Five Lessons From My Last Consulting Project

The port printed on my clients' tickets wasn't the port where the ship was docked. Nobody had told the ground team. I found out hours before a group of Chinese clients was due to board a river cruise in the Netherlands. The change had been made weeks earlier. The notification existed. It had simply stopped somewhere in the chain — head office, agency, ground level — before reaching the one person standing on the quay. By 17:30, everyone was on board. No delays. No complaints. From the client's side, nothing had happened at all. That was the point. I've just written up five lessons from a month of ground-level work with Chinese client groups — arrivals, handovers, and that boarding day. The short version: Information rarely fails at the source. It fails in the chain. The genuine product is certainty, not logistics. The exhaustion is cognitive, not physical. And the one I keep coming back to: trust is built in operational moments, not in proposals. A Chinese client who watches you solve a problem calmly at 15:45 on a quay will believe your strategic advice in a way no credentials page can achieve. Frameworks describe. Fieldwork convinces. Full post on the blog — link in the comments. If your organisation sits between Chinese and European ways of working and something keeps quietly going wrong in the handover, that gap has a structure. It can be found and named. Comment CLARITY or send me a DM and I'll show you where to look.