Welcome, Luminaries.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you as well for wanting to dig deeper with us as we make our latest exploration this week of what it takes to be a perfect consultant.

So, Mike, building on what we did in the main episode here, our big question is, is the best consultant one who's hard working or one who's lazy?

That's what we're thinking about this time.

Wow, that's just a little bit different.

Our previous episodes, we chose pairs of traits that at least seem like they both are valuable.

There's nothing inherently wrong with being creative or being confident or seeking certainty.

But the word lazy, I'm trying to remember, has that ever been used as a compliment in my days in consulting here?

Yeah, not to me.

So this pairing might be a little bit controversial here.

So what do you think?

Is there room for laziness in consulting?

Could it ever be a mistake to work hard?

We're going to get into it, Mike.

This week, along with our excellent Luminary supporters, we're going to look at the virtue of being hardworking and discover that some of the most valuable kinds of hard work might be the work that we do when we're not on the clock for clients.

I think we're going to talk about dynamos and cruisers and losers.

We're going to uncover how evolution has rewarded survival of the laziest, or so it seems.

Nice.

I've always liked Charles Darwin.

Yeah.

We're going to look at ways of being creatively lazy by bringing our clients into the picture.

Right.

And then finally we.

We are going to delve into the dark side of having a hard working ethos when the get it done mentality turns into do yourself in.

Ooh, I resemble that remark.

Yeah, there's going to be some light and shade, I think.

Mike, first of all, let's dig into our first topic.

Let's talk about the importance of being hardworking.

So let's get it out of the way.

We do need to be hard working, at least in many key moments of our consulting careers.

I mean, let's face it, not many people leave a job in industry or government and say, I think I'll go sign on with a consulting company because I want to work fewer hours.

No, indeed.

Now, there's already a kind of note of cynicism behind that, but we're going to get into the dark side of the wish to work longer hours if it really exists later on, Mike.

But let's just keep going with this thought here.

Hard work might be necessary, might even be fulfilling.

Right, Yeah, I think so, absolutely.

Hardworking consulting is crucial for meeting tight deadlines, meeting client expectations, and therefore ultimately for getting paid.

Now, I've got a caveat here, right?

Provided that these deadlines and expectations are tied to creating value for clients, not these arbitrary rush deadlines that they or we sometimes set for ourselves.

Now, I think, at least in my case, and I know in your case, and I guess in most people's case, this comes from an honorable place, right?

This all originates in wanting to get things done for our clients.

Feeling maybe the need to reassure clients who might be worried about the value for money of hiring smart people to do intangible work.

And let's go back to the reason why we took the job in the first place.

I think, I presume, I guess that we all got into this because we thought the work in consulting would be interesting and important and absorbing and somehow consequential.

And for all of those reasons, from time to time, we might want to work hard.

And I think that's okay.

And I think it's part of the landscape of the job.

I think you're right, Ian.

And just in breaking it down to fundamental marketing terms, being seen as hardworking can be a differentiator, demonstrating our commitment, right?

So we're not going to start out by lampooning the desire to hard to have hard work.

I think that's perfectly okay.

We keep hinting at the dark side and we're going to get to the dark side of it later on.

But Mike, in the last luminary show, you were talking about the author, Adam Grant, and how he points out the virtue of being a little bit skeptical about your conclusions.

And at the very.

I think he's talking about a kind of intellectually hard working spirit being a little bit restless to check and make sure that our assumptions and our findings all stack up.

And I think that's one kind of hard workingness where our clients absolutely will thank us for that.

They will not thank us for being lazy about assumptions and fact checking, right?

No, absolutely not.

Or coming up with conclusions that have basically nothing to do with them.

The problem that they ask us to go after we're, oh my gosh, I did I remember to cut and paste that client's name for the old client's name.

No.

Same report, different client.

No, no.

But I do think, Ian, interestingly, and this I think gets into this idea that how these are tied together a little bit, that this assumption checking, fact checking, tailoring conclusions to specific client situations, all of this thinking plays into being A lazy consultant if we want to save a lot of work and rework and get better results faster.

All things that are good.

Lazy consultant once then doing all that understanding and checking assumptions ours of the clients planning based on the insights gained checking and tailoring our conclusions as Grant suggests, are great ways to be successfully lazy.

Ah, so our love affair, our very brief love affair with being hardworking has hit a snag.

It turns out that actually having a sort of critical attitude and a thoughtful attitude to the things that you do eventually could make us choose to do less.

That sounds a bit like that old cliche idea of working smarter, not harder.

And we might have to come back to that.

Not everything has a shortcut.

But I like the idea that we should be on the lookout for some if they're there.

And Mike, we've talked here so far about working for clients, but as I was digging around this and thinking about it and going back into one or two of my favorite sources, it seemed to me that even when we're off the clock, when you might think that a consultant puts their feet up and kicks back and pulls a martini and opens a book, I think at that time having the attitude to direct that time towards something productive is a kind of hard work that's super valuable in consulting.

To stay up to date with what's happening in the industry.

Investing time in your own development.

One of our favorite authors that we've already mentioned here is David Meister.

And in one of David Meister's really, really great books called True Professionalism, he has this great quote about being diligent with your non billable time.

He says what you do with your billable time determines your current income.

But what you do with your non billable time determines your future.

So working hard today feeds you for today.

Working hard with your non billable time feeds you for tomorrow and next quarter and next year.

Nice.

And Mike, speaking of Maester, he also comes up with some categories that we've already talked about here on the show.

He has this definition of three consulting mindsets, Dynamos, cruisers, and losers.

And his description of the Dynamo type tells us something, I think about what the good kind of hard work looks like, what positive and purposeful hard work looks like.

And again, he's talking here mostly about work that takes place away from paid client projects.

He says this about Dynamos.

He says they are always working to learn something new and continually adding to their skills and knowledge.

They are actively building their practice in new and challenging areas.

Dynamos, he says, are vigorous in finding Ways to get out of the flow of repetitive work.

And Mike, maybe that's another little bit of the psychology of why consultants can sometimes seem a little bit addicted to hard work and high pace and long hours.

Hours.

Because we're sort of intellectually restless.

And I certainly want to work with at least a couple of people nearby who have that kind of, let's get out of the repetitious flow, let's get into new areas.

That sounds like those would be fun teammates to have.

Yeah, absolutely.

There was nothing that I dreaded a little bit more than somebody who came in with a 15 pound methodology handbook to slap it on and go, okay, this is exactly what we're doing and how we're doing it.

And I remember working with clients that had that same opinion, even though they were in industries that some people would have thought of as, gee, Nothing changes for 10 years.

Realize that that's not always the case.

And some people might say, now, never the case.

So I remember working with one client that seemed to push a lot more work than they needed to.

And I finally went to him and said, boy, it seems like you're stirring up chaos fairly routinely around here.

And he said, oh, we are intentionally.

It's intentionally randomly introduced.

And I was thinking, what are you thinking about?

And that was exactly their idea, saying, we see big shocks coming in the future.

We don't know what they are yet, but we know they're coming.

So we like to introduce small crises just to keep everybody awake and not working harder and harder and digging deeper and deeper into the same path we're always on.

Big wake up call for me.

I love that one.

That kind of preceded my introduction to scenario planning and some of that.

So very nice.

Yeah, fantastic.

So being around sparky people who are restless to find new things and inject a bit of pace and adrenaline, that's appealing.

I think sometimes I'm glad to be working alongside people who are willing to show me that we're not alone and are willing to stick out the tough times as well as the good times.

Right?

Yeah, yeah.

You know, it's interesting because I remember one time was faced with a situation.

I hadn't really thought about this as being lazy or hardworking, but there was a big, exciting global project going to be going to a lot of neat places, dealing with a lot of new ideas, cool people, great food, great scenery, and one really tough project in a ditch somewhere like Cleveland or Des Moines.

Lovely, but in Des Moines.

Not demeaning you here, but the idea was, oh, that's going to be a grind.

There's going to get this thing out, everything.

This other one is new and exciting and everything.

And I was headed for the first one, got the call about the second one.

And I got a piece of really good advice in this decision making here.

A colleague who I really valued said people probably won't remember what you do in Cleveland.

I'm thinking, boy, there's a little glory in the other one too.

But they will remember that you were willing to go and grab the plow.

You were willing to go do that hard work without the glory, without the spotlight, because it had to be done for the betterment of the firm.

And that part was.

I missed the other project.

But that part turned out to be true.

You know, taking one from the team every once in a while, even when it is just pure old straightforward hard work.

Good thing.

Good for you.

And I'm sure your reward came later, right?

But maybe somewhere other than Cleveland.

Yeah.

Now, let's say that we've done an okay job extolling the virtues of hard work.

I think that's great.

Let's get into the potentially controversial stuff here.

Let's look at laziness, how it could help us as individuals and firms to embrace the idea of laziness.

Ian, you really intrigued me when you mentioned that Charles Darwin might even put a vote in for laziness here or that evolution somehow played into that.

I want to hear a little bit more about that.

Well, we found this article on LinkedIn by a LinkedIn called Anaruda Bhaskar.

Hello, Aniruddha, if you're listening, about the benefits of being lazy.

And he's picked up on some writings about evolutionary biology and particularly the idea of survival of the Idolist, which I took a bit of a liking to.

It postulates that in evolutionary biology, particularly the evolution of humans, we risk making ourselves weaker if we work too hard and that lazier creatures overall have an evolutionary advantage.

And that kind of flies in the face of the mental model that you might have.

Survival of the fittest means the most willing to spend energy is the one that makes it through the evolutionary cascade.

But actually evolution favors the ones who can use the resources around them more efficiently than their competitors.

So who knew?

Mike?

Maybe Darwinism argues in favor of Netflix and Chill.

Who knew?

Now, I guess there's still this natural edge of competitiveness that makes us anxious and drives us all to go to the gym when we think that we're flagging behind our rivals, that makes us put in those extra hours at work.

But Maybe that comes from another place.

Maybe that's not baked in by evolution.

Maybe that comes from somewhere else.

We'll have to come to that later.

Meanwhile, in the Show Notes, we've got a link to Aniruddha's excellent article and we've got an interesting piece about some of the original research that was written about in the Washington Post not long ago.

So we'll post that there for you as well.

And Mike, just to wrap up this evolutionary thing, clearly the humans who invented the plow and the printing press and the washing machine and the podcast were at least a little bit driven by laziness.

At least that's what the theory of idleness suggests anyway.

Nice.

Well, I remember another great quote, I think misattributed to Bill Gates that said, when there's a tough job to be done, it's best to look for the laziest workers because they'll find the easiest way to get it done.

And in consulting, we take on some tough jobs, right?

Yeah, I think we do.

I wonder though, why then aren't we more lazy if there's a bit of evolutionary pressure on us?

And by the way, if we keep selling our services to clients on the basis that will make our clients lives easier and improve their processes and their efficiency and their effectiveness, are we as good at making ourselves efficient and being a little bit lazy as we'd like to make our clients more efficient?

If we saw the value of what we can do with a bit of laziness, maybe we'd be a little better at exploiting it.

And Mike, when we dug into this, there were a couple of different particular kind of strands of judicious or creative laziness that we both picked up on.

As we said in the main episode, Mike, proceduralizing and automating repetitive tasks is a potentially very helpful kind of laziness, even though, as we said, not many firms are actually all that good at it.

Yeah, but there is another kind of laziness that consultants can exploit much more than they often do.

A lazy consultant encourages clients to take ownership of their challenges and solutions.

This, if you will, client led consultant facilitated approach means that we don't take on the burden of diagnosing recommended planning and executing every single thing without a lot of involvement on the part of the client.

And lots of consultants that we've known are really good at this.

They actively listen, they probe deeper, they facilitate rather than dictate.

Which is, I'm not saying that these consultants don't bring their content to the table as well.

This is not just a content versus process consulting argument, but it does mean sometimes, perhaps, fewer billable hours, but more value by involving the client in problem definition, in options and implementable solutions, getting them to take more ownership.

But who knows?

Maybe doing that means even more billable hours, more hours valued by the client because their fingerprints are all over it.

Right?

And I think if we all treated clients as a free intellectual resource, not just a free pair of arms and legs, but a free intellectual resource, we really ought then to be better at using and evolving them.

But somehow, sometimes we're not.

And I was thinking about this.

I'm wondering, what is it that stops us from applying this external laziness, from bringing clients into more of our work process and leveraging all the things that they know?

I don't know, Mike.

Maybe it's pride as consultants.

Maybe it's impatience that we want to get on and do our thing quickly and clients can't keep up.

Maybe it's a little bit of anxiety that we feel that we have the need to have our hands on the levers and to be doing the stuff in order to keep convincing the client that our work has value.

Who knows?

And that's a question that I think I should be asking myself once or twice more often than I do now.

If we're going to hold a mirror up to ourselves, then, Mike, maybe the time has come to talk about the dark side of being hardworking.

We talked earlier about the professional importance of being able to meet deadlines.

But what if they're arbitrary rush deadlines that we've unnecessarily set for ourselves?

Under promising and over delivering, or over promising and under delivering?

Which way do we want to go here?

Because I certainly have gotten sucked into a vortex of time by seniors doing that over promise, which led us to under deliver here.

So I find sometimes clients do the same thing as well.

So the answer to me is, when can you have that done?

Should be when do you need it, why?

And what are you going to do with it when I give it to you on that day?

Right.

Rather than going into adrenaline shock and going, the client wants it how?

That's almost always the wrong question.

Like you say, Mike, much better if we ask why.

Now, Mike, you mentioned overpromise.

I don't think the problem that we have is with over promising and under delivery.

Maybe the problem is with over promising and only just delivery, like just about squeaking over the finish line.

And I don't know, I've seen this pattern of consultants getting addicted to the adrenaline Rush.

And this comes in a couple of parts.

The first part comes in maybe at the very beginning of a project or maybe even when we're selling a project.

We feel necessary to amplify what my old friend Jeremy calls fud, Fear, uncertainty and doubt.

We have to generate the impetus for the project by getting everybody up to some kind of pitch of anxiety about we need to get it done and it's critical and we need to get it done now.

And that partly was about intensifying the problem so that motivates the sale.

But we come a little bit addicted to the idea that everything that we do is super urgent and is the house is on fire.

And when we continually solve crisis by over promising and only just delivering each time we get to pull the project back from the brink.

We then think to ourselves, you know, thank God I was here to rescue it.

That was nearly a disaster.

Wasn't that fun?

Yeah, absolutely.

A little bit like, you know, skydiving with a partly ripped parachute.

We get to the ground and think, oh my God, we just made it.

Oh, so let's do that again.

Yeah, there's definitely a dopamine release.

You know, the reward centers really light up when we're right outside that comfort zone.

But we made it.

I love it.

I ran into this and I'm thinking back to how you would get a bunch of us so hopped up, all of us on our own version of this and a colleague of mine who was wonderful, who saved us a few times.

Carol would start every day going up to in our war room in the clients offices where we all worked.

She would go up to that whiteboard and write a time on there.

And the first couple of days we said, and we finally realized, and Carol's pretty clear about that's the time we're quitting tonight.

And it was tonight, so it was never this afternoon.

It was never early evening.

She was like, we're not working till dawn every day here.

And this was the old thing.

And it was absolutely necessary as we were people who were working in Germany at the client's office were working away and I think it's 10 o'clock at night or something.

And the work police, or what amounted to the work police came by and threw us out and said, gets a lot of work later than this.

And we thought what a civilized thing to do.

But we couldn't stop ourselves.

So, you know, thank goodness for Carol.

Thank goodness for work police.

Maybe we need to be our own work police.

I don't know.

Have you run into this Ian you know, the way we get so completely hopped up.

Absolutely.

And we think, oh, what a civilized working environment.

They're throwing us out at 10:00.

And guess what we do?

We go back to the hotel and we go find the room.

We say, okay, unroll that flip chart one more time.

Let's keep at it.

Open up your laptop again.

Partly there's a little bit of vanity there.

We think what I'm doing is super urgent.

Partly it's a little bit of this addiction to the idea that we're working at a fast pace.

I had a friend who was managing a project and he was famous for being like Tigger.

He was just one of those super energetic, super high, high adrenaline consultants.

And one of the juniors who worked with him told the story of heading out to a client site somewhere, landing at an airport late at night.

Last flight of the day.

It's dark, the airport's almost empty.

And the project manager puts the bags on a little luggage car and starts running across the empty airport concourse towards where the taxi stand is.

And the analyst is kind of jogging along, trying to keep up.

He says, what?

Why are we running?

Why are we running?

It's like 11:30pm and the guy looks, races.

I don't know, I just like running.

I think he had exactly the same thing.

And sometimes it was charming, and for clients, sometimes it was super appreciated.

But if you're all but done in and it's 11:30 and you're running across the airport concourse, you've also got to ask the question, dude, why don't you just calm down for a second?

Now, Mike, that an interesting thought at play here.

And the working late into the night in the office story reminds me of the idea of Parkinson's Law, which maybe some of the listeners have heard about, maybe some of them haven't.

Parkinson's Law states that work expands so as to fill the time available for it.

People quote this the whole time, not always with Parkinson's name, but it was actually originally written about as a joke.

It was written by a British author called Cyril Northcut Parkinson, a mid to late 20th century writer, historian and satirist.

He intended this thing as a joke about the dumb behavior of bureaucracies, especially the British civil service.

But like most great jokes, it has a strong smell of truth about it.

And Mike, what's bizarre is that making this connection to Parkinson makes us stumble across a connection to something that you and I were doing in podcast world until only very recently.

Right?

Yeah, it's great.

And it's only Taken us three episodes like Three Degrees of Separation here to emerge between the world of this podcast, Consulting for Humans, and our previous podcast venture, the Lovers hole, a Patrick O'Brien podcast about O'Brien's Aubrey Matron books and the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars.

Parkinson himself wrote in that genre, and he wrote serious history books about that era, and he even wrote a biography about the fictional character Horatio Hornblower.

So, and I think we have to say, if you're a former Lovers Hole listener who's joined us for a bit of consulting with humans, welcome.

We know who you are, and thanks for your emails and checking in with us.

Fantastic.

And if you're a Consulting for Humans listener and you've got no idea what we're talking about, then check out the Lovers Hole.

Anyhow, Mike, back to 21st century consulting.

Let's start to draw some of the strands together here.

Mike, we're here today talking about the relative benefits of being lazy versus being hard working.

And one of the things that I think we've wrestled with is that lazy is pretty definitely an insult or a pejorative word.

Well, I think you're right, Ian.

You know, I think we've got to find something, a different word or a different phrase, and maybe your judicious laziness was one of them.

But, you know, I still think that anything that has lazy In IT, probably 99% of the consultants out there would consider that an insult.

So maybe, I don't know, listeners, what's a better term for this?

So, Mike, we like to avoid the pointless, meaningless overwork that we were just talking about, the dopamine rush.

We need to think as well about the cost of being completely selective and completely lazy.

There is merit and being willing to stick out something.

Sometimes we do have to work a little bit longer, either to get the commercial reward or to get the personal reward that comes with a profession.

But we still need to know that not everything is an emergency.

Right?

Yeah.

Not everything is an emergency.

Even though we're drawn to make it one.

Sometimes seeing ourselves as the hero of our own stories and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, getting those, only doing our best work, we think when we can get that fight or flight thing kicked in and get that adrenaline flowing, I think we got to wean ourselves away from that and realize that we do our best work with some really nice judicious laziness baked in and.

With our brains switched on as well.

Yes.

And Mike, right at the beginning of the sequence of four, we were talking about where do you get the perfect consultant from.

And what does that mean for how you develop in your career?

What does that mean for how we hire as well?

And I've been thinking about this about careers and recruitment.

It's probably true that it's a little bit too easy, especially early in the career, to promote people for just being.

Apparently you're superficially hardworking and it's probably harmful actually to get to a point in your firm or in your team where the consultants are competing with each other simply over who is seen to have the longest working hours.

And when it comes to hiring, maybe the same thing is true.

Maybe being hard working is something that's easy to look for and to select for in a resume or in an interview.

It's easy to see a history of strenuous achievement and top grades at school and all the internships and all of the other pieces of work experience.

But I think it might be harder to spot somebody's ability to be judiciously lazy.

What do you think?

It's interesting.

I was thinking back on that.

I was thinking, did I think about this?

And I don't think I really did think about it in terms of hardworking versus lazy.

I looked at what people did and I looked at accomplishments and connections and that.

But I do remember one big proxy for me.

And now that we've been talking about this, it seems like perhaps it's a proxy that applies here is I also look for people who by virtue of our conversation, by virtue of their resumes, appear to, if you will, have a life and not just be 24 7, 365 about the business.

This was, I think I've talked in another episode about the firm that wouldn't hire me because I was married.

There was clearly an expectation of you're not going to have a life.

And I think this was part of my way of saying I want people who are going to have a life because they're going to at some point go home with good reason and they're going to want to get the key stuff done and I think perhaps have other things that satisfy the need that adrenaline hit might do for us.

Yeah, it's going to be better for them.

It's going to be better for the firm as well.

Right.

And Mike, I just want to remind myself as well about that David Meister point about being diligent with the way that you invest your off the clock time and maybe to be really simplistic about it.

We're looking for consultants who will be instinctively hard working when they're off the clock because that feeds our success for next year.

But they'll be looking for ways to be a little bit judiciously lazy when they're on the clock on client work because that's when efficiency can really pay off.

Now I guess that could be true.

If it is, we should take care not to tell any clients that we think that.

But consultants should be lazy, right?

Although it might be interesting, the misattributed quote from Bill Gates.

Maybe we've got some clients that actually think that way.

Yeah, could be.

So tell me, what have you noticed that's holding people back from being able to be somehow a perfect consultant?

What's one of your takeaways here?

It's interesting we haven't mentioned this, but I think we've talked around it.

Stephen Covey, back in the days of the seven habits of highly effective people had great little tidbits that I think were so good.

One of them was begin with the end in mind, which he married with keep the main thing the main thing.

And I think these are both bedrocks of great consulting and bedrocks of lazy consulting, of avoiding unnecessary work, of staying focused, staying on goal oriented behavior.

Not just hours.

So I think I've started way too many projects with everyone in a room.

All these detailed methodologies, really too much research.

And we one day talk about knowledge management systems, having pulled all of this stuff together and we used to joke with each other saying, okay, get ready, we're about to darken the sky with planes and meaning there's going to be so much activity that we're not going to be able to see the sun.

And that's not what we're going for here.

That work that it takes to understand the real issues, to define the real problem, opportunity assumptions from the consultants and the clients that I think is it.

I don't want to be in the place of being so rushed, so tired, trying to close those deadlines and being burdened by either unnecessary work redos that could have been avoided upfront by more meaningful interaction with the client so that all of that comes back to me as things I want to have written on the inside of my wrist to replace all my notes that I walked into college exams with.

It's really great.

And Mike, I want to pick up on this thing about involving clients as well, that external kind of laziness that we talked about.

I think consultants, including me, can easily fall into the habit of going into the bunker to do our work.

And then we only emerge from the bunker when the work is done.

And our PowerPoint slides are beautiful.

Actually.

The latter stages of completing a piece of consulting work, making recommendations and enabling plans to be hatched and decisions to be made, all of that stuff goes so much better, has so much more impact when the client has their hands on them.

And that's a moment for us to be judiciously, you might say, creatively lazy and improve the quality of the work.

I also want to go back to something that you've mentioned already, Mike, which is the idea of Adam Grant and checking assumptions.

That's the kind of hard work that I think can really, really pay off just having that little skepticism to say, hold on a second, spend a few moments just checking the assumptions here.

It's a bit of a carryover for me as well from the idea of, of humility.

But I think in combination with judicious laziness, I think a bit of hard working diligence about checking things out can make me efficient and effective.

Yeah, well said.

So, Mike, that's our show.

That's the end of our review of what makes a perfect consultant.

And to the listeners, we'd love to hear what you think.

Go to our LinkedIn group and tell us what you think.

Search for the Consulting for humans podcast on LinkedIn.

Email us at consultingforhumans31consulting.com we'd love to hear from you.

And what you say can really shape the things that we do next in our forthcoming episodes.

Speaking of which, next week we're going to be using the Luminaries bonus episode to pick up on some listener Q and A.

So please, you know, get those questions in to us so we can include them.

We've been getting some fascinating questions.

Fantastic.

So we're looking forward to hearing from you and we're looking forward to being with you.

Next time on the Luminaries.