Practice management - change ends

Suicidal students form a large part of the work of an Australian psychologist I know. They arrive in his campus office ready to end it all. The instinctive response for most of us would be to make positive noises: “Things aren’t so bad … You’ve got your whole life …” The trouble, as the psychologist points out, is that human interactions work like a seesaw, with both parties striving – usually unconsciously – to maintain the balance of the whole. So the more strongly we argued for life, the further towards the negative end the student would feel obliged to go.

Instead, the psychologist consciously moves to the student’s end of the seesaw, conceding that life can be hard and asking when and how he or she plans to go. His office, he adds gently, has big windows and is four floors up. Invariably, the student decides there is after all some merit in delay, and the conversation proper can then start.

This ability to understand someone else’s perceptions from the inside, to get round the other side of the desk, seems especially hard for professionals – partly, perhaps, because very intelligent people learn early in life to rely on their own perceptions and to mistrust those of others.

Put that in the context of client-handling and it becomes easy to understand how firms can get things badly wrong, and why they can keep on doing so.

They don’t see it that way, of course. They see themselves struggling with “difficult” clients, “impossible” projects, a “tight” market or the quality of junior staff. What clients can see is blind arrogance, insensitivity or defensiveness:

– A City architect’s firm is shrivelling in the face of beauty parades with 150 contestants, and low-balling. Yet he can’t bring himself to rethink its exclusively technical focus.

– A Midlands consultancy got fired by its largest client because, under its ISO9000 “quality” rules, each department bills separately by work done, instead of jointly by project as the client prefers.

– A London firm is in danger of getting sacked (by me) because it clogs my fax with self-glorifying reports about its activities, instead of notes about its results.

This perceptual issue was best captured for me by a lawyer who said: “Every client is a potential enemy.”

The French author Marcel Proust wrote in A la recherche du temps perdu 80 years ago: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” And Stephen Covey, the US management guru, wrote in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: “We began to realise that if we wanted to change the situation, we first had to change ourselves. And to change ourselves … we first had to change our perceptions.”

Seeing blind spots is tough. But it matters.

Tony Scott, an independent consultant, specialises in businesses whose product is knowledge.