Consulting is all about having difficult conversations. Good consultants should be interviewing the client as much as the client is interviewing them. The OJ te

Consulting is all about having difficult conversations. Good consultants should be interviewing the client as much as the client is interviewing them. The OJ test sounds like a pretty good test conversation to have. As a consultant, you're entering a world where really smart people have already taken a run at the problem and failed. They probably know all the angles. Too much optimism or too much negativity is not going to help -- in fact, it can lead to a lot of wasted money. I usually say something like "That's looks impossible. Let's figure it out." Some phrase that both acknowledges the difficulty and offers some optimism. As trite as it sounds, what they say is true: It's a journey. The really wild thing is that even when the client describes something that's dead easy? It's still a journey. That's because it's not easy to them. It's just easy to you. Most times the conversations around problems that are easily solved are the most difficult to have. The client has already thrown away the answer (mostly in my experience because they didn't understand the answer in the first place even though they thought they did) and your job is to get them to reconsider it. Also, hand out oranges at the door at put juicers on each table. Then each person can have as much OJ as they want as recently-squeezed as they'd like. (Solving the problem, of course, is not the point of the essay)