In one, something clicks. Your questions land. Their answers feel genuine. The conversation feels relaxed. And by the time the consultation is done, working together feels like the obvious choice. For them and for you.

In the other, that same feeling never quite arrives. The conversation feels harder to make sense of. They seem to be looking to you for answers, but you’re not entirely sure what question you’re answering. You leave feeling as though you were having two different conversations. Nothing was technically wrong and still, somehow, you leave questioning yourself.

Ask a florist how they know a consultation went well and you’ll usually hear some version of the same thing:

“We just clicked.”

“The chemistry was really good.”

“They were just my kind of people.”

It feels true because it fits a story most of us accept: that some people simply have chemistry with others, while some don’t.

The trouble is, describing chemistry this way tells us very little. It explains the feeling. But not what created it.

Which makes chemistry sound like it exists somewhere between personality, timing and good luck, rather than in anything that happened during the consultation itself. It makes us wonder if some couples are simply easier to connect with, some florists are naturally more magnetic, or if the outcome was largely determined before either of you had said very much at all.

But if that were true, there would be little to nothing we could do about it. No way to improve beyond trying to become more likeable, hoping the next couple feels easier to talk to, or waiting for chemistry to magically appear.

There is something revealing in the way florists explain the consultations that feel successful compared with those that leave them questioning what went wrong. When a consultation works, the explanation usually exists somewhere outside of us. We credit the couple for being easy to talk to, the conversation for flowing naturally or some intangible compatibility between us - as though the success belonged to the dynamic itself.

But when a consultation doesn’t go the way we hoped, it’s rarely the chemistry itself we question. It’s ourselves.

I was too nervous. I talked too much. I should have asked better questions. I explained the pricing badly. I’m just not very good at sales.

Chemistry becomes the explanation for success. And we become the explanation for failure. One gives the outcome to something we cannot control. The other turns it into a judgement about who we are. But neither necessarily tells us what happened inside the conversation.

This is not an argument against self-reflection. Sometimes we do rush, interrupt or become so focused on offering the right answer that we stop listening as carefully to the question. There is enormous value in being willing to examine your own contribution honestly. But there is a difference between examining yourself as one factor in the outcome and appointing yourself as the entire explanation.

Self-awareness asks: What happened inside that conversation, and where might I have contributed to it?

Self-blame decides: Something about me was inadequate.

And in our desire to make sense of things, we can reach a verdict about ourselves before we have properly investigated the interaction. Responsibility without understanding is not accountability, it’s self-blame.

The problem is not only that it feels terrible. It can also send us away to improve the wrong thing. If we decide the issue was confidence, we work on being more confident. If we decide we spoke too much, we force ourselves to speak less. If we decide the chemistry was missing, we conclude that the couple was simply not the right fit. But what if none of those explanations captures why they did not book?

A useful explanation should help us locate where an assumption went untested, where meaning became unclear or where two interpretations began to separate. Chemistry gives us luck. Self-blame makes us the problem. Neither gives us a diagnosis.

We clicked, or I wasn’t good enough. Case closed.

That may make the outcome easier to accept, but it does not make the outcome very easy to learn from. The consultation stops being a conversation we can study and just becomes more evidence for a case we are building against ourselves. And when the story feels complete, there is very little left to investigate.

But if the same couple can walk away feeling deeply understood by one vendor and completely misunderstood by another, then perhaps chemistry isn’t the explanation after all.

Which raises a different question: What are we missing?

The One Thing The Best Consultations Have In Common

The longer I conduct wedding consultations myself and study the consultations of the florists I coach, the less interested I’ve become in chemistry and far more interested in what appears to create the chemistry itself. I’ve found that the consultations that feel best are rarely the ones with the biggest budget or where the florist had all the answers.

Time and time again, I’ve found they tend to have one thing in common: Shared understanding.

This is what I call consensus. Not consensus in the modern sense of majority agreement, but in the original sense of the word - from the Latin consensus, meaning “agreement” or “accord,” and consentire, literally “to feel together.”¹

Understanding exists when both people know more than they did before. Consensus exists when those understandings have been brought into agreement. The florist understands the couple, their vision and what matters most to them, and the couple understands what they want, what is possible, what the florist is proposing and what happens next. In short, they are no longer using the same words while attaching different meanings to them.

Consensus is not a new concept. Related processes have been explored across different disciplines. Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer described something similar in his concept of the ‘fusion of horizons’: the moment when two ways of understanding the world meet and form a wider shared view.² Communication theorists, building on philosophical work by Edmund Husserl, use the related concept of intersubjectivity to describe the shared field of meaning people construct between them.³ Or, as I like to describe it, consensus is a meeting of minds.

In a world obsessed with pricing strategies, sales scripts, enquiry workflows and stem counts, Consensus hardly sounds revolutionary. But the more consultations I review, the harder it becomes to ignore the relationship between shared understanding and a couple’s readiness to commit. Because once you start paying attention to the quality of understanding between two people, outcomes that once seemed difficult to explain begin to make sense. Like why extraordinarily talented designers sometimes lose bookings they seem perfectly positioned to win.

Their work may have created interest. But interest alone does not give a couple everything they need to make a decision.

Loving the work answers one question: Is this florist talented?

Booking requires the couple to answer another: Do I feel certain enough that this florist understands us, can translate what we want into our wedding and knows how to move us forward?

A couple can be completely convinced of your talent and still uncertain about whether you are the person who should be trusted with their wedding. That is the space between admiration and commitment.

Beautiful work creates interest. Consensus creates the certainty required for commitment.

The Same Words Can Hold Infinite Meanings

Consider what happens when a couple says they want their wedding to feel “romantic” and “relaxed.”

You might hear romantic and imagine candlelight, deep reds, layered textures and flowers spilling over the edges of the table. They might mean creams and ivories, delicate linen and something understated.

You might hear relaxed and think garden-led, loose and unstructured. They might mean low-maintenance. Or not too formal. Or not too expensive.

The language matches. The meaning does not. And that is the difference between collecting information and creating shared understanding.

Because in consultations, the devil really is in the details. Not only the details you collect. The meaning the couple has attached to them.

Both parties can leave a consultation believing they discussed the same wedding. The florist can take detailed notes, answer every question and faithfully repeat the couple’s language in the proposal, and still get it wrong. Because while the florist may have recorded every word correctly, they may still have misunderstood what the couple meant.

The florist now has to turn words like romantic, relaxed, abundant or understated into flowers, scale, colour, mechanics and a proposal worth thousands of dollars. If her interpretation does not resemble what the couple believed they communicated, the proposal can feel wrong even when it reflects everything she wrote down.

That is how a booking can be lost without anything dramatic ever happening. There does not have to be an awkward silence, difficult objection or one catastrophic sentence that makes the conversation fall apart.

In my experience coaching florists, they often search for the obvious mistake because obvious mistakes are easier to identify than subtle differences in interpretation. But sometimes there was no obvious mistake. The florist and the couple simply left believing they understood one another when they did not.

How To Create Consensus

So how do we move from two separate interpretations towards consensus? By reducing uncertainty.

Every consultation begins with some. The couple does not yet know how you will interpret their ideas, what might be possible within their budget, how your process works or whether you understand what matters most to them. You do not yet know what they mean when they say they want something modern, which details are non-negotiable, what they are still unsure about or what they need from the conversation in order to move forward.

The purpose of the consultation is not simply to exchange information. It is to surface what each person means, test whether it has been understood and bridge the gap between what the couple believes they have communicated and what the florist believes she has understood.

Communication researchers Charles Berger and Richard Calabrese gave this process a name in 1975: Uncertainty Reduction Theory.⁴ They argued that during early interactions, people use communication to reduce uncertainty about one another so they can better understand the other person’s intentions, make sense of their behaviour, decide how to respond and determine whether the interaction should continue.

In a consultation, that happens through a progressive exchange. The couple expresses what they mean. The florist interprets it. The florist reflects that understanding back. The couple confirms it, corrects it or offers another piece of information that changes the florist’s understanding. And the exchange begins again.

Each time an interpretation is confirmed, corrected or refined, an assumption is replaced with something both people now understand to be true. That is how Consensus forms: meaning is tested rather than assumed.

Which is why simply asking more questions is not enough. Twenty questions can produce twenty answers and still leave the most important uncertainty untouched. The value of a question is not simply that it produces an answer. It is whether the answer brings the two of you closer to understanding the same thing.

Not only: What colours do you like? But: Why those colours, specifically?

Not only: What is your budget? But: Which parts of the day matter enough that you want to make sure you have budget to support them?

Then reflect the answer back in your own words. Not to prove that you were listening. To test whether the meaning you understood aligns with the meaning they intended to communicate.

That “yes, exactly” from the client not only confirms that you heard the words, but that your interpretation matches what they meant. Each time that happens, uncertainty reduces and shared understanding increases. And the two perspectives move closer together until consensus is reached.

Of course, not all uncertainty disappears at once and not all uncertainty is the same. At different points in the consultation, the couple may be uncertain about whether they feel comfortable with you, whether you understand what they mean, what is possible, what they should prioritise or what happens if they decide to proceed.

Consensus develops when the information exchanged has been interpreted, reflected back and understood in the same way by both people. Not because either person has been persuaded to abandon their perspective. But because the differences between their interpretations have been made visible and resolved.

Consensus does not guarantee the booking. But without it, the couple is being asked to commit while important questions remain unresolved. By reducing that uncertainty, aiming for consensus creates the conditions through which interest can become commitment.

Once You See It, You Can’t Unsee It

Once you understand consensus, consultations become easier to make sense of. You stop judging them only by whether the couple booked or whether the chemistry was there. You start noticing where understanding increased. Where assumptions remained. Where two people believed they were discussing the same thing while holding different interpretations of it.

And once you begin noticing that inside consultations, you start seeing it everywhere else too. In client emails where the words were clear, but the expectation behind them wasn’t. In conversations with family and friends where both people felt misunderstood, despite believing they had explained themselves perfectly. In decisions that remain unresolved because everyone involved thinks they agree, but nobody has stopped to confirm what they are actually agreeing to.

That is why consensus is not only a consultation skill. Consultations are one place where the presence - or absence - of shared understanding becomes particularly visible and particularly consequential.

When consensus is present, people understand what matters, what is possible and what moving forward requires. When it is absent, even genuine interest can come to a halt in uncertainty. And once you understand that, chemistry loses some of its mystery.

Chemistry is no longer something you have to manufacture, perform or hope will appear. Because chemistry is not the mechanism itself. It is often the feeling created when uncertainty is reduced and two people realise they share the same understanding.

But the value of understanding consensus extends beyond improving your consultation skills. It also changes what you make the outcome mean about you.

A lost booking no longer has to become proof that you were not confident enough. Magnetic enough. Persuasive enough. Or somehow not meant to be doing this.

It can become evidence of something far more specific: a meaning that was assumed rather than tested. A question that remained unresolved. An interpretation that separated from the couple’s without either person realising it. A moment where the conversation needed to stay open for a little longer.

That is the difference between an explanation that punishes you and one that teaches you.

Chemistry tells you how the conversation felt. Self-blame tells you who to blame. Consensus gives you something you can examine.

But we would be naive if we believed that consensus forms all at once.

Trust makes disclosure possible. Disclosure creates context. Context makes understanding possible. Understanding allows guidance to feel relevant. And meaningful guidance gives the couple enough certainty to decide whether they are ready to move forward.

Each part of the conversation creates the conditions required for the next.

Which leaves us with a more precise question: What is the sequence beneath the consultations that seem to click?

References

1. Online Etymology Dictionary. “Consensus.” From Latin consensus “agreement, accord,” past participle of consentire “feel together,” from assimilated form of com “with, together” + sentire “to feel.”

2. Gadamer HG. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Weinsheimer J, Marshall DG, trans. New York, NY: Continuum; 1989. (Original work published 1960.)

3. Husserl E. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Cairns D, trans. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff; 1960. (Original work published 1931.)

4. Berger CR, Calabrese RJ. Some explorations in initial interaction and beyond: Toward a developmental theory of interpersonal communication. Human Communication Research. 1975;1(2):99-112.

What has been interesting to watch isn’t the shift…

Read more