Over the years, among all the other stuff that piles up in our heads, a handful or two of “nuggets of wisdom” that are easily applied to real life, and, by and large, help solve problems. One of the more influential books in my early to mid-career was Gerry Weinberg’s “Secrets of Consulting” - a rich and wonderful book that helped me become a more effective consultant and organizational coach. With apologies to Gerry for attempting to reduce the topic to a single page of post, here are a few tips that have helped me over the years with my client work. Most of them were passed on over the years - I apologize for not citing original sources.

• When in trouble, ask questions!

A couple of aspects to this - one is, asking questions can buy you time to think. The more important aspect is the power of good questions. Learning how to ask ‘powerful’ questions is one of the most critical consulting skills. See Eric Vogt’s “The Art and Architecture of Powerful Questions.”

• If you want to understand a dysfunctional system, follow the money!

A take-off from the police bromide about crime. I find IT funding is almost always ‘broken’ and drives dysfunctional behaviors. Fixing the funding model is always quite challenging, but simply surfacing how holes in IT funding lead to dysfunctionalities can be quite helpful.

• The greatest danger with communication is the illusion that its taken place.

I wish I could remember the name of my source for this - it was a data modeling guru, and I heard him quote this line about 20 years ago! You see the traps of miscommunication come up time and time again. The quote helps me remember to everything I can to validate what is being communicated - takes us back to the point about asking questions!

I’ll leave it at that for now - I will share a few additional tips in a future post.