Anticipating the Waves: How Professional Teams Can Stay Relevant.

This article picks up from our January discussion on Riding the Waves: How Teams Can Navigate Change and Create Value, a framework that helps teams stay relevant, committed, and effective. We explored three key activities: taking stock, committing, and coordinating—using surfing as a metaphor to illustrate these principles.

Let’s now go deeper into the first activity—taking stock.

Seasoned surfers don’t just wait for waves to hit them; they paddle into position in advance, reading the conditions and adjusting as they go. In teams that provide services, this means recognising where client priorities are heading, where new risks and opportunities lie, and where your team/firm’s expertise can add the most value. The most valuable teams are those who don’t just answer today’s questions but help clients see what’s coming next.

You can do this in three ways:

1. Sharing Your Perspective
   Clients often focus on their own way of doing things and may not see broader shifts that can impact them. Consultants and advisors get a broader view, and one of the most valuable things you can do is offer perspectives to clients on industry or market developments that are likely to impact them in the future. This isn’t about pushing an agenda—it’s about helping clients anticipate what’s coming, making sense of change, and understanding risks and opportunities they might otherwise miss.

   For example, an engineering firm working with property developers could bring insights about new regulatory changes or emerging technologies in sustainable design. If a client is planning a large-scale development, these insights could help them future-proof their project. When you take the initiative to share perspectives like this, you’re not just responding to change—you’re helping your clients stay ahead of it.

   The more you do this, the more valuable your perspective becomes. Each conversation gives you new insights, helping you refine your thinking and spot patterns. Over time, you develop a sharper instinct for what really matters to clients—what’s coming down the pipeline that they haven’t yet seen.

2. Listening for Explicit Needs
   Many professionals already do this well—understanding what work is coming up, what projects clients are planning, and what problems they need solved. Good client relationships are built on these conversations, ensuring you’re positioned to offer help when needed. Teams and firms that do this well don’t just wait for a tender or an RFP—they stay close enough to clients to spot opportunities early and provide value before competitors do. And they do the research to better understand what their client is concerned about and how they might be able to support them.

3. Listening for Deeper Concerns
   This is where the best teams separate themselves from the rest. The work that everyone knows about:
   — the RFPs, the tenders, the obvious projects
   — is already competitive. The best professionals listen deeper, tuning into the concerns, frustrations, and inefficiencies that clients haven’t yet articulated
   — but that shape their decisions.

   Think of this like spotting a wave on the horizon before anyone else. It’s not yet obvious, but by the time it reaches the crowd, you’re already on it.

   For example, a legal team advising a major infrastructure project might initially be asked to handle contract negotiations. That’s the explicit need. But through deeper conversations, they uncover that the client is frustrated by constant project delays due to misalignment between contractors. The real concern isn’t just legal risk—it’s how to improve coordination across multiple stakeholders.

   Instead of just doing the contracts, the legal team anticipates the larger challenge and proposes a new approach: embedding legal and risk advisory earlier in project planning to proactively address these coordination issues. This positions them not just as legal experts, but as strategic partners shaping how the project unfolds.

   In other situations, with existing clients, it’s important to be asking for their perspective on their experience of working with you, to bring to the surface what clients might be feeling or saying when you’re not there, that shape their future buying decisions. Do this in a matter of fact way, without being needy, and when you say that you want to keep improving the value you provide, and listen well, it’s incredible what you learn and how much this helps, even if there is a short-term sting.

   There’s an obvious but often overlooked factor in all of this: how you show up matters. You can read about the importance of moods and these conversations in a previous post, Moods and Business Development, some thoughts for Professionals.

So, what can teams to do enhance this process?

1. Invite other team members who may not know the client to the conversations, to listen and share their perspectives. Having different people in those conversations creates a different energy, which can result in new ideas and possibilities. This requires confidence in your own relationship with the client.

2. Compare notes and look for patterns. This can result in the seeds of new offerings and also a great way for the team to learn.

Over time, your team builds a sharper instinct for what’s shifting and where the risks and opportunities lie.