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The Good Consultant · Part II: Seeing · Early draft

Meet Them Where They Are

Storytelling

The best stories don't explain reality. They help people see it for themselves.

Storytelling is one of the most underestimated skills in consulting.

Not because consultants don't communicate, but because many mistake communication for storytelling. We present evidence, describe architectures, explain strategies and defend recommendations. We assume that if our thinking is rigorous enough, the audience will naturally arrive at the same conclusion.

Experience has taught me otherwise.

People don't arrive in a meeting as blank slates. They bring their own experiences, assumptions, incentives and concerns. A founder, a developer, a product manager and a board member may all be looking at the same problem, yet each is seeing a different story.

The role of the consultant isn't simply to present information. It's to understand the story the audience is already telling itself and then create a bridge to a better one.

That bridge is empathy.

Not empathy as kindness, although kindness rarely hurts. Empathy as genuine curiosity. Curiosity about how people see the world, what matters to them, what they fear losing and what they hope to achieve. Without that understanding, even the most technically correct recommendation can feel disconnected from reality.

One of the questions I ask myself before almost every workshop is remarkably simple:

Where does this audience think the story begins?

The answer is rarely where I would choose to begin.

A board wants to understand risk before architecture.

An engineering team wants to understand constraints before strategy.

A founder wants confidence before process.

Each audience needs an on-ramp. If I begin too far ahead, I'm asking them to perform unnecessary mental gymnastics just to understand why I'm saying what I'm saying. That's effort they shouldn't have to expend. My responsibility is to reduce that cognitive distance, not increase it.

Good storytelling is therefore an act of design.

Every example, every analogy, every diagram and every question should make it easier for the audience to move from their current understanding to a new one. If they have to work harder to understand me than they do to understand the problem, I've probably designed the story badly.

This is one of the reasons I enjoy Domain Storytelling so much.

Its value isn't really the notation. It's that it begins with the language people already use and the work they actually perform. Instead of introducing abstract models too early, it invites people to tell their own story. The consultant's role is simply to listen carefully enough to discover the important parts, organise them, and reflect them back in a way that creates shared understanding.

That requires attention to detail.

The phrase that keeps appearing in different conversations. The awkward pause before someone answers. The contradiction between what the documentation says and what people actually do. The smile that appears when someone says, "We've always done it this way."

These details are rarely accidental. They are clues about the real story.

In recent years, AI has become extraordinarily good at generating words. That's both exciting and dangerous. It can help organise ideas, improve clarity and challenge assumptions, but it also makes it remarkably easy to produce something that sounds convincing without saying anything original.

The internet is already filling with what people have started calling AI slop — content that is technically fluent but emotionally empty, detached from experience and impossible to defend.

I don't think the answer is to avoid AI. Quite the opposite.

Use it generously.

Challenge your thinking with it.

Edit with it.

Research with it.

Explore ideas with it.

But never outsource your judgement.

The stories you tell should still be yours. They should be grounded in observations you've made, conversations you've had and experiences you've lived. If someone asks why you chose a particular story, example or metaphor, you should be able to explain every choice. That's the difference between using AI as a tool and allowing it to become your author.

Ultimately, storytelling isn't about persuasion.

It's about helping people arrive at understanding together.

The best stories don't leave an audience impressed by the storyteller. They leave them seeing their own world more clearly than they did before. That's a far more valuable outcome, and one that stays with people long after the meeting has ended.

Questions to leave with