Here's how you can use your creative skills as a consultant to deliver innovative solutions.

To fully unleash your creativity, it's crucial to empathize with your client's perspective. By stepping into their shoes, you gain valuable insights into their goals, aspirations, and pain points. Active listening becomes more than just a technique; it becomes a gateway to understanding the essence of what they're trying to achieve. This empathy not only informs your creative process but also builds a stronger foundation for collaboration, ensuring that your solutions resonate deeply with your client's vision and objectives.

To leverage your creative skills as a consultant: 1. Challenge conventional approaches and explore alternative solutions. 2. Use brainstorming sessions to generate new ideas and perspectives. 3. Employ visual tools like mind maps or prototypes to illustrate and refine ideas. 4. Stay updated with industry trends to inspire innovative approaches. 5. Foster a collaborative environment that encourages creative thinking among team members. 6. Test your creative solutions in smaller, controlled environments before full-scale implementation. 7. Present your innovative ideas clearly, focusing on the benefits and potential impacts for the client.

Every consultant is unique, thats what makes us valuable. 2 consultants may see the same situation and come up with 2 radically different solutions/designs. Dont let this hold you back. Use your creativity to serve your end customer as you see fit. Some one may be better, but they arent in the room :-)

The key for innovation to happen is to form supportive team environment. To allow all voices to be heard and ideas to be shared openly. That's how you set the ground for the ideation to start. As a leader, listen to diverse voices, even the most silent ones. Ask the right questions to support your team, but do not force your opinions.

Creativity is one thing, but you have to ground it in reality. Apply different frameworks to fact check your creativity and ensure industry experts agree with you.

This is your moment of truth. Your creative solution grounded using industry proven frameworks, need to be prototyped. Once the prototyping is successful, it is now ready for implementation and scaling.

Delivering impact is an important consulting concept. Why? Because consulting is expensive. More prestigious is the firm higher the expectations. Making impact is also something that can be measured it even can be part of contract. Example: You are reinventing marketing functions of automotive brand with Generative AI, they expect to deliver $35 million / year savings on marketing cost, while also increase their market share in Europe by 5%. If you deliver this - it’s called impact. Opposite of impact is when client hires forty developers in India and pay them fix-price for five years. It saves money but it’s not linked to impact KPIs like a real transformation partnership. That’s why impact matters because impact changes status quo.

You are holding yourself back if you are not leveraging your creative side for consulting. Your client comes to you for a solution that is not “been there done that”. Lean on your creative thinking. Check out other industries to draw inspiration. In consulting, there is no wrong answer, but there are better solutions that only YOU as a consultant can provide. There is no need to reinvent the wheel for every case, but it is paramount to understand your client’s unique position for crafting a solution that is in line with their values and delivers the impact that they are aiming to achieve.