Knowledge-Proof / BWE

In which our Hero stands here before you to sit down behind you and talk to you about something he knows nothing about

I’ve long held that my success as a consultant has come from being able to separate knowing about something from speaking intelligently about something. The proof of that concept came in two requests for presentations on the big project I’ve been working on.

The first presentation was, oddly enough, on a piece of the project that my buddy Hollywood and another guy have been running with for months. They have been leading, they have been communicating, and they have been presenting. But for some reason, the program manager wanted me to present, and so I stole Hollywood’s deck, ran through it with him, and then started tweaking.

My big realization is that I’ve reviewed the presentation deck before, and there were things that I didn’t say because I didn’t want to nit-pick and I didn’t want to trample the author’s voice. But when it comes to me actually delivering the presentation, I found those changes matter to me more. Little things like consistent and non-redundant wording. Colour coding.

And then I did the talk, to visiting executives. Ran through the options that had been developed, the implications. Even handled some of the questions till I was presenting “Option 2” and they asked, “Why would we pick this rather than the last option?” And I honest hadn’t a clue but I did remember that “… there’s a comparison of pros and cons in a couple of slides” and that was good enough to keep the execs quiet.

When we got to the end of the deck, with the pros-and-cons discussion, I explained the highlights that I remembered and understood, and when they asked questions about more detail, I made up explanations that fit what I knew. I didn’t go too far wrong, but I wouldn’t call them right.

And in the end, the executives made a bold and decisive statement, “We’ll go with option 1.” Which is great, because we don’t get enough decisions from them. And it’s a problem, because we actually had only just identified the options and hadn’t actually finished researching which was better or what the relative costs were. So I told the team to keep working as if the decision hadn’t been made, and we’ll reopen the question if it makes sense.

The second presentation was even funnier, in terms of how unrelated it was to my actual knowledge. I got called into a meeting room, where the manager and some other folks had apparently been talking for a while. They showed me the whiteboard and said, “Could you put together a presentation that talks about this stuff” and I said sure.

And I’m really happy with the resulting presentation, it’s crisp and clear, and generally fast to go through (or at least it gets out of the way so that we can have the right conversation). So that’s good. On the other hand, I just presented to the executives about how a software system I don’t know will send financial data I don’t know about to another software system I don’t know. And the issues and complexities of that situation.

It’s terrifying. I mean, I’m good at this, and have enough of an understanding to know that I’m right enough, but the ability to take things down bizarre rabbit holes just floors me. No wonder everybody, myself included, hate consultants.

Meanwhile, my side project is escalating. The bad news is that my next deadline is in a week and I have to be able to demonstrate file uploads. The good news is that if I get that far, I’ll have wired up about 80% of the project to make that point. Which means that the new challenge will be a) finishing the project in the week or two after that and b) keeping people from realizing that I finished two months early so that they continue to be aware of how hard the work is.

Today I’m updating presentation #2 because I’ve been asked to add option 3: “What if we did nothing at all?”

Ah, bold decisive leadership.