When I was 29 I became a consultant.

I think I’d been practicing for some time, at least since high school, when I had friends instead of boyfriends and counseled them so much my mother called me Dear Abby. But when I was almost 30 I opened my own little business. It was all about retirement plans for other small businesses, and it involved recordkeeping and clerical work too, but much of my time has been spent trying to figure what my clients want, where the mistakes are, and how to get through.

That’s it. Those are the three crucial elements to the job. Put in more words, here’s what I’ve learned.

The first challenge is to determine what the question is. That can take the most time but you can’t move forward effectively without it, and you probably can’t miss once you have it. It’s a bit like being a doctor, where the challenge is usually in the diagnosis because once you have that, you have paths to the cure.

The second element, not always present but often encountered, is to understand how the mistakes got made that probably created the question (malady) in the first place. This part may mean mimicking the client, being the client in a way and trying to follow the path already taken to see where it veered. Imagination is involved, and as the mystery unravels you get ideas for solution.

The third part of the job, the part most often not done, is to implement that solution. The doctor can prescribe the appropriate medicine but if the patient doesn’t take it the illness will persist. I can’t tell you how often I’ve left a good meeting, where useful conclusions were reached and hope for improvement was obtained, only to go nowhere. Participants leave with the best of intentions, but they’re busy people with habits already formed about how they spend their time, and they’re not about to create time for new approaches unless you map the approaches, at least sketchily, for them.

If you’re trying to answer a question, to solve a problem, proceed with a punch list. Then hit those punches. Forget efficiency; aim to be effective.