Reflection on a Consulting Workshop
Epistemic status: This is a summary / review / critique of a workshop I attended today. The workshop’s materials are not publically available, so I don’t expect any productive discussion regarding the workshop itself. This is mostly for myself to process the new information.
Introduction
I work at a consulting firm. All new hires attend an annual course. The course consists of three full-day workshops.
I’m making this sound like a corporate nightmare, but it’s not. The format is very flexible. The organizer has a slide deck, but it mostly serves as a seed for group discussion. The first slide is a Kendrick Lamar song. Hopefully that conveys the tone of the workshop.
From here on, my paragraphs will be strictly alternating paraphrasis and analysis.
Consulting
The workshop’s definition of consulting is very broad: consulting is when you help someone do something. In a corporate context, you’re fulfilling the client’s explicitly defined needs. In other contexts, you’re working towards favorable outcomes.
This sounds like optimizing for someone else. But my suspicions may be misplaced, as we discussed only the definition today.
Eight Principles
Most of today’s discussion centers on the proper mindset for consulting. This consists of eight principles. Each principle also serves as general advice for interacting with people.
The organizer has read the Tao (or so they say). They arrange the eight principles on an infographic in Taoist imagery. Perhaps this evokes a feeling of Deep Wisdom. I find no intersection with my (albeit limited) knowledge of Taoism. This inspires distrust, but should not detract from the ideas’ inherent merits.
The first principle is the ego check. Everyone has two egos (no relation to Freud). Your “big ego” says you’re the smartest person in the room. Your “little ego” says you have nothing to contribute. You should remove both of these feelings before a conversation starts, the same way you would check your coat at the door. During group introductions, everyone should comment on how they check their ego.
This seems like reasonable life advice in general. However, I can’t detect any change in my mental state when I say my ego check. Verdict indecisive.
The second principle is humanism: treat people nicely, feed their ego, and they’ll help you succeed. The third principle is curiosity: ask people questions, and they’ll enjoy answering them. The fifth principle is relationships: all of your success originates from a relationship with someone. The seventh principle is to optimize your interactions: get the most mileage out every time.
This all seems like reasonable advice for dealing with people. The practical demonstration for humanism bordered on love-bombing, but these principles aren’t inherently Dark.
The fourth principle is problem-solving. Most of the work of problem-solving lies in describing or analyzing the problem. The sixth principle is self-education. You can get some knowledge by learning from others, or learning at school, but you get the most knowledge by teaching yourself.
These both seem reasonable.
The eighth principle is leadership. A leader takes initiative, takes responsibility, and takes the falls. Responsibility cannot be given, only taken. If you ask your leader what you can take off their plate, you are adding to their burden of management. To lead is to help everyone around you succeed.
I’m not sure what to make of this one. They imply everyone in the organization should be a leader. Leadership does not come naturally to me, so this will be difficult. However, this seems like the most true of the eight principles.
Policy and Practice
We look at the following model of human behavior. Your thoughts form around certain inputs (media, associates, experiences). Your beliefs form from your thoughts, actions from beliefs, and habits from actions. Your outcomes follow from your habits. To achieve better outcomes, you need better habits. The only way to do this is at the start of the chain: switch to better inputs. Associate with winners, and you’ll learn beliefs and habits that help you win. The same applies at an organizational level. Inputs, thoughts, and beliefs correspond to policy, while actions, habits, and outcomes correspond to practice.
This seems counter to our methodology on LW. At best, this is a shortcut to use others’ success as proxy evidence for their beliefs. Also, this model does not describe meta-level beliefs, nor does it describe self-updating. But I shouldn’t bash this too hard: for most people, the shortcut is better than not changing their beliefs at all.
Remarks
This concludes the alternating paraphrasis and analysis.
I went into the course expecting either to reject everything they say, or to get brainwashed outright. I think I’m doing a decent job filtering the beliefs presented, but that just could be truth bias speaking. I’ll write an update once I see our practical exercises (maybe compare and contrast with CFAR exercises?)
I think this points in the right direction, but lacks nuance. Notice the two implied assumptions:
you can recognize the winners (otherwise the advice is not actionable); and
the beliefs and habits are what made them winners (as opposed to e.g. resources or luck).
On one hand, yes it is true that beliefs and habits have a great impact on your life, and you will probably instinctively associate with people having similar beliefs and habits, which makes it difficult to see outside your bubble. Other people do not necessarily tell you about their actual beliefs, and you do not get to see all their habits in action. So it might be tremendously educational to understand how others live in a “different reality”.
I assume that for most people the self-imposed limitations caused by their own beliefs are invisible. But sometimes you get an opportunity to clearly see how someone else is limited by their beliefs.
For example, I have met a few smart people who believe that they are stupid or average. Not as a fake humility, but as a factual statement about themselves. They therefore assume that the “things that smart people do” are beyond their reach… so they do not even try, which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. (The cause was either having an asshole parent who was never impressed by anything, or having hobbies that were not stereotypically intellectual.) I have told a few of them to go take a Mensa test, because they were pretty sure they couldn’t make it, but they passed the test successfully. (My heuristics is that if I can talk to you about an interesting topic without getting bored, I am pretty sure your IQ is at least 130. This test has many false negatives, but few false positives.) I do not have an information about whether this update changed their lives somehow.
Another example is how I sometimes achieved seemingly unlikely things by simply asking. Once I asked a member of parliament on Facebook (via private message) to join our local LW meetup. I honestly said it was just five people meeting regularly in a pub, but “the last time we met, we discussed your recent political cause, and I thought it would be interesting if you could provide us a first-hand info”. They said yes. Another time, I happened to notice a sign saying Amnesty International on a door of some building, so I was curious and knocked. The people were friendly and happy about my curiosity, but they were busy working on something, so I offered to help. Skip five years, and I was a coordinator of the local branch. I wasn’t even interested in politics much, I just had a lot of free time back then, and was a useful sidekick; and that turned out to be enough. Once I met a queen. She happened to visit our country, one of my friends was somehow involved, they said “I can bring one extra person to the audience”, everyone else was scared because of some status-regulating instinct, I said “yeah, no problem”. -- These are things that I myself would have a problem believing, until they suddenly happened. I mean, I would believe that this is possible, but not that it can be so easy.
So, I wonder what other things, obvious from someone else’s perspective, I am missing. Sometimes it drives me crazy, the idea of all those easy missed opportunities.
On the other hand, many people who present themselves as “winners” are actually scammers. Like, all the people in multi-level marketing pyramid schemes. Five years later, almost all of them will be out of money and ashamed for their actions. If you follow them and copy their beliefs, so will you. Even outside of organized scams, many people exaggerate their achievements. If you hang out with them and observe them, you will gradually learn that they are not what they pretend to be. That’s certainly educational, but it won’t make you a winner.
Sometimes people achieve success by luck, or by having resources you don’t have. Typically, luck alone is not enough, but it could be a combination of (working hard and doing the right thing) + (having resources and luck). Merely copying their beliefs and actions is not a guarantee of success. Just having a safety net makes a huge difference: it is easy to be courageous when you know that the only consequence of failure is that you have lost some time, but also got some experience, and can immediately try again. It is easy to laugh at risk avoidance, when the “risk” only means that some number on your bank account got a bit smaller but otherwise your life continues completely unchanged.