CONDENSING THE DATA

You always collect more data that you could ever use. A high anxiety point in any consulting project or ongoing relationship is what to share. When discovery is done—when you have finished asking your questions and have all the information you are going to get—you now have to make sense of it.

You may have devised a rational, logical process to sort out and categorize the information, but the selection of what is important is essentially a judgment on your part. This is what your client is paying you for. Trust your intuition; don’t treat it as bias. If you are an internal consultant, you are often familiar with the organization, the people, and how they operate. Use this information.

When I am struggling to decide what is important in a pile of data, I sometimes read through all the notes, reports, and meeting summaries once. Then I put them aside. On a blank sheet of paper, I then list what I think is important in what I know—usually about four or five items. I let that be my guide on what to report and how to organize the report.