Telling stories

The Domestic Engineer

How consultants really work

Telling stories

How To Move Minds and Influence People is Iain’s first book. It’s rather more modest that the title suggests, but that’s what happens when your work is mugged by the sales director on the way to the proofs department.

It’s only 100 pages, with the simple intention of getting people in business to tell stories, and to do so skillfully. Most of the time they attempt to beat you senseless with argument or snare you with statistics. It’s based on Iain’s belief that everyone has inbuilt narrative muscles, which we ignore at our peril. There’s a series of exercises and examples to help you get going, plus examples from Kevin Spacey and Julia Roberts to perk things up.

Many people were very nice about How To Move. The greatest joy, though, is the random emails we receive from readers around the globe (it’s in six languages) saying ‘I did that thing on page 43 in my interview and it worked!’.

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The domestic engineer

This is in Cyan Books ‘Great Brands’ series. Dyson were initially reluctant to collaborate, because they have an interesting antipathy to the idea of brands, and a marked one to the idea that they might be a brand themselves. We delve into this, and also the feast that the Dyson story provides: the nature of the entrepreneur, the conditions that allowed the brand to flourish, a product as domestic muscle, the struggle to become more than a one product business, and much else besides. Our friends at Brainjuicer were collaborators and helped us with the scene setting opening chapter.

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how consultants really work

Iain took a Masters in Organisation Consulting at Ashridge from 1999-2001 (filched it when they weren’t looking.) He’d long been curious about how organisations functioned, especially as many of the ones he’d encountered didn’t seem to do so very well. The course’s first official outing is Organisational Consulting – A Relational Perspective published in April 2007: Iain’s practice is featured in the chapter entitled, rather unnervingly, The Conviction Consultant.

The relational in the title is a pointer to the book’s philosophy. Most organisation consulting briefs are requests to fix, challenge or enlighten individuals or issues on behalf of a temporary coalition of power. Relational consulting is interested in the brief, sure, but more in the dynamics that created the issue. That means attending to what led to the ‘problem’ and creating conditions in which it can be faced and dealt with, or even by not seeing it as a problem any more. All this entails being interested in the informal, digging into differences, and working with what is, rather than what you (or your client) think should be. This is sometimes uncomfortable, but largely beneficial, like my dentist, who gently insists on me taking responsibility for my teeth, rather than just shoving fillings in my mouth every year and telling me it will be all right.

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