint. Your closeness to the nuance and the technology behind the AI umbrella label, seems to determine on how positively and negatively you think and feel about it.

The scientists, the technologists, and the practitioners who’ve been involved for the longest time—the people best qualified to offer an informed perspective—seem to be the ones who are holding this tension the most visibly. A tension between the promise of unparalleled creativity unlock; and a dystopian image of the near future.

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Is AI the invasive species of technology that’s threatening over every element of our individual, social, and professional lives and causing disruption?

We can learn a lot from parallels in nature. And from history.

“Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.”
Yuval Noah Harari’s reminder in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”

Are we now at a point where we’ve created an invasive species that’s already invaded nearly every corner of our digital lives?

Australians know a thing or two about “introduced” species.

From tourist to long-time resident of Australia, I’ve enjoyed many of the country’s extraordinary and fragile landscapes, the explosion of biodiversity, its unique flora and fauna. If you’re yet to visit, there’s sooo much more to experience than kangaroors, sharks and spiders.

Behind the sunshine, beaches, and quirky marsupials, you don’t have to travel far to see the impact of homo sapiens close up.

A breathtakingly beautiful walk along the cliffs above central Sydney beaches include warnings about the garden daisy. Back here in my home in England, it’s the most innocent of flowers.

Not so 14,000 miles away without any natural predators.

Take a hike into the towering eucalyptus forests an hour out of Melbourne and you see brambles and bracken everywhere, also far from the wild woods near me here in England. Here we pick blackberries out of the hedges to put in apple crumble. In Australia, they choke forest floors and river systems.

Travel further out still as you marvel at Uluru and the spiritual feeling from the outback, and learn about buffel grass let alone the terrifying statistics of feral cats, pigs, and camels and their environmental impact on native flora and fauna.

None of these species was introduced by people intending to create such environmental havoc.

Carving out an existence for yourself and your family in often the most inhospitable of landscapes calls for creativity, ingenuity, and persistence.

If that means growing or breeding something you knew about back from the land you came from, then it would make sense for you to make some decisions, that seem small on their own…but at scale have unforeseen consequences.

Others are unhappy accidents with questionable moral or common sense motives.

Check out the origins of feral foxes, camels or rabbits in Australia to hear about unhappy accidents.

We’re wired to want to use our creative brains to survive. To create a smoother path to survival for our children and loved ones. To build a bigger business.

Clear some trees for the cattle to graze. Introduce some nutritious fish into a nearby river. Breed cats to eat the mice that eat the grain your family’s survival depends on.

These are the same motivations that see us training ourselves in the AI tool du jour, to try and keep up. To stay relevant. To impress.

Boards, investors, clients, or just the next level up of management are all hungry for AI success stories.

While there are many such tales of productivity multipliers and the pace is accelerating everywhere.

However, scratch the surface and much of the real successes seem to be with individuals/solopreneurs, micro-businesses… or those enterprises who’ve been intentionally getting themselves AI-ready for years or decades before ChatGPT. These look like “digital natives”: companies set up and run by tech-fluent professionals. They are the organisations with solid foundations in engineering process automation, scalable cloud / infrastructure, productised APIs (i.e. MCP-ready), strong data management disciplines, clear tech accountabilities and so forth.

AI success is far harder for large organisations in incumbent industry sectors. They are often dealing with heavy-but-necessary regulation, high complexity technology environments, large portfolios of customised SaaS solutions, and heavy dependence on third party or outsourced services.

AI adoption is showing up very differently in these organisations. Much the way that introduced species show up differently in different environments.

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Take the notorious cane toad.

Cane toads were introduced into far north Queensland in the 1930s to reduce the population of grey-backed cane beetles.

The beetles were eating the sugar cane that had become a valuable crop for local farmers.

So scientists tried helping out with a controlled experiment deploying 120 of the South / Central American amphibians who’d proven their worth in other sugar cane farming successes such as the Caribbean. The experiment seemed to work, so the rollout continued until some 60,000 toadlets had been released into the sugar cane fields.

However the local cane beetles proved pretty good at adapting. Over time they learned to hang out at the tops of the sugar cane, before the heavy and clumsy toads (who can grow up to more than 20 cm long) had enough time or motivation to get good at cane-climbing.

It was easier to just change their diet.

The cane toads found plenty of other tasty alternatives from the extraordinary biodiversity that is part of the wonder of Australia.

Meanwhile, what they lacked in climbing skills, they more than made up for in breeding capabilities.

The females can lay up to 25,000 eggs at a time, and live for 10 to 15 years—and they were put into an environment with little or no natural predators.

The cane toad story is just one of too many ecological tragedies from introduced invasive species in Australia. The most notable include: 23 plants, 4 crustaceans, 36 insects, 9 molluscs, 12 freshwater fish, 4 reptiles and amphibians, 18 birds, 23 mammals, a starfish, and a fungus.

Land, air, rivers, and sea ecosystems are all victims of the top 140 species that proved they were better at adapting to their new worlds than the species left behind.

You can take a economic, political, ethical, or environmental position on any or all of these.

Each of those positions could be right from your perspective. Yet in a room of people with different interests and perspectives, deeper questions could arise.

• If your family’s future depended on next season’s harvest, how far would you go to protect your crops from pests or disease?

• If you were an owner, investor, or shareholder in an agricultural or mining business, how would you feel about lower returns if they chose to take long term ethical or environmental strategies that eroded profit in the short to medium term?

• If you were a regulator, a politician, or a ethicist, what would you be trying to do to get the most from the growth potential of a new territory, while avoiding more accidental releases of species into environments that are not ready for them yet?

They are the same questions we’re asking ourselves now with AI.

Or they should be.

• If your team’s future depended on hitting next year’s budgets and AI targets, how far would you go to protect your colleague’s jobs and financial security?

• If you were an owner, investor, or shareholder in a business profiting from AI adoption by others, how would you feel about lower returns if they chose to take long term ethical or environmental strategies that eroded profit in the short to medium term?

• If you were a regulator, security architect, or risk professional, what can be done to avoid accidental AI experiments released into environments that don’t have the right security and governance guardrails ready yet?

When there’s no clear right or wrong, you have to get comfortable with fuzzy.

Too often, a culture of pace and forward momentum hogs the limelight. The focus is on getting out the next AI experiment, product, use case, or publishable story and result.

Taking a pause and allowing time to reflect, debate, align, and move forward (the ”less haste, more speed” mindset) may be seen as a waste of time. Or an unnecessary luxury.

But investing in the right conversations at the right points in time is becoming the difference between rushing along with AI in an ad hoc and potentially haphazard way; and thoughtfully going after meaningful experiments that can actually scale, while balancing the financial/economic, ethical, and sustainable goals for AI in your organisation.

This is why I am convinced that we need to have more conversations now and ongoing that allow us to take a breather and move forward sensibly.

Now, more than ever is time for “less haste, more speed”.

Not to stop and go back. It’s too late for that. But to hold ourselves in check where we need, and give others time to catch up.

We’re all part of continuous change.

Cities were part of my life for decades. They were how I got to live and work in four continents.

Now I get to live a different life. Far from the vastness and harshness of the Australian outback, England is largely a countryside completely tamed and shaped through its temperate climate by populations that have lived here continuously since the age of the neanderthal.

Outside the back door I both glare and marvel at the ground elder taking over my neighbour’s flower bed. While its white flowers and rich green leaves blend in well in the English countryside, I’m reminded that it is also a polarising plant for many.

For gardening enthusiasts, aegopodium podagraria spreads fast via deep root systems. If you want to stop it from choking any other plant or vegetable, it can take you multiple seasons—or heavy doses of toxic chemicals—to get rid of.

For others interested in wellness and the power of plants, it’s valued for nutritional and medicinal properties.

Properties that were were apparently well understood by the Romans.

Some 2,000 years ago they introduced it to the UK as a fast-growing crop that could provide useful vitamins—a healthy ready meal—for an army on the move.

They benefited in the short term. For something others are paying for today. While others adapted happily.

All opinions in this article are those of the author (rather than any colleagues’ or client’s). If you want to talk more about this subject and the thinking behind it, get in touch with , Gentle consultant and Board whisperer.

At the start of 2020 I took on a part-time pro bono gig to lead an embryonic women-in-tech community associated with growing female participation at tech conferences.

The first thing we did was to give it a clear purpose: to help people be seen and heard in the public domain.

Then the pandemic hit.

Conferences were cancelled or went online.

Speaking took on a whole new direction.

So the community did too.

From lockdown-induced virtual meetups (some of which were more like unplanned group therapy?), we’ve grown membership to 1100 people in over 60 countries.

Some 500+ people have attended our training programs, and thousands grown networks through connections and conversations at our meetups around the world.

It’s happened thanks to committed volunteers, male allies, conference organisers, sponsors and partners, and of course our members themselves.

So as “International Women’s Month” wraps up, it’s time to share what we’ve learnt.

Whether you’re a new or wannabe better speaker, event organiser, facilitator, or champion for change. You need to know this.

Lesson 1 | More women speakers on the line-up does get more women attending.

Any place or social gathering skewed towards one gender has a different vibe than those with balanced representation.

The same goes for tech events: whether a local community meetup, a company offsite, or a large public conference.

There’s a lightness, a level of conversation, and generally a more relaxed feel when the group is more diverse.

For those who favour hard data over “it’s the vibe”, we know that attendees who see others like them speaking up are more likely to (a) register / participate and (b) put themselves forward to speak in future.

More females attending conferences gets them access to latest knowledge, ideas, career opportunities, and better professional networks.

All this has a part to play in solving the bigger problem of women’s underrepresentation in the tech industry at large.

To get more speakers, we need less hesitation to answer a conference Call For Papers, or even just to volunteer at an in-company event.

If you’ve read this far and fancy some more Gentle Consulting stories and musings straight to your inbox, then sign up here and support my work..

Lesson 2 | Women turn down speaking opportunities more often than you think.

You have someone in your company or your network who you think has important stories and perspectives to share. It would be great for them and the wider community to have them speaking about it.

You make the suggestion and are surprised by their response which is something like:

“Thank you, but not now. Maybe next year…”

We hear this often from people in our community. When we drill into the response, we find they’re more likely to be saying things to themselves like:

“What could I talk about? Why would anyone be interested?”

“How can I find the time on top of my already overloaded work and home commitments?”“Won’t this come across as me just wanting to make myself look good?”

“How will I arrange cover for my travel and caring responsibilities if I need to be away for more than a day.”

And in today’s pressure on jobs in the tech industry, people may really be saying:

“Could this signal I’m not really serious about my job and it becomes an excuse to let me go…?”

Yet a little encouragement goes a long way.

People are more likely to consider a “Yes, why not?” answer if they get a tap on the shoulder from someone they trust. A peer, their manager, or a mentor.

Listening to members’ own experiences, it’s similar to the popular story that women will only apply for roles when they are already comfortable ticking every box in the job description. Meanwhile, their male counterparts are more likely to see the job description as a stretch; a list of things they’ll get development and experience from.

This means women need extra encouragement to apply for roles they don’t believe they’re ready for.

The same applies with encouraging women to speak.

It’s why we focus on getting them ready.

Lesson 3 | Having speaking experience is different from being ready to speak.

Event organisers often have war stories of having their fingers burnt.

The speaker’s profile is impressive; their application looks compelling; the briefing session went well.

Then their delivery fell short of expectations on the day, leaving disappointments all round.

So it’s understandable that conference programming committees may choose to play it safe and go with proven voices.

Yet with women averaging 22% of the tech population in many countries—with lower percentages at leadership levels, and an even fewer number willing to put themselves forward (see lesson 2)—these proven voices represent an even smaller minority.

While there are many fabulous women who are comfortable speaking in public and/or at company in-house events; it’s likely they are carrying an unfair load. Particularly if they have senior technical roles in high demand topics and/or work at recognised companies.

They are often happy—and/or feel a responsibility—to “pay it forward”. To be the all-important role models for current and future talent in the organisation. To show customers, colleagues and partners what diversity means in practice.

But they are probably putting in a lot of unpaid effort to prepare and show up for talks, despite being told how much it helps with their visibility and career.

So to spread the load and broaden the pipeline of (female) talent, we need to introduce new voices.

And those voices need to be both skilled and confident to turn their “Nah, not this year…” responses into: “Okay, it’ll be a stretch, but I’m up for it!”.

Because getting skills, confidence and a support network is the best way we’ve found to get people speaking up and building confidence.

Taking small steps rather than being thrown in the deep end.

Lesson 4 | There are speaking opportunities for every level of experience

One of our members had a rocket launch of a start to her speaking career. Her first public speaking experience was a keynote at a conference in front of some 800 people, live-streamed on the internet. Delivered in her non-native English.

She smashed it.

Because she prepared, practised and perfected her talk. Over many, many hours.

It stood her in good stead, but would have been a far too daunting a challenge for many others, no matter the gender.

However, as a woman she’s possible had (or chosen to have) fewer chances to build her speaking muscle earlier.

We’ve learnt that women seem to miss out on many of the smaller steps that their male counterparts take advantage of earlier in their careers.

• Speaking to a small group at a local meetup?

• Pitching at a hackathon?

• Giving a lightning talk at the side event of a bigger conference?

These types of activities over multiple years can mean the step up to presenting at big public or in-house event is just the next logical step.

Rather than needing a huge leap from nothing to the Big Stage.

So we work on growing the pipeline of female speakers who are ready to speak by firstly encouraging them to start small and grow their confidence and experience in steps. Secondly, we provide ideas, tips, tricks and support mechanisms that make the preparation less time-consuming, the whole experience less stressful, and the outcome more memorable.

Some of the things we recommend suggest we need new ways to measure speaker contribution to conferences and events.

Lesson 5 | We’re measuring the wrong things.

Confession time: I used to be a fan of the metric that reports on the percentage of women speaking at a conference.

Now, like too many over-simplified metrics, I’ve seen it unintentionally become a blunt instrument.

Take a generic format of, say, 10 speaking slots for an event’s morning program.

Two opening talks (keynote + high profile speaker); followed by morning coffee; then split into two parallel ‘tracks’ each with four slots for either a talk or a panel discussion; then lunch.

Say there are 15 key people on stage:

• 1 x Keynote

• 1 x high profile speaker talk

• 6 x 1-person talks

• 1 x double-act talk (which we suggest for time-poor and/or unconfident speakers: presenting as a pair is less stressful, plus gives the audience a fresh energy)

• 1 x 3-person panel

• 2 x moderators

If six of them identify as female, that makes 40% female speakers. A statistic many conference organisers would rightly be proud of.

If those women included the keynote speaker, two of the 1-person talks, two thirds of the panel, and a moderator, that would suggest their contribution is similarly representative.

However, if two of the women are the double-act, both the moderators were women, and the other two are scheduled for the fourth slots i.e. just before lunch—to audiences with low sugar levels and even lower attention levels—then is the 40% measure actually pointing to the bigger problem we’re working on?

Yes, perhaps the hard work put in to encourage some new voices to get up and speak has meant they’ll be more ready to take up a bigger speaking role next. Having their names and profiles visible to attendees encouraged more women to attend.

But there’s a risk that the agenda in the second scenario, whether subconsciously or otherwise, suggests the women’s contribution is less important than others…

If there were only two women speakers, but one keynote’d and another led the panel, they may have had bigger and more lasting impact on their audience. For a gender balance measure of 13%.

The question about what we should be measuring deserves a proper answer. For another time and another article.

Meanwhile, it’s important to recognise other stakeholders involved in planning and putting on events.

Lesson 6 | For lasting change, everyone needs to be part of the conversation

Well-meaning conference organisers, their sponsors and partners recognise that diverse voices around a table ultimately make better business decisions, are more successful, and create healthier working environments.

From the hundreds of conversations I’ve had with them, most are more than eager to find and provide a platform for women. Particularly when they see that these women are often more comfortable bringing that all-important human element to a presentation or a panel discussion.

Finding them may not be easy at first, but like recruiting for better balance in tech, it takes time and some different thinking and tactics.

At the risk of over-generalising, in my experience, women seem to be more natural storytellers. They also seem to find it easier to create audience connection, make people smile, and tell people things they genuinely want to hear.

And there are many men out there who recognise this and want to know what they can do to help.

I have always been, and remain, a firm believer that the gender agenda is a conversation for everyone.

There is a certainly a need for the kinds of safe spaces where people can share stories and experiences that are best (and most safely) kept amongst people of the same gender. There are many forums and organisations running events facilitated by professionals who are professionally qualified with helping people manage emotional challenges, establishing psychological safety, or dealing with inappropriate and damaging workplace behaviours.

But not necessarily at tech conferences.

If it’s an opportunity to acquire knowledge and professional connections that help with one’s current or future work—then the most effective activities aimed at improving gender balance in the industry…are focused on just that.

Men tell us they want to help. That they get value from being part of conversations where they learn what that might look like.

They bring a different energy into the room, and they can find it eye-opening being in a minority.

If we want to make lasting change, they need to be part of the conversation.

Which is why people have always been welcome to our events and programs however they identify.

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In summary

As we approach the sunset of another women’s history month, remember that this year could be the one where you:

• Move yourself or someone else from the idea of speaking in public from “One day…” to “Today’s the day!”.

• Start watching how gender balance plays out in events you’re part of, and think about what you could do to influence it more positively.

• Have conversations: with your team, your colleagues, even your family and friends on who’s showing up where and what positive (or not-so-positive) messages are coming through.

The content and opinions in this article are those of the author and not of any clients, affiliates, or community members. To find out more about Women In APIs, subscribe to , check out the website, or follow the community on LinkedIn.

You’ve been working diligently on promoting the benefits of your initiative.

What people will achieve. The wins for the team, the organisation, the financial results.

Yet you’re still getting resistance.

People finding excuses not to participate, adopt, or implement.

The reasons see obvious:

• “We’ll save time and money.”

• “Our teams will get new skills and stay relevant.”

• “We’ll all be better positioned for the future.”

For the individauls who get behind and really drive this change, there’ll be recognition and reward.

New opportunities will open up. Their customers, teams and colleagues will succeed.

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Still, no matter how much you seem to sell the benefits, and how much you explain you’ve managed the risks to ensure its success, you still don’t have everyone you need to get on board for the project to deliver. For the system to meet expectations. For the change to last.

Sometimes it’s just one or two key invididuals.

Some cultures and organisations take the hire-and-fire approach (“If you can’t change the people, change the people.”). Others may choose, or are required to, “do the right thing” and bring people along.

Which means they need to understand and manage loss.

People don’t resist change, they resist loss.

The Castle is a quintessentially Australian movie. A 1997 classic low-budget comedy about a middle class family whose home comes under forced government purchase.

The house is nondescript. The decor dated. The position directly under the nearby Melbourne airport flightpath.

Yet it’s the family’s home.

So they fight. All the way to the highest court in the land.

The family is a parody on Australian family life and culture, while the script and acting make the characters relatable and loveable. There’s kind mealtime praise for the wife’s experiments in the kitchen. They share enjoyment from the son’s latest bargain from pre-eBay adverts in the Trading Post. There’s collective family excitement over holidays to the edge of a shrinking manmade lake.

That’s the backdrop for the classic storyline of the Little Guy taking a stand against Big Bad Government.

No amount of compensation, or the prospect of a nicer house in a quieter, safer neighbourhood will do for Darryl Kerrigan and his family.

Because they’re resisting loss.

Not just the property itself or the land it sits on.

But the memories. The identity tied to their place in the neighbourhood.

As the legal case against the government—and the publicity that goes with it—grows, losing the case could risk losing public commitment and the emotional investment they’ve put into it.

Translate this to a corporate, business or client context; and you get to the essence of change management.

We’re wired to resist loss

Take away a toy from a toddler and watch the tantrum.

The screams and tears are louder and more emotional than the calm, gurgling smiles once distracted with something else. Or they get the toy back.

Think of grief after death of a loved one.

The hole left by a parent taken too soon. The jolt when you remeber a close friend or colleague who’s no longer with us. The unspeakable grief of losing a child.

Those same parts of our brain get activated when we experience loss at work.

Psychologists and thinkers like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed we experience losses two to two-and-a-half times more intensely than equivalent gains.

Their work underpins Prospect Theory: people are irrational when it comes to evaluating change.

They evaluate what they believe they are about to lose.

Naming, understanding and responding to these beliefs is central to change management.

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Take the simplest example: an organisational restructure with job losses.

The same job loss could be experienced differently between:

• someone living with a higher earning partner whose salary adequately covers the family’s financial outgoings

• a primary earner with caring responsibilities for a dependent family member, and reliance on employer health care insurance.

Oobvious losses include: job, income, and benefits.

Less obvious losses might include: status or reputation (not just among peers, but potentially with friends and family), financial security, confidence and self-esteem, or a sense of purpose.

Know the brain to understand the reaction

I’m a mere armchair psychologist, however a basic undersatnding of our brain’s wiring helps make sense of loss.

Our amygdala is our internal threat detection mechanism. It’s the home security system that pings our phone to tell us there’s someone unfamiliar at the door.

An “amygdala hijack” is our brain’s response to an unexpected stressor that we’re in danger. It plays out as fear, defensiveness, or a fight-flight-freeze response.

If you’ve delivered unwelcome news to a colleague about their job or their performance, you’ll be familiar with how differently people can react.

It’s not the news they’re reacting to, but how they’re experiencing the threat from loss.

Our anterior cingulate cortex processes pain. The FOMO effect when you hear about the fun holiday your friends are planning that you have to miss due to a family commitment.

It’s the fear of rejection by the in-crowd. The feeling of being left out of a game in the schoolyard; missing out on an invitation to a work event; getting overlooked for part of a planning process for a strategic initiative.

The fear of being rejected from the tribe, shows up at work as painfully as it did in the playground. It shows up in the same way we experience psychological pain.

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Lastly, there’s our prefrontal cortext where we do our analytical thinking. Where we make sense of what’s going on around us.

When fear or loss is high, our analytical thinking drops.

At it’s extreme, if we’re experiencing a genuine panic attack, we are likely to be immune to rational, logical arguments for dealing with the problem.

It’s what we feel when a police car behind us suddenly put its lights and siren go on.

The illogical part of the brain kicks in: ”Is there a problem with my brake lights? Could I have read my speed wrong? Did I remember to bring my driving licence with me today?”.

It fails to listen to logic, ”I’m not speeding. They must be after the other car that sped past me seconds ago.”.

Until we feel safe again, our analytical abilities are effectively car parked. We become more rigid, more emotional, and more risk-averse.

Until the police car passes, we suppress the logic.

Put all these parts of the brain together and you get neural self-protection.

During major change, logic-heavy change communication won’t work.

Each of us experiences grief or loss differently.

One person’s tantrum is another person’s shoulder shrug.

The time it takes to get over it, is also highly individual.

Managing a graceful and respectful way for people to understand and response to change can require different conversations, different types of support, and different communication content and methods.

It’s back to the mantra of “you don’t remember what people said, but you remember how they made you feel”.

Each person may need to come to terms with how they’ll deal with those losses. At their own pace.

Surviving the organisational restructure scalpel can still feel like a loss

For those who’ve kept their role, or been promoted to a new one, it’s easy to focus on the positives for them:

• continued employment

• a salary raise

• promised new value to the organisation.

But they may experience losses too:

• accumulated knowledge built over years that is now less relevant (”How will I matter when what I do and know can be replaced by a machine?”)

• access to knowledge and network connections from colleagues no longer in the organisation (”Who do I go to now for…?”)

• friendship with departed colleagues (the ”survivors’ guilt” syndrome)

• sense of security (”Will I be next?”)

Remember these losses can be real or perceived.

They don’t follow logic or rationale. They are intently human.

So what to do about it?

Damon Centola shows you need more than 25% of a cohort—for example the employee workforce—to be committed to change for it to be sustainable. Once you cross that threshold, momentum builds naturally.

Focus on getting to the magic 26% by understanding and managing the losses as much as promoting the gains.

This includes:

1. Acknowledging what people will lose, rather than dismissing their concerns

2. Building enough flexibility to absorb change at a human pace

3. Creating safety and predictability within the change process itself

4. Recognising that people work 50% more productively when inspired rather than merely engaged

Understand loss and actively manage it, and you’ll find your change is less like dragging concrete blocks behind you, and more like pushing on an open door.

References:

• Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

• Change: How to Make Big Things Happen, Damon Centola

The opinions in this article are of the author’s alone and the content relied on minimalist use of AI-generated suggestions.

My friends and family are of an age where many have late teen and 20-something children.

If they have a daughter interested in STEM studies or careers, or a recently graduated son looking for an internship or first proper job opportunity, I often get asked to meet and give them some ideas.

They’ll join the video call with terrible lighting (can’t they see that turning the laptop around would mean I could actually see their face?), shaky wifi connection (housemates gaming again?), or just a distinct lack of preparedness (pressure from anxious parents making them talk to someone they really would prefer to avoid?).

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Some of them seem to have some fuzzy interest in management consulting. Reminding me of when I really had no idea what it involved either, but it sounded good…

Their ideal job seems to include:

• Opportunities for international travel (digital native aspirations?).

• An enviable starting salary and benefits (how to fund escalating costs of living?)

• A meaningful social agenda, preferably something to do with the environment (finding balance?)

What they seem less ready to do, is take up my advice of finding a starting role in something like a call centre. Or a job under the Golden Arches.

For anyone unfamiliar with Aussie slang (which normally involves abbreviating any name, brand or label and adding “y”, “ee” or “a” on the end), the fast food brand is affectionately known as Maccas.

Nylon uniforms, cheesy customer service expectations, long shifts, and low wages. And usually even lower prestige factor, thinking about “How far will this impress my friends and family?”.

It’s also somewhere young people with aspirations for graduate roles in recognised companies can get hands on experience of how businesses actually run.

You learn more working in fast food than in artisan coffee.

If Hong Kong was where I became a foodie, then Melbourne was where I became a self-confessed coffee snob.

If you’re going to have a coffee, you have a proper one. Double espresso. No sugar. More hit than hip.

And in a café in the Melbourne model world’s coffee capital. Everyone has their favourite café (almost never a chain or a franchise) with a barista who knows their froth from their crema; their single origin from their cold pressed; their piccolo from their ristretto.

Arguably their skills are highly sought after in coffee shops and cafes remodelled in urban cities around the world. Many built on the Melbourne or Australian model.

Getting work experience in one of these cafés could be great for career aspirations in the food and hospitality industry. Or starting your own café.

Medium and large businesses don’t operate like coffee shops.

So why would a Big Name franchised fast food business be a place to learn about such things?

You get to see (and learn about) all the things that big companies need to deal with. Things like:

• customer service

• “lean” processes and automation

• occupational health and safety (OHS)

• systems and methods that enable new trainees to be onboarded quickly and efficiently

• compliance and standards

• teamwork under pressure

• quality and minimum standards

Long hours on your feet. Time-poor demanding customers. Noise from machines, tannoys, and the punters.

It may sound as appealing as a being caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella.

But it gets you some very real experience into how things work.

You get to see the inner workings at the customer interface of a global organisation.

The kind of experience arguably more relevant to a future career advising people how to treat customers, use automation appropriately, or get new people onboard and trained as efficiently as possible.

So the next time someone asks you for career advice, what will you tell them?

I have many memories of my grandmother involving homemade cakes, litters of puppies, and cottage flowers in garden pots.

One memory stands out as different. For the negative feelings it conjured up: frustration and irritation, tinged with embarrassment.

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I was about nine years old.

We were paying for groceries at the checkout. This was an era before mobile phones, let alone contactless payments or ApplePay.

My grandmother had opened her purse to find the right cash.

One of her quirks—which I confess I took up later myself—was if she didn’t have the exact change, she would pay for, say, a £10.23 purchase by handing over a £20 note and 23p.

Change as a £10 note made it easier for the cashier, and kinder on Grandma’s arthritic shoulders. Her handbag would be just that little bit lighter.

On this day, my grandmother was fumbling. She was trying to find the right coins and pull them out to pay.

For what felt like an embarrassingly long time.

I could see the coins she needed. The cashier could see them. The people lined up in the checkout queue behind her could see that she couldn’t see them.

I felt acutely conscious of the cashier’s reaction and soft rumblings from people behind us in the queue.

What she needed to do seemed so obvious. And yet she didn’t see it.

Then she looked up and spoke to the cashier (still oblivious to me and the others in the queue). She’d left her reading glasses in the car, the arthritis in her hands was playing up, and she was having a bit of a turn.

Today we’d probably label it post-menapausal brainfog.

Nine-year old me had clearly missed the big picture.

Being young and frustrated spilled over into my early working career.

I took up my first professional consulting job at the age of 23. It was already my second employer and my fourth role since finishing university.

Yet I still had plenty to learn. Not that I thought so at the time!

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For the next few years I lived and worked between the UK, Hong Kong and Australia. I endlessly found myself on projects and in client situations where the solution seemed blatantly obvious:

• The choice of which software vendor to go with.

• The project GO/NO GO decision.

• The priority initiative that needed funding NOW.

• The new operating model changes to be understood and adopted.

Once I nearly lost my job over one what-seemed-obvious finding from a week’s immersion at onsite at a client. I’d felt the client’s plans and efforts were as futile as trying to nail jelly to the wall.

I reported back, in black and white terms, that the client’s goals were far too ambitious for the technology choices they were making. They were walking headlong over a cliff that would only lead to project cancellations down the track. So why keep going?

The client partner back at base camp had a much bigger picture. They appreciated that the client was at a very early level of understanding about projects of this nature. The client needed to experience and feel the heat from an uncontrolled IT project wildfire. As trusted advisors, we’d be there to save them long before the house burnt down.

The partner understood the bigger picture.

Explaining that projects can turn into wildfires wasn’t a message the client was ready to hear, let alone understand and action at that point in time.

I learnt to go more gently after that.

Over time, the bigger picture became clearer in each client and leadership situation.

And the clarity was: that there is rarely a black and a white, a right and a wrong. Most situations are grey, fuzzy, and full of options and trade-offs.

My consulting style—and the needs of my clients—has evolved to accommodate this.

These are three things that consistently help me find, win and deliver client outcomes in today’s organisational and technological climate.

1. Take time to understand the human behind each job title and LinkedIn profile - What’s behind the position they are taking? What’s in it for them if the decision goes one way, or a different way?

2. Make more time than you think to get clarity and alignment - What do people agree and disagree on? What’s the common ground? What ideas or opinions are people unable to let go of? What can everyone live with?

3. Once agreed make sure the communication is clear, consistent and continuous - What’s the message from here? How can we communicate it to others not in the room? How do we stay consistent?

Seek out the unobvious from the outset

When I look back at my grandmother in the supermarket, or watch other elderly people grappling with simple tasks that require the dexterity and confidence that you take for granted when you’re younger. I look at them differently.

There arthritic fingers that no longer bend and curl, let alone grip and hold onto small things. Slower reactions or the ability to calculate mentally on the fly. Narrower field of vision meaning less awareness of others.

These all have parallels in the business world.

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Walking along a street of luxury shops on a street in central London, I stopped.

A 50-foot-long slab of readymade wall being craned into place on the third floor of a construction site.

It was too good a photo opportunity to pass up.

I had a conference talk coming up on the subject of simplifying technology by making it more modular, or “componentised”. The metaphor of simpler, more reliable, and easier-to-change technology as kids’ Lego blocks had been overused for years. This construction site could offer a fresh take.

I didn’t expect it to unfold as an equally powerful metaphor for the consultants’ dilemma: how to deliver financial benefits—more revenue, greater reach, lower costs—without losing sight of what makes organisations truly valuable.

That “growth at any cost” always comes at a price. When the commercials make sense, the price on humanity may be questionable.

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The efficiency illusion

As the concrete block swung into position, the pre-fabricated outside wall came into view. It had been moulded to look like thousands of individual bricks. No doubt to blend in with the look and feel of the heritage streetscapes.

Designed to simulate craft and detail, while optimised for efficiency, with a nod to local planning regulations. Depressingly devoid of craft or character.

The street was blocked off. All traffic stopped whilst a single crane driver and their counterpart in a cherry picker worked to manoeuvre the massive slab into place. A group of hard-hatted site workers in fluorescent vests chatted in different languages, puffing on vapes, and watching from the sidelines.

I overheard a comment from someone standing next to me.

Grey hair, company logo’d jacket, jeans. He was watching the cherry picker, saying they’d never reach the taglines due to the wind. He spoke with authority—he clearly knew what he was talking about.

While I never learned his name, he turned out to be the site manager: an industry veteran with more than 30 years in the trade.

As I commented on the modular wall, he pointed out the art deco-influenced bay windows. They too were pre-made to order and shipped in from Germany, complete with window panes, trimmings, fittings, and tinting. Ready to slot in as self-contained units.

“It’s just about time and cost these days. Never quality and craft any more,” he said, his voice tired and cynical.

The global assembly line

Built in Germany. Installed in London. Overseen by a British main contractor employing a mosaic of different nationalities to build the head office for a European luxury goods conglomerate backed by a consortium of US-led investors.

They’d built three storeys in less than four months.

“Everything’s been outsourced now,” the site manager continued. “They did it to save money, but it just makes everything take longer. No one knows anything about the detail any more. If something’s delivered on site with a problem, it takes days or weeks to ripple down to the subcontractor of the subcontractor. Then they come back with another question. Long gone are the days when we could fix everything on site.”

Just like too many legacy software and integration management scenarios—with the distance between the code and the layers of conversation flowing up and down through teams and contracts and service levels to solve an incident, respond to unplanned regulation, or address security controls and requirements. Just two humans on the project’s critical path. A large group of site workers in safety vests and helmets, vaping and waiting.

A reminder of the bottlenecks in software delivery that stymie flow and value delivery.

The consultant’s dilemma

The building felt like a case study in how large organisations and their technology can end up over time. Modules of infrastructure delivered with supposed efficiency, but at what cost? I found myself thinking of the conversations that must have gone on to get the design approved—the boardroom presentations where the building concept was pitched to prestigious clients as a destination fit for high net worth customers and even higher net worth owners and investors.

But it was the realities of what was really going on from the site manager’s view that highlighted to me the kinds of dilemmas people are trying to balance at the coalface of commercialising technology and digitalisation.

The classic consulting dilemma was brought back into sharp focus: make a recommendation to save money, speed up, or grow at any cost, and you’re undoubtedly going to directly or indirectly impact someone’s role. Potentially their loss of that role. The associated loss of income, status, purpose.

For every freed-up person walking off with a fat redundancy package and a newfound energy to start a side hustle or travel the world, there are likely dozens more reassessing their financial situation, coping with strained relationships, worrying for their futures.

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Growth at any cost

The site manager was a seasoned veteran who’d started more than 30 years ago in an industry that has changed so much, his job would be unrecognisable from its equivalent a generation ago. He’d witnessed the transformation firsthand—from a craft-based profession where problems could be solved on-site by skilled tradespeople, to a globally distributed supply chain where decision-making authority is fragmented across continents and contract clauses.

As a career consultant and technology leader who’s live and worked across four continents, I have observed and been part of many such conversations and decision-making processes.

The drive for efficiency. The push for scalability. The relentless focus on reducing costs and accelerating delivery. The championing of modularisation, outsourcing, automation, and consolidation. Business cases that look brilliant on spreadsheets, show impressive returns on investment, and collapse payback periods.

Yet how often have we fallen short or—or at best glossed over—accounting for the true human cost? The loss of institutional knowledge? The erosion of craft and pride in workmanship? The alienation that comes when people become interchangeable components in a global assembly line?

The paradox is real: we’ve achieved unprecedented efficiency and scale, yet somehow made things slower, more fragmented, and less fulfilling.

Navigating paradoxes

Modern consulting, at its best, is about helping leaders navigate precisely these kinds of complexities and paradoxes. It’s about holding competing truths in healthy tension rather than pretending they don’t exist. It’s about seeking out people who are different to avoid the safety and speed of “groupthink”—the comfort of reinforcing one’s own opinion.

Yes, organisations need to be efficient and competitive. Yes, they need to grow and adapt to changing markets. Yes, technology and modularisation can unlock tremendous value. But they also need to preserve institutional knowledge, maintain quality and craft, and treat people as humans rather than resources to be optimised.

The real work of consulting isn’t just about delivering the next cost reduction programme or the next digital transformation. It’s about helping leaders see the full picture—the trade-offs, the unintended consequences, the long-term implications of short-term decisions. It’s about asking difficult questions: What are we really optimising for? Who benefits and who pays the price? What are we losing in pursuit of growth?

The price of progress

I’ve been reading Goliath’s Curse” by Luke Kemp. It describes how, today, we are part of the first truly global Goliath, built around technology domination and rapidly accelerating inequality. The book is packed with intriguing facts, figures, and insights anchored to decades-long analysis of the collapse of more than 500 civilisations throughout history.

Standing on that London street, watching that concrete slab swing in the wind whilst a group of workers waited idly, I couldn’t help but think about what we’re building. Not just the physical structures, but the organisational and societal structures we’re constructing through our consulting recommendations, our technology choices, our growth strategies.

We’re creating systems that look impressively efficient on paper but feel increasingly soulless in practice. Retail experiences that are depressingly similar whether you’re in London, Sydney, Bangalore, or New York. Same shops, same products, same décor. Technology platforms that offer frictionless experiences but strip away local character and human connection.

And yet, there are also exciting and positive pockets of creativity popping up in the most unlikely places.

Independent retail, music and dining venues. Young families escaping city rat races to bring up children in simpler, more wholesome environments where nature comes for free. A post-pandemic focus on recycling, digital detoxing, or just being kinder. New ideas coming to life through online creative writing, podcasting, music-making. Rapid advances in AI-assisted everything.

A different kind of value

The challenge for modern consultants is to help organisations pursue growth and efficiency without sacrificing their humanity. To build systems that are both scalable and sustainable. To create value that shows up not just in quarterly earnings reports, but in the lived experiences of employees, customers, and communities.

To do so while keeping pace.

This means being willing to have uncomfortable conversations. To challenge the assumption that growth at any cost is always the right answer. To point out when the pursuit of efficiency is actually creating fragility and dependence. To advocate for investments in people and craft that might not have an obvious return on investment but create resilience and meaning.

To slow down and to reflect, in order to be able to then speed up.

It means helping leaders navigate paradox rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. Acknowledging that sometimes the right answer isn’t either-or, but both-and. That we need efficiency and craft. Scale and local character. Technology and human connection.

Conclusion

That concrete block eventually made it into place. The cherry picker operator finally caught the tagline. The waiting workers returned to their tasks. The building will be completed, the luxury goods will be sold, the investors will see their returns.

But the site manager’s words stayed with me: “It’s just about time and cost these days. Never quality and craft any more.”

As consultants, we have a choice. We can continue to optimise purely for time and cost, delivering recommendations that look good in presentation decks but contribute to a world that feels increasingly hollow. Or we can help our clients navigate the complexity—to pursue growth and efficiency in ways that preserve what makes organisations, and societies, truly valuable.

The paradox isn’t going away. The tension between efficiency and humanity, between scale and craft, between short-term gains and long-term sustainability—these are the defining challenges of our era. Modern consulting is about helping leaders navigate these paradoxes with wisdom, courage, and a clear-eyed understanding of what growth really costs.

Because in the end, the question isn’t just whether we can build bigger, faster, cheaper. It’s whether we can build in ways that honour both our balance sheets and our humanity.

If you, your colleagues, or your clients are looking for ways to understand and positively navigate today’s complex challenges facing people and teams, then contact me for consulting, coaching and workshop planning and facilitation.

I just picked a bunch of early daffodils. In November.

These are the earliest of the bulbs to flower in the garden. They’re a nod to brightness and positivity through long nights and English wintery days of grey skies and horizontal rain. They leave one with the uplifting promise of springtime ahead: warmer nights and longer days.

This year they’ve arrived at least a month early.

Experienced gardeners tell me they must confused by the unseasonable warmth.

You might expect this to now take a turn towards commentary on climate change.

I leave that for others.

There are many more specialist environmental scientists (and horticulturalists) far better qualified to write on the subject. Although, the flowers are strictly speaking narcissi.

The “daffs” seem to be putting on a positive face on the uncertainty around them. Trying to get a head start with their job of flowering and propagating themselves, before going back to sleep underground for another year.

Like how people are responding to current business pressures.

The urgency to show results—directly or through pressure on / with others—seems to be dominating conversations in people’s day-to-day work and, increasingly, even their personal life.

There feels like a forced positivity about many people’s excitement about AI—in whatever form it means to them.

I also see that many are getting ahead…sometimes at a speed that means others risk falling further and further behind.

As consultants, we have the privilege of being able to help people with these challenges.

Firstly, the people who are charging ahead need help recognising the risks they face with adopting too fast.

Have they brought others along with them, or risk leaving them far behind?

Are they unknowingly exposing themselves, their teams, or their organisations to risks from their creative yet insecure use of AI?

Like the narcissi in my garden: if the weather turns cold again, do they have the resilience and security in place to make it through a few nights of hard frost?

Secondly, the people who feel left behind need help with keeping up. They may be genuinely fearful: for their jobs, their families, their financial situation. In countries and communities without fallback healthcare systems, losing a job can mean losing healthcare security for themselves or dependents.

All these emotions and more may be going on in people’s minds. Things that may not be transparent in their day-to-day interactions at work.

At the same as they are being encouraged to think about how to (re)skill, (re)educate, (re)invest in their lifelong learning.

They might be the later bloomers, but there are important questions for them.

Will their natural tenacity to stick with something for the long term be a help or a hindrance?

What are the small and less daunting steps they can take to feel more in control, and less being blown about in whatever direction that month’s wind is blowing?

How to help convince team members, colleagues and customers/clients, when not yet convinced themselves?

They might be cynical about what could feel like Shiny New Toy Sydnrome on steriods, while they end up being the biggest fans. The early adopters might have got bored and be onto the next thing. (For the record, I’ve seen this time and again when new ideas, technology or processes get brought into teams and organisations.)

The current challenge, like weather patterns, is the sheer pace at which change is happening.

As consultants, we are naturally wired with in-built resilience. Each new client, or each new project, calls for us to observe, listen and learn fast.

We get to remain curious without being nosy, stay calm without losing focus, and be commercial without stopping caring.

This is at the heart of what good consulting looks like, and at the heart of how I work.

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I apply my own background and experience—of living and working across four continents across widely different industry sectors, and technology uses—to help individuals and teams take time to reflect, catch up with each other, and move forward in a united way. One that saves them time in their over-busy lives to focus on what matters, and to stress less about what doesn’t.

At its simplest, this is helping clients:

1. Understand and learn from each other.

2. Explore options and reach alignment.

3. Develop plans and move forward.

The critical skill is to help people and teams through this process. Some simplify it down to “facilitation”. For me, it’s applying more than three decades of consulting and being consulted to in different industries and technology uses, to get people in a room (in-person, virtually or hybrid) and apply any of a well honed set of tools, frameworks, and lines of questioning to get to the client’s outcome.

Get good at facilitating, and you get to the heart of understanding what makes people, teams, and organisations tick. It can even take you around the world.

Since setting up business for myself, I now run an average of 50+ workshops, events and training experiences each year. Over the last two years, the in-person versions alone have taken me to eight countries across four continents.

Contact me here, or on DM me on LinkedIn to find out more about how I help individuals and teams get their ideas shaped and shared.

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It's flawed to believe that organisations:

• Have opinions.

• Make decisions.

• Can change.

• May buy your services.

Or that they can choose to avoid doing any of the above.

Arguably, organisations don't really do that much.

It's the people and teams who work for organisations that do things.

As a consultant, to understand organisations—and how they change—is to understand the people that work there.

How they behave.

Why they do what they do today.

What it will take to inspire, motivate and convince them to think, act and behave differently tomorrow.

Confession time: I can be a bit of an armchair psychologist

I have no psychology training or qualifications.

However, I read and listen to people who are qualified in the subject.

And I get to draw on my experience consulting—and being consulted to—in and around large enterprises and public institutions over more than three decades.

So here are three concepts drawn from psychology that help you succeed as an agent for change. One of the key reasons people will pay for your advice as a consultant.

Hold every opinion as valid, no matter its silliness

We should be able to have a ready answer — and never take offence — if someone asks us (as they should): ‘In what ways are you mad’?
The Eight Rules of The School of Life, Alain de Booton

Everyone is a little bit mad (in de Booton’s, British use of the word), or a little bit crazy.

We make decisions for irrational reasons. It plays out in our lives: among our families, our relationships.

And yes, among our work situations.

Early in my consulting career, I once had the opportunity to go and help out with a colleague’s client who was starting on the implementation of a new financial accounting system. A long flight, and an even longer train trip away from home, culminated in a week at the client site to talk to the team onsite. Find out where they were at. Report back to base camp on progress.

To say the project was ambitious was an understatement.

The proposed solution was clearly completely under-specified to meet anything close to that ambition. Let alone expectations of the client’s stakeholders.

It was the tech equivalent of proposing that a cordless drill, some planks of wood and a box of different sized nails had everything they needed to start building a block of apartments. And they only needed their team of three people. A team who loved renovation reality shows and had done some home improvement projects at weekends for a couple of years beforehand.

While a well known German integrated enterprise resource planning system—skyscraper-ready if needed—was clearly out of the question for the client in question, they still needed some awareness (education?) of what they could expect to buy at least partly readymade for their problem space.

This was certainly one of those client situations where their choice of what they wanted to do made no sense. And that we had a duty of care as their advisors to make them aware of the risks they’d be taking to their business, their customers and their suppliers if they carried on down their chosen path.

My failing was with getting this across to my colleagues back at the consulting mother ship.

I was younger and more opinionated then. Less able to read between the lines.

I thought the client was mad. And that anyone letting them head off unknowningly into certain project disaster would have to be mad too.

What seemed blatantly obvious—and just needed explaining to the client—instead nearly got me fired.

I’d failed to read between the lines. Understand the subtlety of the relationship between my colleagues and the client’s leadership team. The amount of face at stake.

I like to think an older, wiser version of me would have had read the tea leaves much earlier. I’d have asked different questions of the team during the site visit. Raised red flags earlier with my colleages. Drip-fed the findings with feedback along the way.

Been more sensitive to the cultural norms of both client and colleagues coming from an alien culture to mine.

Thanks to my track record and potential, I held onto my job.

But more time spent listening early to both clients and colleagues would have eliminated a lot of angst along the way.

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Be ready for turbulence below the waterline

Grown-ups are not good at masking their concerns, although they can hide their delight and curiosity surprisingly well. Whereas with children it is the other way around. Children can tactfully mute their anxiety and conceal their sorrow, but will struggle not to express their excitement.
There Are Rivers In The Sky, Elif Shafak

The familiar image of the swan gliding along serenely on the surface of its pond or river...its webbed feet paddling away madly below the surface.

Calmness and composure on the outside. Chaos and confusion on the inside.

A common way to describe what might be going on in an organisation, a team, or for an individual.

It's impossible to guess what's going on for others in any work context.

Even more so, if you're providing, or proposing to provide, them with paid advice.

My approach is to try and gauge as quickly as possible in a meeting or interaction—ideally in under 2 minutes—what may have been going on for them already that day, or week.

Back-to-back virtual meetings? Quarterly planning cycle in full swing? Sick kid at home? Waiting on the results of a biopsy?

Suffice to say, you never know what else is really going on in someone's life. Let alone in their mind.

And much of it could rightly be none of your business.

But it's always safe to recognise that they may be distracted with other things than what you want to talk about is not their problem.

You could label it empathy, smart client relationship management or just common sense.

I get to work every day with clients and community connections around the world. In different cities, countries, and time zones.

Having something ready-to-share, or a question to ask that shows a connection with their world is a game-changer for quickly establishing connection and trust. Curiosity about, or appreciation of, their city, their local / regional news, their country’s favourite sports or food or festivals.

The science behind building connections this way is well proven. Check out psychologist Gillian Sandstrom’s research and experiences around the power of weak ties. It’s not just good for them, but good for your longevity and mental health.

For me, it's about remembering that you're just interacting with another human. Or group of humans. Fellow travellers on this earth with similar-but-thankfully-different fears, hopes, loves and dreams.

The Dalai Lama’s “Art of Happiness” is an ideal handbook for . It even helped me think about compassion and understanding for others as a selfish action: be more positively about others and guess what? You feel better about yourself.

Understanding the humanity of the people you come into contact with, is also the best way to come up with creative and effective plans and strategies that are in your clients’ interests.

Plans that will help them lead, navigate and contribute positively to the changes you're helping them realise for the organisations they work at.

When your clients really know that you genuinely care. Guess what? They’re more likely to trust you with the information you need to help them. And more likely to refer you to others. And come back for more.

Be a pace-setter rather than a go-getter

Pausing allows you to take a beat to take a breath in your life. As everybody else is rushing around like a lunatic out there, I dare you to do the opposite.
The Power of the Pause, USC Annenberg School address, Maria Shriver

Whether your engagement is to solidify or justify an idea. To deliver a one-off initiative. Or facilitate some or all of a complex program of change.

In all cases, your client is the runner that all the focus and attention is on.

And rightly so.

You were there to support during training. You're there to set the pace. To keep a good momentum going for the early laps. To encourage and support.

Your client's success—and the glory they can enjoy for having it—means you've done your job.

And the overarching thing to remember as a pace-setter: is to set a pace for the organisational change that meets the Goldilocks test.

Not so fast that people can't keep up with you.

Not so slow that people get frustrated with a lack of visibility of progress.

But just right.

One of the most common reasons consulting projects fall short of meeting client expectations, is this mismatch in pace.

The consulting ego and drive can take over the true client need.

Whatever services you offer as a consultant, you have to be able to plan the work, to be able to deliver the work. And the biggest variable in the plan is your client’s input to the work.

Their team’s availability. The time they need to review. The number of stakeholders they need to involve.

Experienced consultants know how to set expectations with this up front, and to manage the plan accordingly. But much of it still comes down to understanding the pscychology of the people involved.

A new leader wanting to show his colleagues that they’re making fast progress on the change they were brought in to make? They’ll need an approach that gives frequent updates—supported by metrics and stories and presented by the client’s team—that show progress towards one or more tangible outcomes.

A team needing to deliver a new solution that relies on technologies and skills they’re missing in-house but want to acquire in order to attract better talent in the future? They’ll need an approach that incorporates regular clarification of requirements, and manages the trade-off between delivery/execution speed, and the ability for the client ongoing support team to learn and apply the new tech and skills.

A leadership group wanting an outside-in perspective/s for reassurance that their own strategies, plans, priorities, or decision-making have rigour and other opinions to support them? They’ll need an approach that might look more like a retainer-style advice plan; similar to the way a business might use legal or accounting advice on an “as need” basis.

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In summary

Consulting is as much about psychology as it is about technology, orthodoxy, or let alone methodology.

Thinking about the people and teams at the organisations you get to work with—from their points of view, and in their contexts—goes a long way towards making your advice both truly valuable. And valued.

The trick I use as much as I can is to stop myself writing, saying or implying that a company (or a government, or any organisational construct) actually did or should do anything. Instead, I phrase it as the person or group of humans who did or should do something.

It gets a lot of clarity. Fast. Including with how you think about things.

And will become even more important as the human and AI/machine interface becomes increasingly blurred. And the language others have used in their content and their prompts…de-humanises too much more of business language.

Key takeaways

To level up the humanity in your day-to-day client interactions, focus on these three things:

1. Start with the assumption that everyone’s viewpoint is valid. From their viewpoint. Understand their viewpoint, and you’re most of the way there to understanding how to influence them to your way of thinking.

2. Find the human connection in any client interaction. Remove the role title and the company brand and see the person as another human. Practice the art of developing weak ties. You’ll be doing yourself a health favour if nothing else.

3. 

   Understand and work with your client’s pace of change. Go fast when they can absorb it. Go slower when they want it.

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It was the 1990s. I’d been working away from home for several weeks on a consulting project for a big client. We were a small team. My role as the junior member was officially: lead analyst.

Unofficially, I was chief of just-getting-stuff-done-behind-the-scenes. It didn’t include any real influence with the direction of the project. Or the client.

It was hard.

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It followed an old-school consulting format. Convoluted Excel data sets and formulae. Overly detailed PowerPoint presentations. Draft reports getting unpicked and knitted back together over drawn-out client meetings in windowless offices in faceless skyscrapers.

Long days to meet overly ambitious timeframes. Long nights pushing into early hours of the next day to meet each major milestone.

A classic example of the kind of consulting project that was well-intentioned in the thinking…yet questionably executed. The kind I avoid now, as do my clients.

However, this was a different era. A different style of client relationship management. And a project methodology that culminated in a Big Reveal, billed as an “all hands workshop”.

A senseless phrase.

Firstly, most of the client team’s involvement had been decidedly hands-off throughout.

We had a key client contact working with us day-to-day. Let’s call him Pete. Pete was sufficiently far removed from the big picture and key stakeholders to limit his focus on low-level details…These played out as seemingly endless rounds of t-crossing and i-dotting on assumptions and commentary on the increasingly complex data sheets.

Secondly, calling the grande finale a workshop made little sense as there was very little “real work” planned to get done.

The agenda was set for an intensive four hours.

Pete had been bustling around for days to make sure the invitees included all the key stakeholders. The people needed to finalise and sign off recommendations for major streams of investment. Investment over multiple years in new team structures, more efficient processes and better technology.

Recommendations that would impact the organisation’s departmental structures and deliver big “headcount savings”.

Headcount was a loaded word. A label that conveniently disassociated the conversation from the reality (job cuts), let alone the lives, of the actual people impacted. People who’d put many years into their work at the organisation. People whose families relied on them as their primary source of income. People who faced losing confidence, kudos, or simply a feeling of financial security.

From my narrow view behind the spreadsheets and conversation with the other consultants, it was clear that the real question was: Whose number would come up in the imminent restructure lottery?

The workshop goal was to confirm the final number of roles to be made redundant in each key department.

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The boardroom table was set up. We’d expected a dozen people: the key heads of department. The people who’d need to agree to the potential reduction in team sizes in their teams.

Until we suddenly had to rustle up 20 more seats.

For uninvited and unexpected guests.

Each department head had brought along at least one sidekick. Trusted advisors? Note takers? Briefcase carriers? (Yes: briefcases were still a thing.)

It wasn’t clear to us why they were there. And there wasn’t time on the agenda to do more than the most cursory of introductions.

From the moment everyone trooped in, we’d been hijacked.

My colleague leading the project chose to keep going regardless.

We plodded through the agenda and recommendations.

Thanks to the late nights we’d put in, these were presented as an embarrassingly lengthy deck of high density slides. The monochrome reading experience broken up by occasional rainbows of colourful charts and carefully double-checked references—many in 8pt font far too small to read even from my position close to the screen.

The sidekicks—chairs pushed up against the edges of the room—furiously took notes while also trying not to look like a group of grumpy teenagers who’d been relegated to the kids’ table at the family get-together.

There were few questions. And even fewer sparks of healthy debate or informed dissension.

The recommendations got agreement. But it was a long half-day.

Later that evening, debriefing as a team, we kept coming back to the unexpected walk-on extras. And the potential reasons they were there.

Were they there as their department heads’ security blankets? Was it to show everyone else they were a team player and would support whatever outcome came about? Or simply early notice of whether their own job was destined for organisational death row.

We also voiced what we’d all been thinking and hadn’t felt able to bring up: the number of people multiplied by four hours…meant nearly 150 hours of people’s time spent largely passively, in what was ostensibly a one-to-many presentation.

We could have sent out the presentation as pre-read and got through feedback in less than 30 mins.

With a third of the people.

A waste of time and opportunity to do some real work.

Because they needed to get going on the real work: implementing the recommendations.

Mobilising the project team.

Addressing changes to the culture of the organisation.

A culture that would challenge 30 people spending half a day in a meeting without everyone contributing to something that moved the organisation forward.

Many things could have been done differently.

Most of them went back to the proposal stage for the work.

Long before we booked planes, trains and hotel rooms, farewelled friends and families for weeks and planned out the project; the goals, approach and timing could have been much better thought through.

The quantity and seniority of client involvement.

A more iterative approach.

Regular checkpoints and, most importantly, input throughout from the people likely impacted.

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Workshops are a core ingredient of the consulting process.

Prepared and run well—with the right people doing the right kind of work together at the right point in time—a workshop can be the ideal way to accelerate change.

To get ideas communicated. And then understood.

To hear others’ perspectives. And then change your own.

To try things out in a safe space. And then take them back to build out as a team.

The greater the number of people and teams impacted, and the bigger the change impact, the more important it is to get people involved in understanding what it means for them in their roles.

Run well, workshops are one of the most effective ways of doing this.

Know your problem, choose your style

On a large-scale change project, workshops can be used in different ways. Here are four of my favourites.

1. As a seed germinator—a process for brainstorming and coming up with ideas that can be quickly assessed, evaluated and prioritised. What to do now, do next, or do one day. Do we really need to do “it” at all?
   Best for: Early stage planning; “Ideating”; and Prioritising.

2. As a turbo booster—a means of quickly taking an idea from “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” to “We can do it like this…”. Getting people to understand an opportunity as a group, to work through the implications for each other, while building a lasting team dynamic.
   Best for: Turning theoretical concepts into executable plans; Testing ideas.

3. As a circuit breaker—a way to get over the inevitable speed bumps on a project involving a lot of change impacts on people and their roles. A time-efficient and structured approach to problem-solving as a team. An approach where everyone’s views get heard. Where the way forward needs agreement and buy-in.
   Best for: Solving problems; Diffusing tension or conflict; Breaking stalemates.

4. As a team energiser—the corporate equivalent of a neighbourhood street party. Something to get people out of their usual departmental / geographic / market-focused tribes. Getting comfortable mixing with people from different disciplines and experiences to explore what the real impacts will be of an upcoming change.
   Best for: Introducing new stakeholders (customers, partners, colleagues) to what’s going on; Getting wider buy-in to the change.

There are many tried and tested ways to “ideate”, and a plethora of frameworks and approaches available to support any or all of these four.

Channel your inner scout: Be Prepared

The key things to remember when planning a workshop include:

• Understand the audience / the group

  • Who are they?

  • What’s their experience to date? And their expectations?

  • Why should they give up their time for this?

• Plan an agenda that moves at the right pace

  • What does the workshop need to achieve? What are its objectives?

  • What background and context does the group need?

  • What approach (steps) do you need to get through the work?

  • What framework(s) will you use to structure people’s thinking and output?

  • How much needs doing as a full group versus better in breakouts / small groups?

  • What are the key inputs?

  • What will happen with the outputs after the workshop?

• Manage the logistics—which vary if in-person, fully remote, or hybrid

  • How much of the conversation needs to be captured in real time?

  • Who’s facilitating and who’s “scribing”? Or is it a job for GenAI?

  • What’s the plan for breaks?

  • What tool(s) are you going to use to capture the conversation?

  • How will you ensure everyone gets to contribute?

  • Where will you capture “car park” items to address later?

  • What tech will you be using and who will manage or host it?

  • How will you follow up afterwards?

• Pre-prepare the audience

  • What are the key messages in the invitation? Who will it come from?

  • What pre-read or inputs do you need the group to prepare with?

  • What do they need to expect from participating?

The larger the group for your workshop, and the higher the stakes for the work coming out of it, the greater the level of planning required.

And the easier it is to anticipate and avoid hijack situations.

Or to deal with them when they arise.

Expecting the unexpected

No matter how well you plan, stuff still happens. So being ready to respond in the moment is part of how you nip any potential hijacks in the bud.

These are my tips for three typical workshop hijacks.

1. Attendees turn up late, seem distracted with other things on their minds, or are just “no shows”.
   Choose a location, timing and format that works best for the group. Get the sponsor or key client contact/s to fully pre-prepare them for why they need to be there, and what’s in it for them attending.
   Give time at the start and end for people to get into the topic. Avoid assuming they’ve done the pre-read: what’s top priority to you and the client team may be low down their lists.

2. An obstructive participant, who challenges your approach, or tries to take over the agenda.
   This is a test of your facilitation skills: to make them feel listened to, while not “letting go of the pen” and letting them derail your process. Or your timing.
   I may respond by inviting the whole group to offer a view on whether to change tack, or keep going. Presented convincingly, with some fast pros and cons, the group usually agrees to stick to the original agenda. And the disrupter saves face. Your “car park” is another useful way of respecting their contribution, while addressing it later outside the session.

3. Someone risks dominating the conversation, or someone with important contributions chooses to stay quiet.
   This is another test of your facilitation wizardry. Everyone needs to feel included and to get an opportunity to participate sensibly.
   For a longer session, I’ll mix up the session with different ways for the group to contribute. Quiet, reflection times or small group breakouts; as well as all-group agenda items. I’m also always trying to read the room—even if it’s run virtual. I generally scribe notes during the session—typed or on a whiteboard, and just pause while they keep talking…they generally realise their contribution has run its course.

The main thing about workshops is to watch, learn from experts, and keep practising. With bigger and bigger groups, for longer periods of time.

Serving your audience, rather than yourself or the immediate team, is a reminder that they need to finish up feeling that their time was used well.

That they learnt something.

That they had some fun.

Conclusions

Despite the move to online and regular hybrid work, the problems facing teams and individuals in many workplaces are only getting more complex.

The ways organisations work are continually changing and at an ever faster pace. The types of change they’re undertaking to meet customer, employee and partner needs call for problem-solving beyond existing team structures and decision-making frames.

Done well, workshops are a technique to get groups through this quickly. Three things to remember are:

1. Workshops involve getting work done.

2. A well-planned workshop puts the group first. The approach and agenda align the individuals’ needs, the group’s dynamic, and the organisation’s priorities.

3. Using people’s time usefully and respectfully gets the best results. And avoids potential hijacks.

***

If you want to follow my daily thoughts and observations in and around consulting, I post on X/Twitter at @ConsultGently

If you enjoyed this post and would like to follow more from The Gentle Consultant, then I’d love you to subscribe.

Note that opinions in this piece are the author’s own. The stories and examples are based on actual examples, with some seasoning sprinkled around the details.

As consultants and change agents, we’re always learning.

We’re naturally curious.

We often read and consume content voraciously.

Back in the noughties, a work colleague suggested I read Spencer Johnson’s "Who Moved My Cheese?".

It was a best-selling self-help and management book published in 1999. The title tells you “what it is in the tin”: a fable about a couple of mice stuck in a maze.

Their daily cheese ration doesn't turn up at the usual place. One of the mice gets paralysed with fear. Terrified to step out and explore where else in the maze the cheese might have got to. Suffice to say, he nearly starves.

Moral of the story: Unexpected stuff happens. Resist being a victim. Take action and get back control.

Or something like that.

TBH, I don’t really remember all the details. Because: confession time…

I found it a truly irritating read.

If you, like my colleague and those behind the many glowing reviews and testimonials of the book, loved it…then my apologies.

It’s probably because you’re wiser than I was.

The whole set-up of the story seemed silly and unrelatable. I got increasingly frustrated by this mouse who couldn’t bring himself to even step out and poke a whisker outside his small, narrow little world. Who kept coming up with excuses about why he wouldn’t get up and out.

I remember negatively judging the people who found it inspiring. People who related to this nervous rodent that seemed incapable of taking any initiative. Let alone see the excitement of getting out of home and exploring something more of the world.

Until I realised what the real learning was for me.

Firstly some context.

I come from family role models who lived much of their lives somewhere different from their country of birth or the nationality on their passport. From four generations back on both sides. Many of those moves were based on their own choices: for work or travel or both.

“You make your own luck” was a family mantra.

Myself, I’ve lived and worked in four continents.

My international career moves have started with “I want to go to xxx next.” because it was a country I wanted to live in. And I’d find some work to take me there. Not always exactly as planned, but taking up a career in technology because “it looked like something that would only get bigger” has proven helpful. Internal moves and job roles were often through taking my own initiative—or just seeing or hearing about an opportunity and putting my hand up for it.1

So while it would be fair to point out that I was dealt with a pretty privileged hand of cards compared to 8 billion fellow humans on this planet, I’m still known among friends and colleagues for being unusually resilient.

Stuff happens. I bounce back. But this isn’t the time or place to share those stories or my personal resilience strategies.

This is to talk about change.

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As a consultant—or having been consulted to when a business or technology leader—for more than three decades, I’ve made a living helping people anticipate, invest in, and navigate ways to change things. Make them better.

At the heart of my work is managing the human aspects of any change—which there always is whenever technology is involved…

I’m a self-declared change junkie.

With a weakness for saying “Yes!” to too many things. There's always space for another pebble in the jar. More sand around the pebbles. Another few millilitres of water...

Couple this with a family background of eternal optimists. The glass is 7/8ths full and “it could be worse…” are part of our DNA. If things go pear-shaped, then it’s an opportunity to go somewhere else. You move jobs. Or countries. Or just move on.

But clearly, others start from a very different perspective.

For some, living more than half an hour away from immediate family might be unimaginable. Perhaps they just subscribe to the “work to live rather than live to work” philosophy. For others, new education and other job opportunities might be severely constrained by geography, family commitments or disabilities. Let alone those in places facing political, climatic or other disasters far out of their control.

I used to help provide training and guidance to recently promoted new managers. Practical skills and frameworks to get them comfortable in their new team leadership roles. One was the simple Comfort Zone > Learning Zone > Panic/Alarm Zone framework. I’d also share my career story and leadership point of view as part of helping them build lasting networks from senior leaders across the wider business.

After one such talk, a lady came up to me in the break and said she enjoyed the talk:

“And your whole life is out of my comfort zone!”

As consultants—as change agents—it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that the reason and benefits change we might have helped justify, or plan, or execute… is as obvious to our clients as it is to us.

What I learnt from Spencer Johnson was to relate to people better through their context.

In some things—such as putting up a hand for a new job opportunity, or taking on a high-risk project, or speaking in public—my Comfort Zone might have a lot wider circumference than others. I now spend a lot of time helping people widen theirs.

I was unlikely to have been a target audience for Spencer’s book in the first place.

I believe he wrote for readers who relate to Stay-At-Home mouse. On reflection, he taught me to appreciate that there are people whose Comfort Zone circle for certain work situations is much smaller than mine. And that’s just fine.

I suffer vertigo. My comfort zone on a rickety footbridge or at the top of a skyscraper is the size of ball bearing.

Key lessons for consultants

1. Avoid judging people and the decisions before understanding the context.

2. Recognise that everyone’s context is different.

3. What may look easy and comfortable for you, may be intimidating for your clients.

Lastly...

If you want to follow my daily thoughts and observations in and around consulting, I post on X/Twitter at @ConsultGently

As customers of others’ services, the difference between the good and the great is often self-evident. From the outset.

Clearing a blocked drain, offering financial advice, being shown to the table at your favourite restaurant to celebrate a special occasion—we seem wired to remember the customer experiences that count.

Those with a human touch.

First impressions are tablestakes.

The plumber : “I can see where it’s blocked. Let me get my toolbag.”

The financial planner : “I can see where you could get more from your savings plan. Let me run some numbers for you.”

The restaurant host : “I can see your booking suggests this is a special night. Let me show you to your table.”

As their customer, this might be what you’d consider as a decent level of service.

Anything less might even cause you to feel you’ve been underserviced.

But will it get you pulling out your phone and giving a five-star on your favourite review app?

Will you be telling your family or frends that they absolutely must try out this person/business/restaurant?

Unlikely, without those little extra things that make you feel special.

The little things to them that appear as big things to you, the customer.

The plumber : “It looks like I’ll need to move some of your things out of the way to get the work done. May I move them myself, or would you like to?”

The financial planner : “It looked like your calendar was blocked out for most of last week, so I’m guessing you’ve had even more on than usual. Is this still the best time for us to talk about your savings goals?”

The restaurant host : “We’d reserved this table for you, but it looks like you might have got caught in the rain on the way here. Would you rather we move you to this warmer spot so you can dry off faster?”

That little bit of extra service done with genuine level of spontaneity in response to the moment. Probably not scripted. But certainly honed from years or decades of dealing with customers. Or having been a customer themselves.

So, too, with consulting services.

Consulting clients need human connections too

One of the more touching bits of feedback to get from meeting or speaking with people for the first time to understand more about them and their problems is something I’ve heard often:

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I’ve had the privilege of consulting, and being consulted to, for some three decades across four continents. It’s mainly been in and around technology. Something every job relies on somewhere, somehow.

Working around technology shines a light into those corners of work: what goes on behind bank statements or PIN numbers, at the end of telephones or chatbots, or in water cooler conversations about a systems outage.

It gives a view of what the people who plan, implement or maintain the technology that touches every part of our work and life.

I’ve sat next to people on the phones in a contact centre. Patiently offering soothing words of reassurance as they masterfully move between some 20 open application windows on three different screens in front of them. A mass of complexity largely invisible to the concerned customer calling in with a question on their tax form.

I’ve donned safety vests and hard hats to watch manufacturing engineers and warehouse managers explaining what more automation would do for getting inventory levels down. They enthusiastically explain where automation could make their lives easier as they’re interrupted by calls to learn that a truck of frozen goods had just turned up at a supermarket distribution centre to learn the refridgeration had stopped working three days earlier. That a key supplier was going to be a week late. That half the warehouse crew had called in sick with ‘flu. And all before 8.30am.

I’ve donned a lead coat and surgery scrubs to watch orthopedic surgeries and cath lab procedures. Exploring information flows and conversations between senior doctors and hospital administrators, putting the patient’s short and longterm treatment outcomes at the heart of the problem.

I’ve visited schools, bank branches, manufacturing plants, data centres and trading floors. Skyscrapers, temporary buildings and industrial parks.

And now, of course, countless screen shares and views of people’s bookcases, pets and virtual backgrounds.

Each one, a window into a workplace. Each one a hint to something about the person behind the box on screen.

Each interaction, an opportunity to stay curious and learn something fresh and new.

Staying focused while staying tuned in.

For consultants who haven’t had the luxury of being able to get around and visit a lot of different workplaces, there’s still an opportunity in every client interaction to go that extra mile.

It’s about more than taking pride in the polished deliverable, the impeccable research and analysis, or the tightly rehearsed pitch and software demo.

It’s about remembering that clients have lives—and lives outside their workplace or home office.

That your consulting project is just one of the many things that’s clamouring for their attention right now. That what might seem obvious to you—particularly if you’ve been immersed full-time in the project and its problem space for the last few weeks—might not yet make any sense to them. Or they’ve changed their views since you met with them earlier at the start of the project.

It’s about being insatiably curious about the person, their colleagues and teams and how their roles play out in the wider organisation.

It’s about getting a feel for the measures and pressures they set or get set for those around them.

It’s about picking up on those moments of spontaneity that will make their day easier. Or the mood lighter. Or the conversation less strained.

The things that mean you’re also more likely to pick up the signals and client feedback on what’s working on the project overall. Or could be working better.

The opportunities your’re creating for the kind of relationship that will leave them becoming, over time, one of your raving fans.

Claire Barrett is a consultant who has more than 50,000 hours of consulting and being consulted to under her belt. She helps people and teams get strategy done.

Early in my consulting career (and long before one prompt could create an image like the one above), I was at a client getting introduced to their software engineering team.

We were walking around the office, an unmemorable grey sea of cubicles.

That is, it was unmemorable until we got to the engineering manager’s desk.

Above it were two A4 pages of printer paper sellotaped to the wall.

The first page was mostly blank, with a dark shape in the middle: the silhouette of a beetle.

Below it, the words, “What a bug looks like to you.”

Next to it was one of those highly magnified close-up photographs of an insect’s head. An extraterrestrial image: spikey antennae, bulbous alien-looking eyeballs, hairy fangs.

The caption for this second picture, “What a bug looks like to your user.”

This simple reminder that all the hard work going into creating something—in this case, a working set of code—could be let down by the impression it leaves with ultimately the most important stakeholder group. The users themselves.

The same can be said for consulting.

It’s too easy as a consultant to get wrapped up in the process

…of consulting.

Getting enough information into a proposal. Sweating over the timetable of client interviews. Working into the early hours to finish a report.

All at the risk of losing sight of the bigger picture, namely that of the client’s goals and priorities.

The occasional wrinkle in a consultant’s sales or delivery process, can look more like an insect close-up to the client.

And yet these wrinkles come from a place of good intention.

They may come from myths about consulting.

These myths are the stories we tell ourselves and each other. The expectations that have been set by client’s past experiences—either good or bad. The things that fit an image we may have of what a consultant does, or does not do.

Here are some of the more common ones.

Myth #1 | Proposals need to explain every detail of how to solve the client’s problem.

Why would the client invite you to help them in the first place? Let alone pay you to do so?

Sell your expertise, your track record—where you have one that’s relevant—and the value you’ll bring.

Myth #2 | Your client expects you to know more than you do.

Why?

It’s most likely you’re there to help: solve problems, answer questions, get things done.

Things where they lack time or skills to do in-house.

So when you don’t know something, say so.

Myth #3 | You need to provide lots of detail to show your client how hard you’ve worked.

Why isn’t “less is more” also true for consulting?

Clients are often time-poor or just stretched.

You’re there to help. So respect your audience by providing insights that are clear, brief and substantiated.

Details need to be there to back up your position, and the data and/or insights of client team members you’ve been working with.

However, a core consulting skill is to be able to distill insight from data and observations.

In a format that the client can consume.

And actually use.

Myth #4 | You don’t need to sweat the small stuff.

While the time and effort you’re putting in to preparing your recommendations and findings might overshadow the time you have left to spit and polish the outputs, remember the two A4 pages above the software engineer’s desk.

Your hard work—and that of your team and the client’s teams you’ve been working with—may not get the attention it deserves unless:

• spelling, grammar and fonts are correct

• ‘look and feel’ is consistent, professional

• references, sources, testimonials and quotes are appropriately attributed

• compliance and regulation e.g. confidentiality and privacy are respected

While there are variations between different countries, languages and audiences in terms of “what good looks like” in this space, it is safest to set the bar high.

It may only take one or two key decision-makers to see a couple of repeated spelling mistakes as much worse than a beetle in silhouette.

Claire Barrett is a consultant has spent more than 50,000 hours consulting or being consulted to. Contact her on Substack or X/Twitter at @ConsultGently if you want to find out more about what she does. Credit to www.pexels.com for the image.

It was early in my career. And even earlier in my consulting career.

We were working on a proposal.

A big opportunity. A likely shoe-in.

The client was a government department. The client’s buying process needed to be transparent and auditable. They favoured local players while wanting to open up opportunities for new entrants.

We were a local player and a market leader.

Our offering and its implementation services were well established. We were on every tenderer’s shortlist.

To say that the client’s request for proposal (RFP) was thorough would be an understatement.

Pages of seemingly repetitive questions about every technical and non-technical aspect of the project filled dozens of pages. Dense 10pt font. Paragraphs that started with things like “9.2.14 (d)”.

Suffice to say, the RFP was a hard read. Preparing a suitable response was going to need patience, focus and a lot of coffee.

Of course, part of me couldn’t help questioning the value of taxpayer spend on people’s time preparing such a long document. Let alone responding to it.

However, the voice of my inner cynic was balanced by advice from a family member.

She claimed decades of experience working on tenders for a defence contractor. Both supplying and being supplied to. She was someone I listened to. She said:

So, that’s what I did.

Section by section, line by line, I went through the RFP diligently, preparing our response. In the days long before generative AI assistance, it took many hours and most of a precious weekend to knock into shape.

By Monday morning it was ready for review.

It was due with the client by Tuesday 5 pm. Any later, our tender would be disqualified.

This was when proposals were still printed in hard copy, bound and couriered to clients’ offices. All this took time and needed factoring into the timings.

Along with the senior manager's review and feedback.

I left a copy of my masterpiece on his desk. Reviewing it was just one of many things on his to-do list for the day.

He didn’t get back to me until it was nearly time to pack up for the day. On the front page, he’d written three words.

“This is boring”

I was crushed.

And frustrated. I’d wasted most of my weekend on it and even bowed out of staying up with friends from out of town who’d turned up unexpectedly.

But most of all I felt that sinking sensation; that admission to yourself of something you’ve been ignoring.

He was right. My draft was mind-numbingly dull.

It was time to go back to basics.

All the detailed replies went into an appendix. They were still needed: to respect the RFP’s author/s; and to comply with all the client’s necessary procurement wants and needs.

However, all bets were off when it came to the introduction—the context, the real client need, and the true value of our offering.

It was the chance to get back to the fundamentals. And a second chance: to tap into the creative process. A process that had been stifled over the coffee-fuelled long hours of the previous week.

Since then, writing styles, and certainly writing platforms, have changed over time. I’ve certainly honed my own consulting writing process and expanded my kitbag of go-to’s and gotchas to watch out for.

But the top three fundamentals that I applied to those all-important introductory pages for the government proposal are just as relevant today.

1. Know your reader.

2. Make it flow.

3. Keep it genuine.

It was a long night.

By Tuesday morning I was able to take back a revised document that didn’t feel like it was written from inside a dark, grey cell block.

The words had lightness and movement. The revised structure meant it was easy for different readers to find their way around. Or dip in and out. Or just read the first page and get a great summary of everything else in the document.

My manager loved it. We won the work.

While his three-word feedback might be construed as harsh at the time, his frankness was the wake-up call I needed. A wake-up call for writing consulting content that I’ve been able to apply consistently ever since.

For that, I’m thankful.

If you enjoyed this post, keep an eye out next week for a breakdown of the three fundamentals mentioned above.

Claire Barrett consults to people and teams. To help them be and do their best. Follow her on Twitter/X at @ConsultGently and here on Substack.

Photograph credit to www.pexels.com.

Admit it. We all make odd decisions.

Decisions that might seem illogical or even just plain dumb to others.

Mine is paying for groceries.

I used to opt for whatever path looked like it would get me out of the supermarket the fastest.

As more and more self-scanning stations started replacing staffed checkouts, technology and convenience was my ‘go to’ for getting out with my pasta ingredients and toilet paper as soon as convenient.

And I do admire the technology.

I’m an IT professional, so have a pretty good idea about what will have gone on behind the scenes for a major supermarket chain to justify, plan, design, deliver and run all the systems that come together to allow me to:

• waft an item over a window and its details to come up in the screen in front of me

• have its weight recognised with enough sensitivity to pick up a tiny packet of coriander (cilantro for US readers!)

• show my loyalty card to the reader and get discounts

• point my smartphone at the pay terminal

…and leave.

Even when it felt like one in every four items I scanned became an SOS for help. A harried staff member with the Override Badge of Power had to come over and confirm I hadn’t chosen the wrong code for loose red onions…the tech behind the scenes fascinates me.

Now, I opt for the staffed checkout.

And that’s thanks to Pamela.

Pamela is a resourceful and fit 80-something year old. She’s known for her excellent lemon drizzle cake and tales of making it as a professional woman in media in 1960s London.

I bumped into her in front of the tinned tomatoes and we kept chatting as we headed to the end of the aisle. She firmly told me she was heading off to join the queue behind one of the tills.

“I don’t use those horrid scanning machines. If I did, the people employed on the checkouts will lose their jobs.

This is a small town, it could be hard for them to find another job here. It won’t be good for them, their families, or the community.”

She has a point.

Certainly a point that could be countered with many “Yes, but…” arguments by people working in organisations such as this big brand supermarket chain.

Arguments about the cost of employing people over automation. Arguments about reskilling workforces to keep pace with digitalisation. Arguments about how customers will get better speed and convenience.

The kinds of arguments managers and leaders in organisations of all shapes and sizes are making every day. Or inviting their teams to help them make.

What I love about The Pamela Logic is that she makes a small decision each time she visits the supermarket with thought to the societal impact of the community around her.

She has the ability to think big, consider the human impact, and then act small. It’s a microcosm of the types of decisions managers in organisations—and ourselves as consumers—can learn from.

There may be a time in the future where, with new information, and other perspectives, that I change my checkout choices.

However, for now, it’s a regular reminder of the bigger picture impact of smaller decisions. Something that helps in my consulting practice.

The right decision isn’t always obvious. But the process can be.

However, following the right process of getting to a decision can allow the best results to surface.

For leaders and teams at large and medium-sized organisations, this is often about getting the right diversity of people, experience and thinking into the room to come up with the best result.

For individuals looking to find more meaning in the more mundane aspects of their roles, it can be having someone to bounce ideas around with.

For consultants looking to bring a bit more humanity into their work—to make a lasting difference to their clients, and the people who work there—it can be getting some guidance and support.

Make decisions more human by getting help.

If you want to bring a bit more Pamela into your own team, or your own consulting practices, then please get in touch.

Photograph thanks to Pexels

It was a warm summer day. A day to be outside in shorts and sunglasses.

It wasn’t to be.

The meeting room was airless with too many chairs for the size of the table.

I’d just taken up a new role and had only met a few of the people before.

This was a fortnightly meeting I’d be part of going forward. A meeting where a bunch of smart people got together to discuss issues they were unable to resolve individually.

I was the only woman in the room.

Staying quiet as the newbie

Situation normal. But still five years away from feeling appropriate to bring that one up. Five years away from asking, with a smile on my face “How are we going to ensure we get as many different perspectives into the conversation?”

However, this was a time when I questioned less and accepted more.

My mind was taken up on the topics in hand.

The meeting was seeking for consensus on some long-standing deeply technical topics where people had evidently ended up having to pick sides.

One long-standing issue got debated for quite some time.

Two different groups of people.

Two equally valid sets of opinions.

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The conversation was heading towards stalemate

The more confident contributors to the conversation were getting stuck into the topic.

“The architecture assumes that it will be done like like this”

“It’ll take ages and cost a lot of money if we change it”

“Our customers need the system to solve the following problems”

“The software doesn’t work the way we want it to”

“We’ve always done it like this”

“Other organisations would never do it this way”

It was starting to look less like a collaborative problem-solving session..and more like an opportunity for a confident few to dominate the discussion. A showcase for their knowledge and opinions.

At one point, I asked a clarifying question.

“Is the issue to do with what the system is processing? Or how it’s processing it?”

There was silence.

I looked around the table. Most of the people were looking at their knees. As the pause got more uncomfortable, I felt my confidence draining…

Eventually one person smiled, looked up and said:

“We’re just baffled by the simplicity!”

Two others smiled. One of my friends in the room smothered a giggle.

How a simple question became a seminal moment

Many of the issues had been unresolved for months. They needed to come to a head in the next eight weeks.

As is often the case, the person who shines a light on a problem, gets to own solving it.

The rest was history

After that first meeting, I set up a process to get closure on the issues that the meeting had been set up to resolve.

In the next intense eight weeks, we culled the list down to a manageable number of key topics. We ran small, efficient workshops to articulate each problem with plenty of time for people to air their opinions, focus on the facts, and get behind the findings.

The fortnightly meeting went from grandstanding and unresolved conflict; to decision-making and good humour.

The process and outputs were held up as a benchmark for others.

Years later people involved would still comment positively and go back to the key documents.

Say it how it is and people will thank you for it

The longer term success came from a pragmatic approach that allowed everyone to have their say, in a safe space, knowing their views would be respected.

However, it was kicked off by challenging some core assumptions.

The lesson to take away, is that it’s rarely too soon—and never too late—to point out the obvious.

• That a less diverse group’s going to need work harder to get balance and perspective into its problem-solving

• That debate in the technical trenches has lost sight of the big picture

• That the emperor’s being scammed by the keepers of the royal wardrobe

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