4 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
The Learning Lenses
From a learning perspective, the first level is characterized by unconscious
incompetence; you lack awareness even of the things you need to know.
As your experience and exposure to the profession increases, you become
aware of the gaps in your knowledge and you begin to ask questions: What
systems do I need to invest in? What products and services work for me?
How do I get clients? How do I service them? What do my clients need? You
are consciously incompetent. At the third level, your experience at earlier
stages gives you a base of knowledge from which you draw to expand
and improve the solutions you provide to your clients; you are consciously
competent. The final mastery stage of unconscious competence is when you
work with ease. You are in the zone, loving what you do and doing what
you love. You are answering your calling in life and fulfilling your purpose
with passion and grace.
The Business Lenses
Figure 1.2 captures the consultant’s career path and illustrates how each pro-
cess level affects buyer type, sales activity, management, and strategy as you
progress up through the four levels.
At the beginning of your career, your consulting activity consists of deliv-
ering just-in-time product-based solutions; for example, a half-day’s training
or an assessment. These solutions feed into the client’s operational efficiency.
You are managing separate events. As you progress, those events become
more sophisticated and may form part of a conventional strategic interven-
tion. The great events, however, do not begin until Level 3, where you
devise innovative strategies with clients and marshal a range of interventions
within that process. At Level 4, you are in collaboration with the client and
operate primarily as facilitator.
At Level 1, the buyer type you deal with for your product-based transac-
tions is almost always the end user who is likely to operate at supervisor
level in the client organization. Level 2 buyers may require a little more: low-
level interventions to facilitate the use of the tools you have sold. Although
you are now more likely to deal with various manager levels, your solutions
are still largely product based. At Levels 3 and 4, you are a solutions pro-
vider, partnering directly with the economic buyer. You are an innovator,
a thought leader, facilitating the implementation of strategies that will help
transform the business. This is the real business objective: to work with the