Being seen as an expert is sometimes a problem, as everyone expects you to have all the answers.
Nobody has all the answers, and they are usually uncovered only by the judicious use of questions.
As an outsider to businesses I work with, I come in with some level of anticipated expertise, otherwise why would I have been hired? It is sometimes initially a bit disconcerting for employees and other stakeholders to be quizzed by a so called expert, called in to do a commercial diagnosis. However, the analogy to a doctor doing a diagnosis usually works to turn that around.
Asking questions does two things:
- It leads to answers that will be essential to the diagnosis, and always leads to other questions you may not have considered that uncover the deeper realities rather than the superficial perception.
- It acknowledges the value of the specific expertise of those being questioned. Everyone likes to be seen as an expert, or at least having some specialised knowledge valuable to someone else.
Many years ago I came across what Guru Peter Drucker called his ‘5 questions’ critical to diagnosing performance.
- What is your mission?
- Who is your customer?
- What does your customer value?
- What are your results?
- What are your plans?
I use these 5 questions all the time as a foundation of any diagnosis I do. Not always in order, rarely asked the same way twice, but getting at the answers is the core task of the commercial diagnostician.
It goes to another of Drucker’s pithy statements , ‘The key value of a consultant was not to have the right answers, but to ask the right questions’
Most of those I work with are smart enough to recognise when you are on to something, and then help you figure out the right solution for them, in their circumstances.
No consultant will ever know as much about the detail of a business as those who work inside it every day. It therefore makes little sense to assume as an outsider that you do. However, what an outsider does have is a wider view of the context of the business, an unencumbered sense of what is important and what is not, the location and nature of sacred cows, unstated behaviour drivers, and the informal networks at play among every group of humans.
Being an outsider allows you to ask seemingly innocent questions that challenge the status quo, and the conventional wisdoms that exist.
These are the ones that lead to the breakthrough thinking that enables change.
