Keep a personal "consulting backlog"

In the leadup to a new client engagement, you’ll typically have a flurry of connections and plans and defining deliverables and success, so you can show up knowing what you need to do and get right to work.

Then you actually show up, and meet the people involved, and the real learning begins. Team communication issues, processes that’ve fallen out of sync with people’s needs, pains and blind spots people have just learned to live with…bringing in an outside perspective, it can be overwhelming to absorb everything at once, and impossible to change it all in one go.

Don’t.

Treat the consulting issues the way you would incoming issues for software: write them down, triage them, and tackle one at a time. You won’t make any headway trying to reset a culture that isn’t even yours, but you can know where you want to go, take a small step in that direction, and re-evaluate. Your notes will still be there for you. Make sure they are, though–unwritten, you’ll certainly forget, and soon be one of the insiders that can’t even see them.