You're Cheating Clients Unless You're Repetitive

David recognizes that the fear of repeating ourselves in our client work is motivated by the right things: “am I delivering value?”

Links

"Repeating Yourself as an Expert" by David C. Baker for punctuation.com

"Questions, Not Answers" 2Bobs episode

Transcript

Blair: David, this topic is timely.

David: Like all of my topics.

Blair: Yes, like some of your topics. It's timely because I just got back from a 3-day trip with 10 family members.

David: This is about you. I knew.

Blair: Yes, of course.

[laughter]

Blair: That's why I'm here. [laughs]

David: You found 10 family members that wanted to be with you on a long weekend.

Blair: Nine, yes.

David: Oh, nine, okay.

Blair: Yes, we had a blast. As I'm reading this post of yours that we're going to discuss today, you are cheating clients unless you're repetitive. I'm reading this post, and just the headline made me think of all the stories I'm telling-- everybody in the family on this trip is younger than me, other than my wife, so everybody's younger than us. I'm doing what a person of my age might do with a younger group of family. I'm telling stories. Every story I'm telling, I'm thinking, "How many times have they heard this story? Why can't I stop myself?"

[laughter]

David: Is it the same story? Do they notice the subtle differences where now I'm the hero in this story? Before, it was an accident. [laughs]

Blair: I'm more and more of a hero as the years go by. Yes, that triggered that for me. Your point is, I'm cheating my family unless I continue to tell them these stories ad nauseam. Is that the point of this? Let's just get right to the chase here.

David: Yes, that is exactly it. Your family members each contacted me. It was so odd. They said, "We just love hearing his stories over and over again."

Blair: Tell the audience this story about your grandparents, a story that you have told to me four or five times.

David: [laughs] My grandpa was really sharp up until he died. He was over 100. He always wanted to be 100. He said, "Okay, I'm going to live to be 100, and then I'm going to die." Sure enough, he did. My grandma, she was not very sharp at the end like he was. Towards the end, they would come visit us every year for a week. They'd pull their travel trailer, and they'd call it the relative route. We called it the sponging route. They'd call it the relative route.

They arrived one of the visits after we'd purchased a new van. Grandma, we were taking them to restaurants or whatever and parks. I don't know, 8, 10 times a day, she would ask me, "Hey, David, how long have you had this van? When did you buy this van?" I'd say, "Six months ago, Grandma." She would just go on and on about how much she liked it and everything. I was just losing my mind. It's like, I cannot answer that question again. I thought, okay, I'm going to switch it up. She asked again, "How long have you had this van, David?" I said, "A half a year, Grandma." She looked at me and grinned, and she said, "You silly man. That is six months." [chuckles]

That's what got me thinking about repeating myself. On top of that, you just think about your experience with clients where you're on a phone call with a client, and it's a great client. They've asked a very legitimate question. You go into the answer, and you catch yourself halfway through and think, "You know what? I was saying the same thing yesterday." Then sometimes I'll joke. It's like, "You should have been on the call I was on yesterday with a different client because they asked the same question." You just realize, "Wow, there's a lot of repeating myself. Is this good? Is this cheating clients to repeat myself, or is this bad?" That's what got me thinking about it. Have you ever had that feeling when you're working with clients?

Blair: Haven't we had this conversation before?

David: Yes.

Blair: All the time, yes.

David: Do you ever feel bad, like, "Am I cheating somebody?"

Blair: Sometimes I find myself getting a little bit short, like I'm talking to a child with whom I have had the same conversation a million times, and we shouldn't have to have this conversation yet again. I don't know if it's discernible to the person I'm speaking to, but sometimes I find myself getting a little short, like, "Come on, we know this." That's called the curse of knowledge. I know something. Once I explain it to you once, I assume that you know it to the same extent that I know it. If it has to come up again, I start to think, "You're a moron." Meanwhile, how much repetition did it take for it to sink in on my end? I think we all suffer with this to a certain extent. The older we get, the more we suffer from it.

David: Yes. Where all the people have been so patient with me over the years, and somehow it seems like a burden to me to be patient with somebody that's never had the privilege of hearing this before, that paid me a lot of money, that's just wrong on my part. It's just natural. It's not evil. It's just a natural reaction. Then, when that hits me, I have an option. I can either be more selfish and just say, "Okay, I got to do something to break this up." Then, instead of figuring out a way to say it even better, I'll try to reinvent things so that I don't have to say the same thing. That's the whole point of this. You're cheating your clients.

If what you are telling one client is the right thing for them to hear, and if there are similarities in your client base, and the next client comes along that needs to hear the same thing, you're cheating them by not telling them that. I'm just trying to surface the fact that tightly positioned experts are going to face this. They are going to repeat themselves, and there are good ways to do it, and there are bad ways to do it.

Blair: What's the good way to do it?

David: The good way to do it is to think about better ways to say the same thing. That would be one way to do it. Another would be how to seed the brain of the person that you're going to talk to so that they can come to that same conclusion without you having to tell them that. You lead them to it by asking better questions instead of just coming right out with the answer, which is easy and efficient. Especially if you're impatient, naturally, that's the way you want to do it, instead of letting the client come to that conclusion by diving really deeply into the specifics of their situation, rather than just a pronouncement that sounds just like what you said last time.

Blair: More of a teacher where you're leading the student on a learning experience. We've talked about this. We've done at least one episode on questions, not answers. We've touched on it in other topics, too. There is this danger of being an expert in anything that you feel like-- and now this is pretty personal to me. I feel like it's my job to have the answers when really it should be to have the questions. There's this danger of seeing yourself as the expert and wanting to prove your expertise constantly by saying the same things over and over again.

Your point here is that the right way to do this is to lean into it instead of delivering that same rote statement that you've delivered dozens of times over the previous years. You would think of the question to pose to the client in this situation that would lead them to the understanding you're trying to deliver in the assertion.

David: Yes, exactly right. Then the context around that is something that you don't run away from. You actually embrace it and say, "Oh, wow, I have been saying something similar multiple times with different clients over the years. What's causing this? At what point does this happen? Or is there any pattern in the firms that experience a situation that calls for this statement?" You lean into it and you try to figure out everything you can about what's unique here. You embrace pattern matching as the very foundation of expertise.

If you're repeating yourself, that is a pattern. Embrace it. Figure out why that's happening. Figure out everything you can about it. Start to articulate that in some of your writings, and you use this as an excuse. Sometimes in my early days of consulting, a client would ask me a question, whatever it was, and I jumped to an answer, partly because I felt like I had to have an answer, which is the wrong approach. Also, I had this inclination, but I realized in myself-- I'm not sure that the client in this case even picked up on it. I realized in myself, I was like, "Well, I don't feel quite as confident about how I answered that question as I would like to. I'm going to start writing down some of those questions that I get repeatedly, and then I'm going to dive deeper into them to make sure that my instincts are correct here."

You use those repeated applications, those repeated questions that are leading to your repetition, you use those repeated questions as an opportunity to dig deeper and make sure. You ought to have pretty similar answers to similar questions, but there should always be some little question. It's like a provisional certainty. I'm not sure if that's the right phrase, but it's a provisional certainty. Like, "I'm pretty sure this is the right answer, but I'm always open to learning about this in a new way. I don't want to jump to the answer right away. I want to have this answer at the ready because I think it's correct. I want to listen to your situation more carefully and not just throw an answer back. Use all of these opportunities as a chance to dive deeper too." That's what I mean by provisional certainty.

Blair: I can think of many times where I have been provisionally certain on numerous topics, but maybe you could put it on a spectrum. You enter the conversation with a hypothesis, after hypothesis would be theory, after proven theory would be law of some kind. Instead of seeing these patterns as laws, maybe see them as theories of yours where you're open-minded to alternatives.

David: Yes. It's more like a principle that usually applies, that's worth surfacing and talking about, but always with our ears open because every time you learn something, it's an aberration from a pattern. The flip side danger here is that everything looks like a pattern, and you quit learning. That's something we want to avoid, either. We want provisional certainty. We want patterns, but we don't want them locked down. We want to be open to a client that comes to us with something that we think we've seen before, and we jump to the answer, but then it's like, "Well, wait a second. I haven't seen this element. Does that mean that I need to rethink this, or is that just something on the side?"

You remember we did an episode many years ago where we asked each other something like, "What is it that keeps you going more than anything else?" We didn't know how the other person was going to answer it. As it turned out, we both said the same thing. It was something about--

Blair: Psilocybin.

David: [laughs] Yes. Unless I've run out, then what's next? It was curiosity. It's the love of learning. When you lock down an answer for every situation, you're not curious anymore. You still have to maintain that curiosity. You don't go to the doctor, and you don't want him to stop from telling you the same thing he told another doctor just because he's bored with it. No, if that's the answer, you want him to tell you that, right?

Blair: Yes. You said something interesting a couple of minutes ago. I'm still cogitating on this. You said every time we learn something, it's an aberration, a pattern. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that before. You've previously mentioned that pattern matching is basically how we test intelligence in young children, correct?

David: Yes, before they can even speak. You hold up Duck, Duck, Goose, and they point to the non-conforming image. That's how we teach them how to read, right? To see patterns of different letter combinations and so on. That's why we can test intelligence in kids who can't even read yet.

Blair: I want to back up a little bit. Looking at your post here, you say once you realize you're repeating yourself, you're going to have two possible reactions. We've touched on a bunch of this. Basically, first reaction is further selfishness. I'm bored. I need to reinvent the whole thing. You're saying, no, don't reinvent the whole thing, or do lean into that?

David: Don't reinvent the whole thing just because you're bored, but be open to adjustment all the time. Don't just say, "Listen, I'm tired of delivering this particular package over and over. Let's do something else." Any expert's boredom really leads people astray. The more you're an expert, the more repetition there's going to be. Don't let that repetition drag you off course, but still be open to things.

Blair: The other part was just this deeper realization. "Wow, I'm seeing a pattern here. I should explore this deeper." I don't think you've talked about this, but I have heard you say in many podcast recordings where I ask you, "David, what was the impetus for this article?" Your response has been, "I was just tired of having the same conversation with my clients, so I decided to put it in a post, and now I can point them to that post."

David: Right. Not because I'm trying to get out of work, but because I've realized that in the early days, when somebody would ask a tough question, it annoyed me because it meant like, "Oh shoot, I've got to think a little harder here. This is slowing me down." Now I love questions because it's an opportunity for me to dig in and figure out what I think about something. Not in a permanent way, but in a provisional way. Early in my consulting career, I started to notice all these times when it's like, "Oh goodness, I should have a better perspective on that that's carefully thought through that I could defend."

I started writing those down, places where I was stumbling around, whether the client noticed it or not. There were 55 things that people kept asking me that I didn't-- that seems like a lot in retrospect. I was like, "Maybe I shouldn't have even been consulting." I just said, "Okay, this'll be fun. I'm going to go through these one by one." Actually, I decided to write an article about each one. Some of those are still really good. Some are not. I just view it as an opportunity. When you get something that breaks the pattern, then use it as an opportunity to learn and get smarter and smarter and follow that curiosity.

Blair: Does this have anything to do with the academic paper you wrote in an earlier life on-- was it unconscious recurrence? Was that it?

David: Subconscious repetition in ancient literature. Oh, I don't know. Maybe. I don't know.

Blair: [laughs]

David: When you see your early work as an academic cited in an academic paper, most people would yawn. I get more excited than most people should probably.

Blair: You actually put something of value out into the world.

David: Assuming academics is value. Yes, subconscious repetition. I'm just reading literature, and I read somebody use a word. Then, a little bit later, they use the same word, but in an unexpected way. It's not the perfect word. They couldn't think of the perfect word, so they used the word they just used. That prompted me to do a lot of research in different languages and so on, and see if that was a thing. I basically invented it, and it's now being used in academic research. It's called subconscious repetition. I found myself doing it, even. It's just odd as human. I just like to notice things anyway. That's what makes me weird.

Blair: Okay.

David: You were supposed to disagree. "David, you're not weird."

Blair: No, I fell asleep during that last little bit, you talking about your academic research. I'm sorry I brought it up.

[laughter]

Blair: My mind is somewhere else.

David: You're going to repeat yourself. If you're repeating yourself a lot as a generalist firm, you are cheating your client.

Blair: You're an old man on a family vacation telling the same stories. Is that what's happening?

David: Yes, right. Where they don't even fit, there's very little relevance and so on. If you're repeating yourself a lot as a specialized firm, you're probably delivering value to your clients. There's a difference here because if you are not a specialist firm, then client scenarios that are being dropped in your lap are very different. You should not be repeating yourself because those scenarios are not the same. Repeating yourself is not a surefire sign of competence. It is if you're a specialized firm. If you're not, it's a sign of laziness.

Blair: You're either highly confident or highly lazy. You decide based on your own assessment of your specialization, which is going to be wrong. That's an interesting point. You have admitted previously that you find yourself having the same conversation, so you write a post on it. That's where FAQs come from, too, on various people's websites and products, et cetera. You just pay attention. When you start to get frustrated, note it in an FAQ. All right, you assigned some extra credit to the reader of this post if they have somebody follow them and write down all the brilliant things they say. Is that it?

David: In a positioning exercise, I'm not making people more competent. I'm simply trying to pull out the competence they already have, which they don't see in themselves. One of the reasons they don't see it in themselves is because they have heard themselves say the same thing so many times that they're just used to it. They're saying those same things because they have noticed patterns and their clients are bringing them similar situations over and over again.

When I say, "Okay, I'd like you to begin articulating your expertise," I have this exercise I call drop and give me 20. It's like, "Give me 20 things you know that another firm that's not positioned the same as you would not know. Some aha moments." Typically, they just look at me, staring blankly. It's like, "I don't think I say those things. I don't see myself as that intelligent or that brilliant." That's because they've been hearing themselves say those things over and over again.

If you flip that around and you put yourself in the shoes of the client who's hearing it for the first time, when they say it, their eyes open up, and they pause, and they say, "Ah, I hadn't thought of it quite like that." What I do in this case is I ask them to have somebody else in the meetings listening to the things that they say over and over again, and see how clients react. When those clients who are hearing it for the first time, when their eyes light up, bam, write that down. That is something that's very intelligent. It's a part of pattern matching, and that deserves further articulation.

They're very smart about that. What they haven't done is they've never codified that into a document that makes it even stronger. Then the other thing they can do, which wasn't available to us until a few years ago, is just using some AI notetaker to pick those repeated statements out and post them automatically in a summary. When you see an AI summary of what you've talked about, it's usually pretty good at picking out the statements that are summary statements. Those are the things that you've said over and over again. My point here for extra credit is that if you don't see yourself saying things over and over again, repeating yourself, it's not that you aren't doing it. It's just that you aren't attuned to it. You'll find it really interesting if you start listening to the way you talk more intently.

Blair: You are spotting the patterns, but you're not spotting yourself spotting the patterns.

David: Yes, right. Other people can help you do that, or an AI tool can do that.

Blair: When I worked as a consultant, your exercise of, "Drop and give me 20, tell me 20 things you know about X, your expertise that a more generalist firm wouldn't know," sometimes it's not very easy for them to do that. Just through the course of the conversation, throughout the day, they will make many assertions that are brilliant, and they don't realize how brilliant they are. You write them down, and when you start the exercise, you can say, "Well, here are six things you've already said." Yes, it's really interesting. There's pattern matching and then noting yourself catching the patterns.

The meta pattern matching is the difficult part because almost everybody listening to this is spotting the patterns. They are saying things that are worth repeating, but in many cases, they probably don't see the value in them. I think that's one of the key takeaways here, isn't it?

David: Yes, exactly right. Another way to say this is that most people listening to these things are smarter than they think. They just have heard themselves say things so often that they're used to them, and they don't hit them the same way that it might hit somebody who hears it for the first time.

Blair: Well, I know I'm a lot smarter than I think, and I think I'm pretty smart. Thanks, David. This has been a great topic.

David: Thank you, Blair.