Speaking Truth to Power: Yes, No, Maybe So, The Advisor's Dilemma

This article is an open invitation for wisdom from the broader community of insights practitioners (in #Strategy, #Market Intelligence, #Competitive Intelligence, #Consumer Insights, Strategic #Foresight, #Military Intelligence), who regularly engage with decision makers and must constantly be change managing and managing expectations.

We have all experienced a time during client and stakeholder engagements when speaking "Truth to Power," led straight into, perhaps the most pernicious of all trade-off #choices to #consulting and #advising relationships, the strategic #dilemma of whether to:

"Give the client stakeholder what they WANT, versus give them what they NEED."

This dilemma appears in many hero's journeys, notably in the film, "The Dark Knight" where Batman sacrifices his heroic brand so Harvy Dent can be remembered as a heroic martyr and still serve the greater good.

Do you remember how you were at odds, or perhaps put into an antagonistic position with one or more of your clients?

In the business (and military) world this dilemma emerges from several factors:

• Clients don't often know what they really #Want or #Need in their heart of hearts, especially when they haven't invested the time to articulate those things, leading them to borrow or parrot some kind of Want or Need they may have heard elsewhere because it 'sounded' like a fit.
• Clients that have verbalized their Wants or Needs may have done so with such great conviction and stubbornness that they become locked into unreasonable expectations that are near impossible to meet of even change as the 'client' holds all the power to determine their satisfaction or not.
• Clients are likely and often changing their Wants and Needs month to month, week to week, which makes filling whims and desires is a losing proposition.
• Clients confuse their Wants for Needs.
• Advisors are perversely incentivized to not lose the client's willingness to spend money and therefore tempted to give in to client demands, even if they are not in the best interest of the client in the long run.

Litterature on the topic helps define the difference between wants and needs, understand those wants and needs, suggests ways of managing #stakeholder expectations, and mange manage groups of people as an indirect approach.

Are you struggling to find content that addresses this dilemma specifically?

I suspect the root cause of the matter is that the choice is not ours to make. Unlike the Dark Knight (Batman) who can decide to be the hero or villain because Harvey Dent is dead and Commissioner Gordon is complicit. We need the client to make that choice. And though we strongly wish to nudge them, we are ultimately powerless in the dynamic of #expert & #client.

• I have erred on the side of 'give 'em what they want' and gotten it right about as many times as I have gotten it wrong.
• I have erred on the side of 'give 'em what they need' and gotten it right about as many times as I have gotten it wrong.
• I have alternated between each in various proportions, two of one, the three of the other, and visa versa to no avail.
• I have split the different down the mediocre middle to serve both options and gotten a lukewarm reception as a result.
• I have avoided the dilemma altogether by retreating back into scope review or totally rescope the engagement as a way to find common ground at the cost of engagement progress and time.

Beyond anticipating the Wants and Needs better than the client and reducing surprises to what may follow, we may have run out of strategic options.

How did the Oracle in The Matrix know when to intervene and when to step back so the protagonist could chart their own course because they were ready to hear what needed to be heard?

I sincerely hope that I'll be able to edit this article with an update and further options - but for now, I kindly invite you to post in the comments what manner in which you have solved this Advisor's Dilemma when speaking truth to power.