Welcome to Consulting for Humans, a podcast all about life in consulting.

You're with Mike and Ian, and in each episode, we'll be shining a light on a new topic that gets to the heart of what makes consulting consultants happy and successful.

That's right here on the Consulting for Humans podcast.

It's our mission to add a little more humanity to the lives of consultants, and we'd love to bring the skills and perspectives of consulting to other human lives, too.

So if you're a consultant who's trying to be more of a human or a human who's trying to be more of a consultant, then we think you're just our kind of person.

Absolutely.

So, Mike, I'm looking forward to today's episode.

I think this is going to be loads of fun.

A little while ago, we talked about books that were influential to our generations, and we came up with Ken Blanchard's classic, the One Minute Manager.

We talked about that way back in episode 14, around the Baby boomer generation, and we thought that we might take this idea of the one minute theme and extend it to apply the one minute treatment to a subject near and dear to all consultants hearts and all consultants wallets.

Right?

Scope.

If I had a pound.

If I had a pound for everybody who's ever asked me a question, gee, and how do we think about Scope?

Right?

I wouldn't need to do a podcast.

Well, I being a horse person again, you know, we always talked about Scope creep.

Scope creep.

Scope creep.

And I said, you know, I've never seen Scope do anything but gallop.

True, true, true.

Well, if you've never read Ken Blanchard's One Minute Manager, if you want to just quickly hit pause and go and ask your favorite AI tool to re summarize.

Ken Blanchard, the One Minute Manager.

It'll take you not very many minutes at all.

Get Back to episode 14 if you want to quickly skip through that, if you're not sure.

And we're going to assume that you kind of get the idea of One Minute Manager, but we want to take the first of the One minute tools from that book, which was One Minute Goals.

Now, Mike, remind us quickly then, where had we got to in the book when the idea of One Minute Goals first came up?

Well, we had this person kind of new in their career who wants to be a really good manager.

And people point him to.

This person says, you know, that's a great example of a great manager.

So the person goes to visit the manager.

The manager says, oh, I've got like three things I do, but my People can tell you more about that.

And so lesson one is, you know, I do this so well, my folks could actually tell you about it.

Yeah.

And he starts with one minute goals.

And we're taking that template for one minute goals and applying it to Scope here today.

All right, so let's just review what Blanchard, using the voice of this guru manager as reported by a member of their staff, this is what they said went into a one minute goal or one minute goal setting conversation.

He said a one minute goal is useful because it's short, so 250 words max.

A one minute goal doesn't need to be exhaustive.

You're not there to write a list of everything that's expected to be done.

You're applying the 8020 rule and that it should say something about activity, like what needs to be done, what you want to see happening, and then also quality and some description of when it's due so that we've got an idea of urgency here.

It should describe what you, as the manager, would like to be happening.

It should also have a root cause either in it or inferred in it, a reason why is this action necessary.

And Blanchard tells us something that I've always believed that it makes situations easier, much easier to think about and insight, much easier to distill.

Blanchard says that a problem only exists if there's a difference between actual and desired situation, states of being.

So where are you now?

Where would you like to be?

That helps me understand what the problem is.

And that's pretty close to the ways that a lot of us as consultants define scope.

Right.

And that gets us to what it was about, the one minute goal that made our kind of ears prick up.

Why did we want to take this one minute goal thing and talk about it from the perspective of consulting Scope?

Well, first of all, even though the book and the idea is pretty long in the tooth now, the idea is Blanchard says that there are lots of managers who tend to be long winded or vague or over technical about the way that they set goals for their employees.

And he thought that it would help managers to have the discipline of being able to be not only more specific, but also more concise and more purposeful when it came to setting goals.

And Mike, I think exactly the same could be said about consultants.

It's very easy for us to get verbose and to get flowery in the way that we talk about goals.

And it's always great if we can maybe take some of this Blanchard kind of punchiness and also insight and convert that so we can take the same approach maybe to consulting scope, hence one minute scope.

Yeah, and in the same way, and I'm stepping back into my baby boomer self here, as Blanchard is writing this, he kind of describes managers as typically choosing between either being sort of a purely results oriented manager, what we would have called perhaps a hard ass back in the day, or a people oriented, what we might have called a candy ass manager back in the day.

But Blanchard rejected that as a false dichotomy.

You need, he said, to be both.

So we're perhaps looking for something analogous in a consultant and particularly in a project manager, if you will, not just looking for somebody who's client friendly.

Client friendly.

Consultants know a dozen ways to say yes or not just colleague friendly.

You know those inflexible consultants that can say, oh, but if Our document at 14 sub B, sub A, it says and always says no to the client to protect their team or here's a change order.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, let me write that up.

Let me process that.

Yeah, exactly here.

So we are thinking that, as we said in our initial ideas about consultants, that sometimes it's a little paradoxical.

These are false dichotomies.

Yes, you have to have some of both.

Well, Ian, what might be in a one minute scope, right.

We need to come back to the behavior.

I think there's some really interesting consequences of the idea there.

But let's start by one minuteizing consulting scope.

And in the framework that we have here, we think there are six slots, six short descriptions, maybe six single sentences that would make a good one minute definition of the scope of a consulting project.

Mike, I'm going to go first with slot one I think should be like you said, about the difference between the current and client's desired situation.

What's the difference between where you are now and where you'd like to get to?

So I took a very kind of generic consulting example into my head and I said, well, maybe it would say something like the XYZ company set a target three years ago of reaching 25% market share, but they're still only at half that level.

So we've said something about the business, about where they wanted to be and how they're only partway there.

That was slot number one.

Okay, so if we've got that as slot number one and we're trying to add onto it an apparent root cause or maybe an expression of uncertainty about the root cause, we might say in this example, the reason for this is the arrival in the market of two new low cost Competitors.

Ah, that's our hypothesis or that's what we know.

Or we might be in a situation where we'd say something like, and it's not clear whether this is due to a lack of consumer awareness of XYZ's offering or waning customer confidence following last year's big service availability problem.

I love it.

So we've talked about where they want to get to and we've talked about what they're root causes are or appear to be or that we're not sure about.

That means then that we've got something that we can express now about how our work is going to help to resolve that.

And we love the idea of smart objectives, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time based.

And we love the idea of using a really good active verb, not a wishy washy consulting verb.

So here's an objective sentence for this particular scope.

This project's objective is to analyze the true root cause and make an outline plan of action to regain market share in time for the annual budget round in September.

Now we've done a pretty good job there.

I think you could say that we're finished.

But I'm pretty sure we've only used part of our one minute so far.

Mike.

And there's more to say, I think to have a really good definition of scope that we can pass on to others.

Yeah.

And I think sometimes it's not always included in scopes, but we would say some statement about the key stakeholders who we would assume is typically the economic buyer who's writing the check for this project.

A win for them from this project because a win for the economic buyer is always a win for the team, a win for the company as well.

So we might say Tish, the senior vice president of marketing is the key client and a win for her would be to set plan for the next year with a clear focus and no distraction.

So what's in it for Tish?

Great.

So we've already started to personalize this.

I like how this is sounding, this mix of business oriented and personal that was slot number four.

I'd like to take us into slot number five because it's smart for us to express something about the nature of the deliverable, the thing that we're going to produce in amongst all of this intangibility.

So I might say something like this.

We will produce a final report of around 20 pages and a five page executive summary for Tish to share with the global leadership team in advance of the annual off site meeting.

Yeah, so we're Nearly home.

Mike, that's five slots out of six.

What's the gap that we still need to fill here?

Well, I think we got to have a statement of client benefit, so.

And by doing this, we'll help XYZ to plan corrective actions including marketing investments and or direct customer communications with confidence and precision.

So what's the bigger, greater good out of the work we have here?

Nice.

And if we look at that, it points all the way back to slot number one as well where we talked about the fundamental nature of the problem.

I'm going to try this, Mike.

I'm going to try this out.

I'm going to read our six slots aloud one after the other.

I'm going to set a stopwatch going and I'll see if We've achieved our one minute goal here.

Here we go.

3, 2, 1, go.

XYZ Company set a target three years ago of reaching 25% market share and is still only at half that level.

It's not clear whether this is due to lack of customer awareness of XYZ's offering or waning customer confidence following last year's big service availability problems.

So this project's objective is to analyze the true root cause and then make an outlined plan of action to regain market share in time for the annual budget round in September.

Slot 4.

Tish, the SVP of marketing, is the key client and a winner win for her would be to be allowed to set a plan for next year with a clear focus and no distractions.

We'll produce a final report of around 20 pages and a five page executive summary for Tish to share with the global leadership team in advance of the annual off site meeting.

By doing this, we will help XYZ to plan corrective actions including marketing investments and or direct customer communications with confidence and procedure.

Decision boom.

Wow.

One minute.

One minute exactly.

Which, which is perfect for a lot of reasons.

One, because if it had been 45 seconds, most consultants would do what say, oh my God, there's still white page space on that page.

I better fill it up.

No, no, no, don't do it.

It's not that it has to be exactly one minute, it's.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Well, Ian, I could, I can imagine one of our listeners out there going, well hold on, I'm listening to this and I'm going, is this the scope that we share with the client?

Is this in a proposal?

Is this the statement of work or is this kind of our scope limitation for our consulting team?

You know, and maybe you know, I'm hearing that win for Tish thing in there, right?

Would that be in there?

Well, it's a great question.

I think this can serve both purposes.

It's both an internal, that is to say a useful document directed towards us as consultants.

As a reminder, we'll talk about exactly how we can use it in a second.

And I think it's potentially certainly part of being able to develop a piece of business to build up to the point where we're making a proposal.

I don't think that it's enough on its own.

It does a great job of clarifying scope and benefit.

That's super important.

If I was going to also ask the same client now to buy this work from me, you'd need to add in some important things besides what we mentioned here.

You'd need to add in something about fees and timeline and resourcing.

You'd need to demonstrate that you've understood the stakeholder landscape, not just Tish, but add in some content there to please the other potential buyers.

You'd need to demonstrate some qualifications.

You'd need to counter the competition.

There's a whole bunch of other things strategically that would go into making this not only a scope definition, but something that would allow us to win for the client to buy.

That's all I would say for another day, but we could well come back to it.

And Mike, as you said, recognizing a win for one person for the economic buyer can be connected to a win for the company overall.

Right.

But there's more to it than that.

There is.

So even if it is a personal win for the economic buyer, it's a win for the company and it's still a win.

We can share as part of the selling process in conversation with the economic buyer and make similar kinds of insights ourselves about the other stakeholders and what their interests are and what's in it for them.

By the way, the example we've used here puts the client in as the third person.

So it's written as if it was from the partner to the consulting team.

But.

But you can certainly take that text.

We play a little bit with the pronouns and reorient it towards the client by saying you or XYZ or Tish or if we're having a conversation with another stakeholder, setting it directly to them.

So it should read if it's client oriented, as if the client is in the room with us.

And if you start to think it right like a client, then you're going to get over that one minute territory and then you're no longer.

You're no longer a Blanchard, you're something else.

Mike, there were two elements to this.

I think there was the discipline of being very simple and very direct and very purposeful in what you write and what you say.

And I think our six slots are covering that really nicely and we're hitting the 1 minute target.

But in Blanchard's book he was also talking about the behavior.

The kind of manager who's able to set something out in this very crisp format is also the kind of manager who's able to manage that dichotomy of not just being client oriented, not just being team oriented, but being able to manage a bit of both here.

Remind us then, what did Blanchard say in the context of leadership about what a good manager does?

Well, I think a couple things here, Ian.

One, the leader consultant project manager shows expectations rather than just tells them so joins in to the whole scope definition conversation here and allowing people joining in as well.

And it's not just something that we set it and forget it.

And boy, I've been on too many projects where this is the case.

The leader project manager consultant reviews and reminds everyone, including themselves, periodically and asks, is our behavior matching this goal?

If we do X, will the desired situation emerge?

Right.

Yeah.

So this is a bit of a North Star that we continue to calibrate.

We keep pulling our compasses back out here.

Right.

And the one minute consulting leader or consulting project manager doesn't just write down these six slots, they also embody them and make sure they're regularly there in the conversation.

I think that's going to be key.

Yeah, I think there are some really interesting attributes of a good, I would call them a good engagement leader, a good consulting or consultant project manager.

There are some good attributes for one of those that flow from this.

It's interesting to think about what would happen if you weren't there.

And if you're going to be able to successfully navigate a scope conversation for yourself, for your client and for your team, you should be able to think of it in this way.

Without you there, without this one minute scope definition and a constant conversation about it, without you there, the client's needs will end up not being met and or the consultants will just keep doing consulting activity over and over.

And that's quite a good North Star, to use your phrase, Mike, for what it means to manage a consulting project.

Managing the consulting project means making sure that the client has their needs met and the consulting team has direction and a structure and an endpoint for their activity.

And if Both of those things happen.

You can call it a win.

Like any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

Say trainee pilots.

Well, any project that ends with a happy client and, you know, a limited number of hours on the time card is potentially a great one.

Yeah.

You know, it's funny because I think probably most of us can think about situations where we would think about a project manager or a principal or somebody else say, you know, if it weren't for him or her, we could actually get something done.

Or this thing would not keep adding on every time we had a client review or team would perhaps be cohering a little bit around this and we wouldn't have all the stuff coming up.

So I love that.

I love that.

So, Ian, we talked about what should be in a one minute scope.

And any good scoping project is also about what shouldn't be in.

Any thoughts?

What shouldn't be in a one minute scope?

Well, like we said a moment ago, it doesn't have to have salesy stuff in it.

It fulfills a purpose that's part of a sales conversation.

But it doesn't need to have sales.

I sometimes read stuff that consultants write about their own work and it sounds like they're consistently kind of puffing up their value.

And I've heard consultants say this sometimes.

Oh, we need to sell the value of the firm every time.

You don't need to sell the value of the firm.

You need to demonstrate that you understand the value to their client and solve their problem.

So this is really the problem solving part of that kind of conversation.

We don't need all the salesy stuff.

We certainly don't need jargon about what we do.

And that takes me to the other thing that there shouldn't be in a one minute scope definition.

There should not be lots of consulting activity.

In the six slots that we had earlier on, we had one active verb saying what the consulting project was going to do and one sentence about deliverables.

And no stuff about synergizing, leveraging fancy jargon about activity, which is normally us dressing up relatively simple things like discovering data and then writing the answers on a PowerPoint slide.

We should avoid putting any fancy consulting activity in there unless we know for sure that that represents uniquely something that the client really, really cares about.

And even then, I'm cautious about overusing activity in our one minute scope here.

Nice, nice.

And I think about 99 times out of 100 when I read stuff like that, and I've done the same thing.

I'm guilty on the other End if you go to other companies, other competitors, websites, proposals, sales pitches, it's all got the same jargon in, which means it's all indistinguishable.

Yeah, exactly.

So here's something for the listeners.

If you've enjoyed this conversation so far about the six slots and the one minute consulting scope, send us an email and we'll send you a template.

Write to us at consultingforhumans31-consulting.com Ask us for the template and we'll happily send you a template and we'll be super happy to hear from you.

By all means, drop in a question or a bit of feedback for us as well.

But if you'd like a template that you can start using next week on your consulting scope challenges, then email us and we'd be really glad to help.

Ian.

Let's think about other ways we might use this though.

Well, if I've got that nice one minute definition of scope, of course, Mike, I'm going to use it as part of my business development conversations like we just described.

I think the main thing that I'd use it for is as a review point every time you sit down, either sitting down as a consulting team or sitting down in an update with your client, anytime we need to remind ourselves about scope, I, I'd go and look for this and I'd make sure we look at it and speak it out loud and review it.

My first ever boss in consulting, a guy called Paul, was a great boss and one of the things that he used to do was he always walked into a meeting, a face to face meeting of course, with us with his briefcase, and he would take out of his briefcase this very kind of yellow dog eared coffee stained paper copy of the proposal with the client's signature on it.

And he would kind of smooth it out and flatten it on the table in front of him.

Sometimes he would read it aloud from the first couple of paragraphs, sometimes he wouldn't even do that.

He'd just make this little bit of theater to say, once upon a time, not many months ago, we offered to take the client's money in return for doing something.

Here's what we said we were going to do and why it's important.

And it was a really great anchor for us because, you know, excitable young consultants can easily lose track of that stuff.

It's so funny because a world away in time and geography, my first consulting boss, Scott, would say, remember, read the proposal again this week.

And that was his kind of sign on or sign off to basically every team call we ever had.

Now, even better.

I like a little bit of that theater, but it's so good.

Yeah.

Well, what about if perhaps the team or some of the team members work is a little bit out of control?

What do you think?

I think it's a really important moment, this danger that we have of analysis paralysis when we all get overexcited.

If I notice that I'm maybe running out of control a little bit and using billable hours to do stuff, or if I see that my colleagues are running out of control a little bit and using billable hours to do stuff that seems to have no end, I might go back and use the scope definition, my one minute scope, as the starting point for a conversation and say, look, of the things that we're working on today, which of them is really contributing towards this scope, towards solving this problem?

And if I wanted to be really tough, I'd flip it around and I'd phrase it as a negative.

So you're doing X or you're doing Y.

How about think about this?

If we stopped doing X right now, would that make any difference at all to our progress towards solving the client's original problem?

And I can think of plenty of projects that I've worked on where the answer to that question would have been actually, no.

So we like the idea of using it as part of the setup conversation for the project.

We love the idea of using it as a touch point, as a review, as a way of getting hold of our own tendency to let scope run out of control.

What about when clients are the ones who are pushing for scope to run a little bit out of control?

Yeah.

And this again, I think this is a great example and we kind of alluded to it a little bit earlier.

We don't want to be the kind of project manager that says, let me start by looking anxiously at the work plan and asking myself, how, how, how are we going to get this in?

How are we going to get this in?

Like, you know, I, I've got to say, yes, but how am I going to do that?

So sorry, team, forget it.

I also don't want to be the kind of project manager that says, again, item 14, subparagraph 3, item number 2 specifically stated that with out regard to anything that's happened or what's going on with this client.

No, no, no, no, here's the contract.

But I would rather take out the one minute scope, have a look at that and ask the client why.

So given that this is what we're trying to do here?

Why are you asking for that extra here?

Has the definition of the problem fundamentally changed?

Has something else arisen?

Did we underestimate the extent the deliverables are necessary to solve the problem?

Now, I'm not going to ask the client necessarily all of those, but I am going to ask them why so that I can understand what's their motivation and then bring that back to how does that contribute to what we're doing?

And a lot of times the answer is I found that it's nice to have or I'm afraid I don't know what and plus two levels up is going to want.

So I want to have some extra to take to them.

There are a lot of things we can do besides just saying yes and by doing that and asking why and how they benefit, it gives us that opportunity to say ah, well given that we're going to be doing that and it does add this additional value and perhaps is outside of that, then we can easily figure out the time and cost nice that it to that value and have a very different conversation that works for everybody.

Love it.

Absolutely love it.

By the way, Mike, we've leapt a couple of generations here.

We've made a connection between Ken Blanchard back in the what, 60s and 70s and Simon Sinek and start with why as recently as the 90s or the noughties.

Excellent work.

I think there's a final really interesting way to apply the 1 minute scope and I might be using it if I'm the project manager, as a trigger for either individual performance goal setting with the team or even performance feedback for the team.

I can remember lots of times anecdotally to myself saying, gee, the people that I've appreciated working with, who've done a great job, who are making rapid progress as professionals, are the ones who understand context.

And I think our One Minute Scope tool here all about understanding context.

So as a way to start a conversation about what are your performance goals for this project or a way to have a conversation to say how has your great performance impacted the project and what do you want to keep doing?

I think this could be a useful starting point as well.

What do you think?

Well, I love that because it brings to me two points.

One, the idea that doing this exercise not only kind of keeps us on track and avoids scope problem, it helps us develop our people because we're reminding them about SCOPE and how their work is attached to the project.

And this idea is we're doing performance reviews about this project.

In this situation, at a time when I have teachable learnable moments.

Now, I remember working with a training class and it's in December, and I saw one member who was a little bit more senior in this class at working through every break, working through lunch, and I finally walked over and said, gosh, you know, have you got a big project you're in the middle of, in the midst of this, you know?

And he said, no, actually, I'm working on my team's reviews.

And I said, wow, that's awesome.

I love seeing somebody who really takes this review process seriously because we don't always.

And he said, yeah, you know, I put them off all year and I've got, they're due next week.

And so I'm going back through every project that I've run this year to write up something about each person.

And I thought, no, no, no, you don't remember.

They can't learn anything.

So I love this, I love this use.

Thank you.

The point about remembering is really good.

Like it's super easy to write any old nonsense about what you think somebody might have done 11 months ago, but putting it into context forces you to activate your memory of what the situation really was.

I love it.

Ah, right.

So, Mike, our One Minute Scope, having begun with an idea to flex something from Ken Blanchard's book a few decades ago, has turned into something really useful.

Right?

We've got One Minute Scope that's useful for all kinds of different consulting situations.

Speaking of which, this all brings us now to our latest Luminaries episode, the companion episode for this Consulting for Humans episode.

We're going to be talking with our Luminaries about what questions leaders and consulting project managers can ask in order to really explore Scope.

The questions that they can ask to make sure that they're equipped to give their teams and their clients an excellent version of the 1 minute scope treatment.

So if you would like to join us for that step back kind of conversation.

What are the things I need to explore?

What are the things that I need to be curious about in order to do a great job with defining Scope?

Join us on the Luminaries.

The seven day trial of Luminaries Tier is is waiting for you.

I think you're going to love it.

Absolutely.

And if there's anything else in consulting that you'd like to hear us give the one Minute treatment to?

Who knows, maybe one minute kickoffs, one minute progress updates.

You tell us, just let us know.

We'd love to hear from you.

And until then, have a great week defining your scope for your clients and we'll be back with you next time on the Consulting for Humans podcast.

SA.