Advisory services in a zero attention span world ?

We live in an era of soaring complexity and plummeting attention spans. It is a cruel irony: the more we need deep expertise to navigate the today’s complexity, the less time we have to actually listen to it.

If you are a consultant, you know the struggle. How do you position yourself as an authority when your audience has the cognitive bandwidth of a distracted goldfish?

Here are a couple of golden rules:

• Context is a pre-requisite. Don’t assume your customer is going to have the time to explain their full problem context. They’ll hit you with their immediate problem and assume you know them. And in today’s business environment, you should know your customer.
• Stope the bleeding, then focus on the big picture: Fix the immediate fire to earn the right to talk about the “disease”. You get their attention twice!
• Prescribe, Don’t Propose: You are the expert. Experts don’t give “suggestions” for the customer to pick from like a buffet. You provide the best path forward. If they want to go a different way, they need to justify why they know better than the expert.
• Consequences speak louder: Advice is boring. Spell out potential consequences and the cost of doing nothing.
• Be concise and clear: In a world of noise, brevity is your greatest weapon. If you can’t explain the value of your solution in three sentences, you don’t understand it well enough yet.

In a nutshell, build a delivery model that fits today’s need for speed and commands the customer’s attention.