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How To Synthesize Information
or, The World Doesn’t Need Another Leadership Consultant, Part II
In my first post on the subject of leadership consultancy, I said that the main requirement to be an effective consultant or coach is to be able to synthesize and apply information in a way that is particularly tailored to meet your client’s needs. In this post, I want to dive into what that actually means.
The definition of “synthesis” is the ability to combine a number of things into a coherent whole. Synthesizing information, then, is the process of taking bits and pieces of information and creating a new and coherent thought from them. Sometimes these bits of information are related to each other, sometimes they aren’t. The beauty of synthesis is the ability to create new and innovative linkages between seemingly unrelated pieces of information.
This is where the best consultants and coaches make their money. Anybody can read something, reword it, and regurgitate it. The real work of leadership consulting lies in creating new frameworks, new ideas, new methodologies of applying existing information.
One of the best ways to learn and practice the ability to synthesize information is found in the methodology of Design Thinking. I’ll write a longer more detailed post covering the entirety of Design Thinking…
