During surgery, patients sometimes wake up. Interestingly, this problem affects women slightly more often than men. This is because women are statistically more likely to underestimate their weight, while the dose of anesthetic must be strictly adjusted to body weight. We lie even when our own health is at stake. So why should it be any different in business?
When a consultant sits across from you and asks what isn’t working in your company – do you always answer with 100% honesty?
Lying as a Defense Mechanism
In a business context, “lying” sounds like an accusation, so let’s get that out of the way right away. This isn’t about cynically misleading another person. It’s about a natural, human defense mechanism. When an outsider starts meddling with processes you’ve built over years, your first instinct is to minimize your own responsibility, shift it onto others, or simply downplay the problem. We all do this, in all sorts of situations. Most often, we don’t even realize it.
It is not so much a matter of ill will as it is of common cognitive biases. Being immersed in daily processes and repeating the same actions for many years causes us to lose the ability to objectively assess our own environment. There is a beautiful saying that captures this problem well: from within the system, you cannot define what the system is. That is why we go to psychologists, why we talk to friends, why we read books – to gain a different perspective. In organizations, this mirror is provided by a good facilitator (an external professional leading the diagnostic process), equipped with the right tools.
There is another mechanism that can be particularly treacherous – post-rationalization. It involves constructing logical justifications after the fact for decisions that we actually made emotionally, intuitively, or simply by chance.
A classic example from the consumer world: “I didn’t buy that cheese because it had a funny name – I bought it because it was good.” In an organizational context, the same phenomenon can be truly costly.
Imagine a sales director who, two years ago, insisted on implementing a specific CRM. The system didn’t meet expectations; the team is reluctant to use it, and half of its features go unused. But ask him today about that decision, and you’ll hear a coherent argument about integration with other tools, about the cost of migration, about the long-term vision. Arguments that were created after the fact. Managers reshape the logic of events to fit a narrative in which their actions made sense. The result? A consultant who fails to see through this is presented with a convincing story – one that is, however, further from reality than it appears.
Who are we really lying to?
The question arises: do clients lie to the consultant more often, or to themselves? The answer can be quite perverse, because these two things are usually intertwined. First, we lie to ourselves. It’s the same psychological mechanism that causes about 70% of drivers to naively believe they handle the road better than everyone around them. If we were completely honest about what isn’t working in the company, an external consultant would be completely unnecessary. But we don’t notice our own mistakes because we’re woven into them, like thread into fabric.
Employees, in turn, may feel threatened by the very presence of someone who comes to “check up” on them. And it’s hard to blame them. Our role during the discovery phase is always to reduce that sense of threat – to create an environment where people can feel comfortable enough to speak openly. We separate meetings with managers from meetings with specialists. We meet one-on-one. We conduct anonymous surveys. We do everything we can to eliminate the risk of receiving biased data.
Of course, even with these safeguards, there are still phenomena that can effectively throw a wrench in our plans. It’s worth noting, for example, the trap of the vocal minority. The people who speak up most readily and most loudly – at meetings, in surveys, in conversations with a consultant – are not representative of the entire organization. They represent those who have a motivation to speak up: enthusiasts or the frustrated. The quiet, competent people in the middle, who usually have the most complete picture of how processes really work, sometimes don’t speak up at all unless directly asked to do so. That’s why it’s so important not to stop at those who volunteer.
Twenty Minutes to the Truth
In our practice, the most common turning point is when people start to open up. This usually happens after the first twenty minutes of the meeting, when the interviewee understands why we’re doing this and that honesty will pay off for them. This is the result of several very specific factors: trust, professionalism, respect for who the client is and what they do, and – perhaps most importantly – the sense that what they say will have a real, long-term positive impact on the decisions made.
I like to call this the art of asking questions. A good consultant isn’t someone who delivers monologues and shows off their erudition. A good consultant asks questions, then shuts their mouth. Curiosity is, in my opinion, the most important trait in this profession. An honest, unbiased effort to find out what a person really thinks, feels, or knows. I started consciously practicing this skill myself – I hosted interview podcasts because I wanted to learn how to listen. It changed surprisingly much.
It sounds militaristic, but you can’t work in any organization – let alone as an outside consultant – if you don’t find people who believe that what you’re doing makes sense. You need this like oxygen. The more employees believe that their input influenced the final decisions and implementation plan, the more willing they are to help with the implementation. And then you don’t encounter resistance and can count on their commitment.
Don't just fix the symptoms. Start with a diagnosis
A company is, above all, people
You might think that a business strategist spends most of their time poring over hard data, spreadsheets, and dashboards. Sure, those elements matter too. But let’s do a simple thought experiment: if you got rid of everyone in the company tomorrow morning, the company would stop functioning. If you removed the processes and automation, it would somehow manage. People, therefore, are the heart of the organization. It is precisely in the human realm that the greatest challenges lie – and (take note) these are also the ones that can be solved the fastest.
Changing certain behaviors and habits means that the same things we’ve been doing for years suddenly yield different results. However, we don’t work with people in isolation from the hard, business-analytical side. Companies come to us with problems rooted in their business model – too-low margins, declining sales, marketing that generates low-quality leads. However, the primary source of knowledge on these topics, especially in companies without advanced analytics, is the very people who carry out these processes on a daily basis.
That is why conversations should be treated as a source of hard data. Not only can they be treated this way – they must be. In the small and medium-sized companies we most often work with, a vast portion of processes turns out to be undocumented and unstructured. Most of the knowledge is embedded in the actions and minds of employees. That is why data from conversations with staff is, for us, fully valid data – it just requires careful handling.
False Tones
We must be aware of a key distinction: fact versus opinion. The stage of gathering data from interviews requires discipline. We must sift through the collected information and extract what is a hard fact and what is a subjective interpretation. Novice consultants, after a well-run workshop, might say, “I already know everything.” And then they talk to four more people from the same department, and it turns out the information is completely different. This is probably the most beautiful and fascinating part of this work.
My favorite situation is when the data differs. Some people say one thing, others say something else, and yet something else emerges from the documents. When I hear these discrepancies, I know we’re getting closer to the problem. Our role is to spot the discrepancies and lay them out in black and white: here is the data, and here are the hypotheses someone presented at this meeting, and they don’t match. And then we return to a consultant’s best weapon: the question “why?”
Like following a thread to the ball of yarn, we slowly get to the source. It turns out, for example, that the sales department bases its beliefs solely on its own limited experience. This is the moment when we identify the source of the dissonance and can finally approach what is the true picture of reality – and not just a projection of someone’s habits.
Ibuprofen is no substitute for a doctor
As people, we usually expect quick solutions, not a diagnosis. However, it’s a bit like going to the doctor and expecting a prescription for painkillers without undergoing further examination. You can pop pill after pill, but after a while, you’ll ruin your liver without even knowing the source of the problem. The same goes for the discovery process within an organization. If we’ve been popping ibuprofen for a year to treat chronic stomach pain – hiring another lead-generation company, increasing the marketing budget, adding people to the team – we’re only masking a deeper problem.
That’s why the right decision is one made based on reliable data, not a fleeting hunch. Meanwhile, in companies where most processes take place between people (and this applies to a vast majority of organizations), people are the most valuable source of data. The thing is, you have to know how to extract that data. Clean it up. Cross-reference it with other sources. But it takes patience, curiosity, and courage to ask a question whose answer might turn out to be uncomfortable. But it is precisely in this discomfort – in the false notes, the discrepancies, and the moments when someone finally says what they really think – that the true value of strategic processes lies hidden.
If you feel that the answers to important questions in your company don’t add up – or, worse yet, add up all too well – let’s talk. Schedule a consultation with our strategy team!
