Cohabit with your client

By Linda Julian

Cohabiting with a client  -  temporarily "living with" your client to work on a project  -  turns conventional logic on its head.

It can pay huge dividends to forsake your comfortable, convenient habit of holing up in your own offices  -  especially for intense, pressured, time-critical projects.

There's no easier way to get client input to a critical project than to cohabit with them.

The best service solutions to complex problems are rarely developed by a single professional operating in isolation. 

Better to think of it as a duet, rather than a solo performance. 

Your client needs to be part of a complex project  -  seamlessly, from the beginning, right to the end.

By cohabitating through a project, you'll draw your client into a very intense problem-solving frame. 

You'll create powerful intimacy.  You'll learn and teach.  You'll show just how much knowledge, expertise, resource and time you're contributing.  You'll get close to information resources.  You'll be able to moderate any wild demands. 

Best of all, you'll be able to craft and co-produce a cohesive solution robust enough to last long after you've moved out.

A few cohabitation guidelines:

• check that your client's top-level, quality people commit to making time available to you
• live for your client while you cohabit  -  you don't have to be there 100% of the time, but you mustn't just move your other work onto their premises
• actively transfer knowledge and skills
• leverage every opportunity to increase intimacy and co-identification
• don't just survive it, enjoy it !

If you're still back in the dark ages where this would be "living in sin", try thinking of it as a modern approach to building enduring and strong relationships.