Giving advice and the location of meaning

I am currently at Gartner’s IT Symposium in Orlando. Here, Gartner analysts give presentations, workshops, round table discussions etc. and conduct one-on-one meetings with clients on a topic of their choice. It is an incredible time to try to give value to clients, and also to learn. I lost count, but I think I have participated in several hundred Gartner events over the last twenty years, given hundreds of presentations, and had several thousand one-on-one meetings. When I was young in the game I felt I had to have exactly the right answer to every client’s question, and they should walk away with the answer, ready to implement, and that that was largely based on information that came from me and Gartner, which they didn’t have before the meeting. I felt desperately uncomfortable if the client didn’t get/ like my suggestions, or (in my view) misinterpreted them. Now I feel that I should listen carefully to the client’s perception of their issue (which often contains part of the solution), ask some probing questions to understand more, and reveal more of their knowledge, then hopefully combine it with some input from me/ Gartner, to at least move them forward in their thinking on their issue. This reminds me of the question of the location of meaning. When you read a book, where is the meaning. Is it mainly in the book? Is it in your relationship with the book? Or is the book mainly a trigger to unlock meaning that is already inside you? The extreme example of this is the Chinese divination system called I Ching. You randomly select one of 64 fortunes, then read that page in the I Ching book. Each page contains incredibly general stuff like “the superior man who has breadth of character carries the outer world.”  I thought that made no sense, but I realized the statements in the I Ching are designed to be general enough to allow you to unlock the knowledge and meaning already in your head. In a similar vein, I listened to a podcast with comedian Jimmy Carr this morning. He said that his job is drug dealer, but he sells his audience drugs that are already inside them: dopamine and endorphins. I think it is important for us to keep this ‘location of meaning’ idea in our heads whenever we communicate with others. Certainly if we are seeking to give advice. #Unthink #Unask #Unlearn #Gartner #GartnerSYM