The Consultant and the Watch

The adage goes that a consultant will use your own watch to tell you the time, and then charge you for it. We all laugh.

My work as a consultant has become clearer and clearer over the years as I have shifted my focus from doing the consulting, to building the greatest consultants possible. So when reminded of this old joke about consultants this morning, I was immediately able to argue that it misrepresents the story in many ways. Here’s how:

Not everyone knows how to tell the time. Maybe some can only read a digital watch, but are unable to interpret the weird analogue face. You’re probably wondering why they have a watch that they can’t read. The company they work for probably gave it to them.

A consultant will:

• Bring the ability to make sense of different watch faces, and time telling styles.
• They can help read the time in different languages deciphering the signal from the noise.

It’s hard to learn about yourself with the watch. The idea that the client can interpret the time, especially if the time refers to themselves it’s near impossible.

A consultant will:

• Bring a mostly objective opinion about the watch owner. The consultant brings a more balanced view and accurate assessment of the challenges of time-telling.
• This will include subjective judgements about how the watch owner is helping or hindering their own time telling.

It’s not really about telling the time. Just simply answering the question “What time is it?” with 10:32AM may not be the right kind of answer at all. The real question may be “Do we have time?” in which case 10:32am doesn’t tell you anything without other important information. Truly understanding the question, and structuring the response in a meaningful and usable way is more about what goes on outside the watch, than the watch itself. Furthermore is it a pocket-watch, wrist-watch, smart-watch etc. Which type do you really need?

A consultant will:

• Go far beyond the watch, and time-telling, to help client understand why they need to know the time at all.
• Guide and present watch data in a way that best addresses the real challenge at hand.
• Better define the reason you need the watch based on the role it will play for you functionally, socially, and emotionally.
• Recommend the right watch if changing makes sense.

Client’s don’t know how the watch works. The watch is a symbol of instruments used to interact with the world. The company owns such instruments, but it’s unlikely that any single person knows how they all work.

A consultant will:

• Bring together the knowledge and perspectives on how watches work across many touch-points in your organisation, and other organisations.
• Brings permission to break through internal political barriers and taboos.
• Sync up all the watches in your organisation.

I’d like to think that great consultants do the following two things:

• Help clients do the things they can’t do for themselves, and
• Help those clients build their own capability to help themselves in the future.

The upside of all this consulting is that whilst much of the tricky work is taken care of the client still get’s to wear the fancy watch.