Some Clients Don't Want You to "Give the Answer"

In a brilliant and thought-provoking post, Jack Vinson of Knowledge Jolt from Jack writes:

I've been learning in my consulting practice that when I come across as "having the answer" I never get as far as I do when I offer a suggestion (that I think will work), and ask my clients why it won't work.  There are a variety of questions I could ask along these lines, but they all center around surfacing obstacles and unintended consequences of the idea.  And, conveniently, when I bring other people into the conversation, I usually get a better solution in the end. 

He shares this astute observation after reading and citing a post from Bruce MacEwen's blog. I urge you to read Jack's full post that links to Bruce's.

On a separate note...IT'S A VERY SMALL WORLD

(feel free to skip this story...)
I discovered Jack's post through a very pleasant coincidence. It really IS a small world. I met Jack Vinson at Matt Homann's and Dennis Kennedy's BlawgThink! just over a year ago. Always thought a lot of Jack's blog but admit I haven't been keeping up with it (or most of my RSS feeds lately).

What's really weird is that I just got back from a facilitation conference in Australia (one of only two Americans there). An Aussie from the conference, Andrew Rixon, requested participation in an on-line survey on some deep facilitation stuff. On clicking "done" I was forwarded to a blog called Anecdotes. (This is totally weird because I hadn't met any facilitators through IAF--Int'l Assoc of Facilitators--yet who blogged or knew much about blogs!)

The very first post I see, Stop Trying to Solve the Problem, references Jack and Bruce, two names I know well from the legal blog side and would never in a million years expect to come across in my facilitation circles--a very separate world for me from my legal and accounting side. Isn't this huge world small indeed?

Well, just goes to show, brilliant thinking is appreciated and it gets around! Good to bump into you again, Jack. What an unexpected way to do it.