It Depends. But on What?

The most honest answer that coaches and consultants can offer their clients is often, “It depends.” The phrase applies to almost any problem.

But that makes me wonder, on WHAT does IT depend?

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

Almost everything that coaches and consultants do can be boiled down to this generic statement:

WHEN context THEN advice

There is a tremendous amount of business advice available in the world, spread out over books, blogs, presentations, articles, videos, podcasts, and much more. Good advice has never before been so easy to find. But the same applies to bad advice as well, maybe even more so, and good advice offered at the wrong time is indistinguishable from bad advice. This means that, at any moment, people are surrounded by bad advice.

So, how can people find good advice?

The problem is that half of all advice is offered without context. (“Listen to me. Continuous flow is better than timeboxes!”) And the other half of all advice is given with context that is near-impossible to parse, search, or filter on. (“Check out the blog posts I wrote for startups!”)

How can we do better?

The Mind Settlers app that my Agility Scales team is building looks better every day. It offers excellent agile and lean practices from all over the world. One complaint that we now frequently get is that it’s “too much”. The advice is “overwhelming”, and the relevant things are “hard to find”. And this feedback intrigues me.

Does anyone think that there is “too much” music on Spotify? Are users complaining about the Amazon bookstore being “overwhelming”? Are the most interesting dates on Tinder and Grindr “hard to find” because of the large numbers of users? I doubt it. Large databases attract users; they don’t deter them. However, extensive filtering capabilities are needed to prevent information overload. And filtering requires context.

As a coach or consultant, the more you know about the context of a person, team, or business, the better you can filter the available advice and offer only that what makes sense. Offer the right help at the right time. WHEN something is true THEN you offer them a specific suggestion.

What are the context variables that coaches and consultants use when suggesting good practices to clients?

Now the Big Question is, what kinds of context are we looking for? What type of information do we want to filter on? Tinder allows users to filter on location, distance, age, and gender. Spotify gets us to filter by genre, mood, playlists, and artists. But how do we want to filter business advice? What are the context variables that coaches and consultants use when suggesting good practices to clients?

Here is my wishlist (in random order):

• Industry: What works for a bank may not work for a railroad company.
• Region: What works in France may not work in Japan.
• Job role: Product designers have different needs than project managers.
• Problem area: What works for design may not work for development.
• Team size: Big teams operate differently from small teams.
• Team location: Co-located teams work differently from remote teams.
• Team lifecycle: A newly formed team is not yet a high-performing team.
• Business lifecycle: A startup is not yet a scaleup.
• Method/framework: What works in Scrum may not work with Kanban.
• Product/service type: A web shop is not the same as an app.
• Experience level: A novice needs other advice than an expert does.
• Timing: Some practices depend on the previous time that you did them.
• Dependencies: Some practices depend on which other ones you use.
• Age: Young graduates often work differently from near-retirees.
• Attitude: Enthusiastic people need other advice than hostile workers.
• Time investment: Some things are easy fixes; others take a lot of time.
• Budget: Some advice requires an available budget; other things are free.
• History: After three failed transformations, a different approach is needed.
• Autonomy: A self-organizing team is not a team under command-and-control.
• Success rate: Unvalidated advice is different from highly-rated advice.

Did I forget any?

When you say, “It depends” to your client, what kinds of context do your favorite practices depend on?

Let me know in the comments! Your ideas may find their way into the Mind Settlers platform soon.