Amorphous consulting

I was in London last week for in-person meetings about some consulting work. On my way back to Marseille, I got stuck on the runway for several hours. It was the ideal time to reflect on my highly nonstandard type of consulting, which is naturally heavily inflected by my decade-plus obsession with uncertainty and not-knowing.

There are two types of consulting work. The first type is concrete consulting, which looks legible and accountable, and is clearly scoped from the beginning. Concrete consulting is when the client knows that it needs service X, the consultant is set up to provide service X, and service X is what is scoped and delivered. (For instance, hiring a consultant to evaluate and select a vendor for a new supply chain management system.) Corporate procurement systems love the straightforwardness of concrete consulting.

My type of consulting is the other type: Amorphous consulting.

Amorphous consulting starts out fuzzy, illegible, and hard to scope. The parameters of amorphous consulting are so uncertain that it may not appear to be consulting at first. In my experience, amorphous consulting often starts out with undirected conversations (or emails) with someone who may eventually become a client.

These conversations seem aimless but there’s a kind of work happening: Inevitably I’m trying to make sense of the organization and picking up its native language and its internal patterns and habits. Insiders don’t think or talk about these much. They are so much part of everyday organizational life that they become taken for granted and unnoticeable. Only outsiders who are paying attention can notice what insiders take for granted.

(A side note: Georg Simmel’s essay “The Stranger,” explains how the tension inherent in being an outsider to a group can’t be separated from the unique value the outsider brings to the group. It is worth reading.)

Unlike the concrete consultant, the amorphous consultant doesn’t begin as a clear expert in what the client already knows it needs. Figuring those needs out is what those apparently aimless conversations are for. The sensemaking/patternfinding work being done there is exactly like what happens when I do ethnographic research in organizations: I’m learning, as an outsider, how to see what insiders can’t see.

This is a prolonged, failure-prone, and irritating learning process, but it’s a feature not a bug. This is especially true if the outsider is intentionally paying structured attention by not taking things for granted. As an outsider trying to understand a new organization, I have both the motivation and the license to ask questions which would be stupid or impossible for an insider (or a concrete consultant) to ask.

This is where the amorphous consultant’s value lies. Noticing what insiders can’t see and asking good questions is the only way to reveal otherwise invisible problems and opportunities.

Once these become visible, the amorphous consultant’s scope of work finally becomes clear and legible. At least for me, these scopes of work can end up far removed from where early conversations began. One interaction started with an email question about how to hire a whole new R&D team to replace the existing team that seemed to be underperforming — and turned into training the existing R&D team to communicate innovation work better to the operations-focused CEO. Another engagement began with a conversation about how to rework the product development roadmap — and turned into restructuring the sales team and creating a new fundraising narrative. That kind of thing.

Which is all to say that amorphous consulting is a fundamentally different animal from concrete consulting. It is inextricably bound up with intentionally not-knowing what needs to be done, and spending time and effort to figure it out. For the amorphous consultant, comfort with uncertainty and not-knowing is essential.

If concrete consulting is for the problems organizations already know they have to solve, amorphous consulting is for the problems organizations can’t put words to yet.

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