Cleverer and cleverer – don’t stand still

Consultants can never stop learning, we can never rest. Whether we have one year or 30 years of experience, we have to constantly polish our craft: using new tools of analysis (for example, in the last five years, R, Python and PowerBI have become essential tools), developing or drawing on new frameworks (ways of seeing the world) and being able to produce high quality in half the time that it took us 10 years ago. This constant imperative for improvement always threatens our viability, but for those who respond, it also keeps us at the forefront of our field and in high demand by clients.?

In the last 25 years, as the world and organisations have become more expert, consultants have had to accelerate their rate of development. Often this has meant becoming more specialised, with greater technical depth. For most consultants, the day of the generalist is gone. Quite rightly now, we need to really know our stuff.?

We have learnt that this restlessness, the determination to constantly improve, has to be an organisational effect, as well as an individual effect. Indeed the drives for organisational and individual improvement feed off and reinforce each other. At our best, we experience a persistent dissatisfaction with the present, and a joy in change and the search for the new.?

Yes, we pause to celebrate success. But not for very long: we pause briefly on the plateau of achievement before setting off for the next cliff to climb.??

Some muse as to whether the arrival and rapid development of AI may be existential for consulting, signaling its demise. I really don’t know, but I think it’s more likely that it will accelerate change and productivity in consulting, as in many businesses, rather than entirely replace consulting. Of course, for those consultants who fail to incorporate it in their work, AI may well be existential.

Nous Group is a management consulting firm operating across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, Canada and Mexico. This year, we turn 25. Surely an age at which philosophical reflection comes naturally!

We are proud of the outcomes we have achieved with our clients over our last 25 years. We are also proud that we are now 750 highly talented professionals, who genuinely enjoy working together and feel part of one international, professional community.

But rather than resting on our successes, we are driven by learning that will inform the future. At the age of 25, we have asked ourselves, what are the big lessons we have learnt over the last quarter of a century that should guide us in the future?

Check out some of our other learnings below:

• One of the most important lessons we have learnt along the way is to regularly reinforce the why and bring ourselves back to our founding purpose.