Part I. The Fire.

“The greatest discoveries rarely begin with an answer. They begin with a question that refuses to leave your head.”

There are questions that never let go of you.

Not because they are complicated.

Precisely because they look so simple.

Why does one person buy and another does not?

Why does one manager get his people moving without much effort, while another keeps pulling and pushing?

Why do some organisations manage to change, while others talk about change for years without anything actually happening?

I carried those questions around with me for years.

Not from a textbook.

Not because I wanted to develop a theory.

But because I kept running into them in practice.

And looking back, I know my search began far earlier than I thought at the time.

The adviser who thought he was doing well

When I started advising, I was convinced that a good conversation was about knowledge.

The more I knew, the better I could help someone.

That made sense, too.

If someone has a financial question, you have to know what you are talking about.

You have to understand the figures.

You have to know the options.

You have to know what the consequences of different choices are.

You have to be able to explain risks.

You have to be able to show alternatives.

So that is exactly what I did.

I prepared conversations well.

I gathered information.

I made calculations.

I explained.

And when someone asked a question, I tried to answer it as completely as possible.

I thought that was where my value lay.

In my knowledge.

In my solution.

In my ability to make complicated things understandable.

That turned out to be only partly true.

Because at a certain point I noticed something.

The people sitting across from me could usually follow my explanation perfectly well.

They understood what I was telling them.

They saw the advantages.

They agreed with me.

And still they made no decision.

Sometimes a follow-up appointment was made.

Sometimes they said:

“Let me think it over.”

Or:

“I will get back to you.”

Or:

“We need to discuss this at home first.”

And sometimes nothing happened at all.

I found that difficult.

Because if someone does not understand, you can explain it again. If someone has an objection, you can discuss it. If someone is missing information, you can give them that information.

But what do you do when someone understands everything and still does nothing?

In the beginning I had no good answer to that.

My story

A folder under my arm

In the late nineties I worked as a financial adviser.

My job looked simple.

I helped people arrange their financial future properly.

At least…

That is what I thought.

I drove to people’s homes.

With a folder under my arm.

I was prepared.

I knew the products.

I knew the figures.

I knew the tax rules.

I knew what I had to say.

I knew which advantages to name.

I knew how to handle objections.

I had learned what a good sales conversation was supposed to look like.

And that is what I did.

Properly.

Professionally.

By the book.

But there was one problem.

A lot of people bought nothing.

I found that strange.

Because I was not selling a luxury product.

I was not selling a new television.

Not a car.

Not a holiday.

I was selling something I thought almost everyone would consider important.

A supplementary pension.

An annuity.

Financial security for later.

Who on earth wants less income later on?

That was so obvious to me that I did not even question it.

Surely everyone wants a decent pension?

So if I told someone he could improve his pension, surely that person would be interested?

That is how I thought.

And that is exactly where my mistake began.

“My pension is perfectly well arranged, isn’t it?”

I still remember how I opened conversations.

I sat across from a couple at the kitchen table.

I opened my folder.

And said:

“Good afternoon, sir, madam. I am here to help you arrange your pension properly.”

Looking back, that sounds pleasant enough.

Helpful, even.

But almost always there was a reaction.

“What do you mean? My pension is perfectly well arranged, isn’t it?”

Then I would start explaining.

That it could be even better.

That there were tax advantages.

That an annuity could offer extra security.

That it was wise to look ahead now.

I told them.

I backed it up.

I calculated.

I gave examples.

I did exactly what I had been taught.

And still, many conversations ended with the same words.

“We will think it over.”

Or sometimes, more honestly:

“We do not really need it, actually.”

I would drive home with a strange feeling.

Because I did not understand it.

Why did they not see what I saw?

Surely I had something useful to offer?

Surely I was not selling them something they did not need at all?

I had come to help them.

That, at least, was my conviction.

So I got better

Like every salesperson who takes himself seriously, I drew a conclusion from that.

Not:

perhaps I am doing something wrong.

But:

I have to get better.

So I started taking training courses.

New techniques.

New arguments.

New closing questions.

New ways of handling objections.

I learned how to steer conversations.

How to present the advantages of a product more effectively.

How to deal with doubt.

How to guide someone towards a decision.

I got better.

It felt that way, too.

I knew more.

I presented better.

I responded to objections faster.

I knew more techniques.

But something strange happened.

The result barely changed.

Looking back, I can see exactly what I was doing.

When something did not work, I reached for another match.

But I did not know that yet.

A conversation that changed everything

The turning point did not come during a sales training.

Not because I got a better product.

And not because I suddenly became a brilliant salesperson.

It came through a conversation.

An ordinary conversation.

At someone’s home.

And really it began because for the first time I did not do something.

I stopped talking.

And started looking.

Take a look around you

I no longer looked at my folder.

Not at the policy.

Not at the pension statement.

Not at the tax advantages I was so keen to explain.

I looked at the people across from me.

And at their home.

On the wall hung photographs of their children.

On the drive stood two cars.

Beside the house stood a caravan.

There was a dog that came bounding up to me.

It was clear that these people were happy with their lives.

They had built something.

A house.

A family.

A way of living.

And suddenly I asked myself a different question.

Not:

“How do I get these people to buy an annuity?”

But:

“What actually matters to these people?”

That was an entirely different question.

I asked a different question

I did not start about pensions.

I did not start about money.

I did not start about an annuity.

I said:

“What a beautiful place you have here. Have you lived here long?”

That was all.

No technique.

No rehearsed icebreaker.

I was simply curious.

And something happened.

The atmosphere changed.

They started talking.

About their children.

About holidays.

About the renovation.

About the neighbourhood.

About the caravan.

About their plans.

About their lives.

And for the first time I was not having a sales conversation.

I was having a conversation with people.

That difference looks small.

It was enormous.

What I was actually collecting

At that moment I realised I had gathered far more information in ten minutes than I could ever have got out of a standard sales conversation.

I knew they loved their house.

I knew they had no intention of simply moving.

I knew their children mattered to them.

I knew they liked going on holiday.

I knew their way of living had value to them.

But I had discovered something else as well.

Without calling it that at the time.

I had not only looked at what they had.

I had looked at what they wanted to keep.

That is something quite different.

Then came the pension papers

Only later did the papers come out on the table.

We looked at the income they had now.

Then at the income they could expect later.

I did not start explaining straight away.

That was harder than it sounds.

Because I knew exactly what I would normally say.

I knew the figures.

I knew the products.

I knew the arguments.

My head was full of answers.

But this time I kept my mouth shut.

I only pointed at the figures.

And asked a question.

“You love the way you live now, don’t you?”

They nodded.

“Yes, of course.”

I pointed at the figures again.

And asked:

“And honestly, do you think this income will be enough to keep living that way?”

Then something happened.

It went quiet.

Very quiet.

They were no longer looking at me.

They were looking at each other.

I will never forget that moment.

The twenty seconds

I still remember sitting there.

And saying nothing.

Those were perhaps the hardest twenty seconds of my entire career.

Every fibre in my body wanted to say something.

I wanted to explain.

I wanted to name the gap between their current income and their future income.

I wanted to tell them what the options were.

I wanted to use my knowledge.

That was what I had been trained for, after all.

But I did not do it.

I waited.

And precisely there something happened that I had never understood before.

The decision did not arise in my head.

The decision arose in theirs.

I no longer had to convince anyone.

All I had left to do was ask a question.

“Would you like me to help you bridge that gap?”

The answer was yes.

No annuity

Now look closely at what did not happen in that conversation.

I did not talk about tax advantages.

I did not handle an objection.

I did not use a closing technique.

I did not tell a complicated story about an annuity.

In fact:

I barely used the word annuity at all.

And still they wanted to go ahead.

At the time I mostly saw that as a win.

I had had a conversation.

I had helped a customer.

I had sold something.

Good.

Done.

Or so I thought.

What I did not know then was that I had just discovered something I would only truly understand twenty years later.

That evening

That evening I sat at home at the kitchen table.

As I so often did after a working day.

My diary lay open in front of me.

I looked at the conversations that had gone well.

And at the ones that had ended with:

“We will think it over.”

But this time I did not try to recall what I had said.

I tried to remember what they had said.

That turned out to be an important difference.

In the conversations that had stalled, I had been doing nearly all the talking.

I told them.

I explained.

I backed it up.

I persuaded.

I defended my advice.

In the conversations that had gone well, something else happened.

There the customer did the talking.

About his children.

His house.

His plans.

His business.

His future.

And suddenly I saw something I had not seen before.

Even more information

I thought perhaps I had missed something.

Perhaps I had not explained clearly enough why my solution was a good one.

So I went back to my story.

I told them the advantages one more time.

I showed them another calculation.

I gave another example.

I tried to make it more concrete.

Sometimes that worked.

But often it did not.

And when it did not work, my first conclusion was the obvious one:

I had not explained it well enough yet.

So my explanation had to get better.

In hindsight that sounds almost childishly simple.

But at the time it felt logical.

I was an adviser, after all.

My job was to help people make a good choice.

So if someone did not decide, I evidently had to do more.

More explaining.

More information.

More arguments.

More examples.

More certainty.

And with that I was getting closer and closer to a false conviction.

The conviction that every decision was ultimately an information problem.

If only someone knew enough, he would decide of his own accord.

That is what I believed.

Until practice showed me something else, over and over again.

A conversation that stayed with me

There is one experience that took on a different meaning for me much later.

At the time it was simply a conversation.

A conversation like so many others.

But afterwards it became one of the situations that set me thinking.

I sat across from a customer.

I had done my preparation.

I knew the situation.

I knew what I wanted to say.

And I was convinced I had a good story.

I told him what I had prepared.

I explained what the options were.

I discussed the consequences.

I showed what certain choices could mean.

The customer listened.

He asked questions.

I answered them.

The conversation actually went well.

That matters.

There was no conflict.

No resistance.

No argument.

No moment at which anyone said:

“I do not believe that.”

Or:

“I disagree.”

On the contrary.

The customer seemed to understand all of it.

And still no decision came.

I went home feeling I had done my job well.

But somewhere something kept nagging.

Because if I had done it so well, why did nothing happen?

Everyone was right

That slowly became a recurring pattern.

The entrepreneur was right.

I was right.

The solution was logical.

The arguments were sound.

The figures added up.

The information was available.

And still the situation stayed the same.

Everyone was right.

And it still did not work.

That eventually became a far more important observation for me than I realised at the time.

Because perhaps the problem was not that anyone was wrong.

Perhaps the problem was somewhere else entirely.

Perhaps being right was not enough to get someone moving.

That sounds simple.

But when you have worked for years on the assumption that a good solution leads to a decision by itself, it is an uncomfortable discovery.

Because then you have to look again at your own role.

The question behind the question

I began asking myself a different question.

Not:

“Why is this person not doing the logical thing?”

But:

“What is missing that keeps this person from moving?”

That was a completely different question.

With the first question you look at the other person.

With the second you look at the situation.

And perhaps more importantly:

you also look at yourself.

Because when someone does not move, that can of course be down to that person.

But it may also be that you have failed to see something.

That you made an assumption.

That you went to the solution too quickly.

That you considered something important that the other person did not care about at all.

Or that you thought there was urgency, while the other felt none whatsoever.

From that moment on, the way I looked at things changed.

Not all at once.

Not overnight.

But slowly.

I began to look at conversations differently.

I listened differently.

I paid more attention to what people said.

But also to what they did not say.

And above all to the difference between words and behaviour.

Because there was something there.

People say what they think

A customer may say:

“Yes, that is indeed sensible.”

But nothing has been decided by that.

Someone may say:

“We really ought to do that.”

But that does not mean he is going to do it either.

Someone may say:

“I completely agree with you.”

And then do nothing for six months.

I found that interesting.

Because what is someone actually saying at such a moment?

He may be saying exactly what he thinks.

He may genuinely mean it.

There need be no lie behind it.

But between being convinced of something and acting on it lies an enormous space.

That became clearer and clearer.

And that space was exactly what I had to learn to look at.

A decision is something other than agreement

So I began to distinguish between two things I had often confused before.

Agreement.

And decision.

If someone agrees with me, it means he can follow my thinking.

If someone decides, he attaches behaviour to it.

That is something else.

A decision has consequences.

Responsibility comes with it.

Something has to change.

Something has to be done.

And that makes a decision personal.

In hindsight that explained a great deal about the conversations I had had.

I thought that at the end of a conversation I had to convince a customer.

But perhaps I did not have to convince at all.

Perhaps I first had to understand why someone did not yet see a reason to act.

That was an important difference.

The problem with logic

I have often thought that logic gets people moving.

If A is true and B is true, then C follows.

That is how a sum works.

But that is not how a person works.

A person can find something logical and still not do it.

That does not mean people are irrational.

It means logic is only one component of a decision.

An entrepreneur does not only look at the return on an investment.

He also looks at his cash flow.

At his staff.

At his time.

At his worries.

At what is going on at home.

At earlier experiences.

At whether he trusts the person sitting across from him.

At whether he has to do something today or whether tomorrow will do.

All of those things exist at the same time.

And still, as an adviser, I often try to give one answer.

In hindsight that is a strange idea.

The story I told myself

For years I had told myself that I helped people by giving them the right solution.

That story was not entirely wrong.

But it was not complete.

Because a solution only has value once someone is willing to do something with it.

A perfect piece of advice that disappears into a drawer changes nothing.

A less perfect solution that someone actually gets to work with can mean far more.

That did not mean knowledge was unimportant.

On the contrary.

Knowledge remains necessary.

But knowledge alone is not enough.

That was one of the first hard lessons.

The situation at the kitchen table

Some insights do not arise behind a desk.

They arise in places where you do not expect them.

For me that often happened at kitchen tables.

A conversation at a kitchen table is different from a presentation.

You sit close together.

You see how someone reacts.

You hear the words, but you also see the doubt.

You notice when someone disengages.

You see when someone becomes enthusiastic.

And sometimes you see something you would easily miss in a formal presentation.

Namely:

someone is listening, but is not really engaged with what you are saying.

That is an important difference.

So I started listening more and more to the questions behind the questions.

When someone asked:

“What does that cost?”

I no longer tried simply to answer with the amount.

I wanted to understand why he was asking.

Was the amount too high?

Was he afraid of making the wrong decision?

Did he want to know whether the investment would pay for itself?

Or was money not the real problem at all?

Those questions changed the conversation.

An advisory conversation is not a contest

I also had to learn something else.

I did not have to win.

That may sound strange coming from someone with a sales background.

But if you approach a conversation as a contest in which you have to convince the other person, you automatically listen differently.

You listen for an opening.

For an objection.

For a chance to slip in your argument.

But if you approach the conversation as an investigation, you listen differently.

Then you try to understand.

What is really going on here?

What matters to this person?

Where does his doubt sit?

What is holding him back?

What would have to change before a decision becomes logical for him?

Those are different questions.

And they produce a different conversation.

The moment I began to see it

The peculiar thing about insights is that afterwards they often look obvious.

That was the case here too.

I looked back at all kinds of conversations.

And I kept seeing the same movement.

I gave information.

The other person understood the information.

We agreed.

But somewhere something was missing.

Sometimes that was trust.

Sometimes it was stake.

Sometimes there was simply no reason to do anything now.

And sometimes I did not know myself what was missing.

But that last one mattered most.

Because as long as I thought I already had the answer, I kept looking for arguments.

Once I accepted that I did not always have the answer, I started asking questions.

That is where something began to change.

From convincing to understanding

As a result I began to look at sales differently.

Sales became less and less about convincing someone.

It became about making visible what is needed to make a decision possible.

That is a subtle difference.

Because you cannot force someone to find something important.

You cannot force someone to trust you.

And you cannot impose real urgency either.

What you can do is conduct a conversation in such a way that those things become visible.

That is something else.

You do not automatically create the fire.

You first discover whether there is fuel.

Whether there is oxygen.

Whether there is heat.

That thought would later become the basis of the model I eventually came to call the Fire Triangle.

But I was not there yet.

First I had to understand what was actually happening.

The danger of a good solution

A good solution can even become a problem.

That sounds strange.

But the more convinced you are of your solution, the greater the chance that you go to that solution too quickly.

You see possibilities.

You know the technique.

You know what is possible.

So you want the other person to see it too.

But the other person is not standing where you are.

He does not have the same information.

Not the same responsibility.

Not the same worries.

And not the same stake.

What is an opportunity to you may be a risk to him.

What is logical to you may be too early for him.

What is urgent to you may not feel urgent at all to him.

There is nothing wrong in that.

That is simply reality.

The first real change

So the biggest change in the way I worked was not a new sales technique.

It was a different attitude.

I no longer had to keep proving that my solution was good.

I had to learn to look.

To listen.

To ask.

And sometimes to do nothing.

That last one I found hardest.

Because doing nothing feels like contributing nothing.

But sometimes a conversation is only good when at the end of it you have not sold a solution.

Because you have first established what is really going on.

That may be less spectacular.

But it is more honest.

What I did not know then

At that point I did not yet know this insight would grow far beyond sales.

I was still thinking from within my own field.

I thought about customers.

About advice.

About decisions.

About conversations.

But slowly I began to recognise the same patterns outside sales as well.

In organisations.

In change programmes.

In management.

In collaboration.

In innovation.

In policy.

Everywhere I saw the same thing happen.

People know what they have to do.

And still they do not do it.

Organisations know they have to change.

And still nothing changes.

Teams agree.

And still the problems remain.

Everyone is right.

And it still does not work.

That was when I began to understand this was not only a sales problem.

It was a human problem.

The question that remained

By then I had learned no longer to ask only:

“What should this person do?”

I asked:

“Why would he do it?”

But even that was not enough.

Because even when someone has a reason, he can still wait.

So a third question came along:

“Why would he do it now?”

And that is where it started to get genuinely interesting.

Because between wanting and doing lies time.

Between understanding and deciding lies time.

Between deciding and acting there is sometimes time again.

And in that time all sorts of things can happen.

Doubt.

Distraction.

Other priorities.

New information.

Fear.

Or simply:

nothing.

The decision slowly slips into the background.

I saw that more and more often.

Everyone was right. But the fire was not burning.

Looking back, I can summarise it like this.

For years I had looked at the quality of my solution.

Later I learned to look at the circumstances in which someone had to decide.

That was a fundamental change.

Not:

“How do I get someone to act?”

But:

“What is needed before someone wants to move of his own accord?”

That difference looks small.

It is the difference between pushing and understanding.

Between convincing and investigating.

Between offering a solution and making a decision possible.

And perhaps that is the most important lesson from my early years as an adviser.

A person does not move because you have a good solution.

He moves when the circumstances arise in which moving becomes logical, important and possible for him.

I could not capture that in a model back then.

I did not have the words yet.

But I had found the problem.

And from that moment on I could no longer not see it.

Someone thinks it is a good idea.

But only when behaviour follows do we know that something has really changed.

So the most important question after a good conversation is not:

“Was the other person convinced?”

But:

“What makes him actually move now?”

Once you see that difference, you start listening differently.

And when you listen differently, you start asking different questions.

And when you ask different questions, you sometimes discover that the problem is not at all where you thought it was.

For me that was the beginning.

Not of a sales technique.

But of a way of looking.

Perhaps he understands it perfectly well, but it means nothing to him yet.

And perhaps something else is going on that you have not yet seen.

So the question is not:

“Why is he not listening?”

The question is:

“What is missing?”

That question would eventually lead me to the next word.

A small word.

A word I heard more and more often in conversations.

A word that at first sight seems nothing special.

But that turned out to say far more than I thought.

Actually.