Consultancy training for people who aren’t consultants

Untangle complex and complicated digital transformation projects for your clients.

In 4 weeks, learn to anticipate your clients’ needs, become more effective at diagnosing and solving problems, reduce miscommunication, and ease your path toward repeat business.

What is this?

A hands-on, four-week coached program for people and teams at technology and digital service vendors. We take participants through group teaching and follow-up with collaborative, group feedback exercises based on current or previous work to practice applying what you’ve learned.

Who this is for

It’s for vendors working on complex technology projects for clients, from digital transformation to legacy modernization, at clients learning to become user-centered, agile, and iterative and are hitting all the growing pains.

It’s also for people tired of bullshit and buzzwords.

It’s for people who need something like this:

Hey, vendors. Are you working with:

  • clients who don’t make decisions

  • clients who treat everything as important so nothing is important

  • organizations with bad internal communication and silos, with meetings where people talk past each other without understanding each other

  • a million different stakeholders

  • executive leadership who don’t know how to support technology development

  • managers who are just starting out on the whole user-centered, digital service journey

  • people who don’t trust each other

  • complicated organization charts

  • harsh vibes

How it works

This is a series of group workshops split into teaching and doing.

First, we work with your team to explain and demonstrate principles with real-world examples. After that, we go through your current and previous work — after we’re all NDAed up — and apply what you’ve learned. The workshops aren’t abstract, they’re practical.

It doesn’t matter what the role or responsibilities participants have. We’ll match the material and exercises to what makes sense for you and your organization, all while making sure nobody’s bored.

So what will we cover?

Learn how to build stronger relationships

Learn how relationships built on trust ease the path to repeat business by 

  • listening and talking with candor

  • spotting where and when everybody lies (sometimes a lot, sometimes a little)

  • doing your research to develop empathy and compassion

Understand how people really work in organizations

Help your client succeed by TKTK

  • Learning how to understand your client as a person, their relationships, and their context

  • Building better mental models of organizations by seeing and understanding peoples’ behavior outside of organization charts and hierarchies

  • Recognizing and supporting key individuals critical to success, wherever they sit

  • Making and validating predictions about motivations and fears

  • Manage expectations, and recommend roles, responsibilities and who to consult and inform

Write clearly and simply

Earn your client’s trust and respect by writing simply, with clarity and purpose. Get rid of that filler and get to the point by

  • practising how to spot bullshit, admitting when you use it, then learning how to remove it

  • understanding and meet the different communication needs of different audiences – from executive leadership to middle management

  • learning how to present options and recommendations to leaders

  • learning how to be respectfully candid and communicate bad news 

Spot and solve the big problems

Achieve the RESULT YOU WANT by [thing]

  • Understanding the [interplay] between your problems and your client’s problems

  • Diagnosing how an organization’s focus problem affects your work

  • Recognizing when your a strategy isn’t really a strategy, and how to use Lafley and Martin’s “Playing to Win” framework to get started and and what to do about it