The Consultant's Dilemma...and how to handle it
Deri Hughes
Helping consulting team leaders develop exceptional teams | Tailored course design | Expert trainers | Lasting impact
On any consulting project it is crucial that you start from the right question. A question that, when answered through the work you do, leads to a clear recommendation and helps your client make a decision.
Developing the ability to start from the right question is a common theme within Honeycomb's training courses. We call it 'Framing the Issue' and explore techniques like Situation-Complication-Question to help people understand how to pin it down.
The Situation-Complication-Question framework
Here’s how it typically works:
In this short video, my colleague Colin explains one of the common pitfalls when it comes to defining the Question:
Where's the dilemma?
That’s all good, and works well, until it doesn't. Sometimes, you’ll uncover something unexpected through your work. A veritable lake of value that wasn’t where you expected to find it.
Suddenly you’re in the Consultants Dilemma:
Stick to the question you’re there to answer, or maximise the value for the client?
This isn’t the same as scope creep. That’s when the client - consciously or not - is pushing for you to do work outside of what you’ve agreed to do. Here, the push comes from you. You can see this massive opportunity staring you, and your client, in the face. But, it’s not what you’re there to do.
My dilemma with toothpaste in China
I was once working with a big FMCG player, helping them figure out their toothpaste strategy for their heritage Chinese toothpaste brand - it actually used to be the official national toothpaste of the Chinese government. Consulting gives you some unexpected experiences at times.
We were there to look at the overall vision for the brand and how to grow it, in the context of an aging cohort of users. Young people weren’t buying the heritage toothpaste, and that was a problem. We ran all the usual analysis looking at Where to Play and How to Win; then into the detail of the 6 Ps: Proposition, Product, Price, Pack, Place, and Promotion choices.
During our analysis we uncovered something. In a nutshell, because of the way they were working with retailers, they weren’t getting their most profitable products into the places they would sell the most. Their entire toothpaste business made about $35m profit a year. We estimated the China business more broadly was losing $100m+ of potential profit because of this issue.
Enter the Consultant’s Dilemma. Do we stay focused on the question we’ve been brought in to answer, or shift some of our resources to this bigger source of value?
There was clearly an opportunity: massive value potential suggests something you might get paid for helping with.
There was also risk.
Risk to our team if I asked them to spend time on this new issue and/or risk to the profit margins if we'd pulled in extra resource. There was significant risk to the client relationships. They brought us in to solve a particular problem. If we started running around looking at other things - especially things that may make them look bad - they may not appreciate it. It can look like you are self-orientated, trying to “land and expand”.
On the flip side, you can’t just ignore a big opportunity for your client (and your firm).
So, how to handle the Consultant’s Dilemma?
I recommend four things.
The goal here is to get to that separate discussion with minimal extra effort or distraction from your current case. Protect your team, and make sure the interest is there before you go too deep.
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If you see a spark of interest, the next step is simple. I’ve written about The Turn before , the technique David Fields uses to get into that separate conversation.
It looks like there might be something big here. Are you open to us setting up a separate conversation to explore it in a bit more detail?
In China, the project culminated in a 2-day, 20-person workshop, where we worked through all their choices and landed on a plan for the business. We used the workshop to trail some of the analysis related to the bigger opportunity and watched carefully to see how it landed. In a break, I asked the Head of China what he thought about it, and indicated that it seemed to be an issue that beyond the toothpaste category. Was he open to exploring that?
With the credibility built from doing the job we’d been brought in to do he trusted that was a conversation worth having.
From dilemma to opportunity.
We have three brand new webinars scheduled over the next few months. All are free to join - just register using the links provided. Looking forward to seeing you there.
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?? Thank you for reading. I’m Deri Hughes. I run a training business that helps consulting team leaders develop exceptional teams.
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2 个月Thanks Deri Hughes really useful content I've saved it for reading later as this has happened a few times and I definitely need to get better at addressing it.