Consultants: From diagnosis to solution
Malcolm wasn’t a happy client, but I was grateful that it wasn’t me that he was unhappy with. This was 20 years ago, and I was a junior consultant. I recall sitting in his office, a dingy, underwhelming affair, at least for the Chief Operations Officer of a major retailer. Almost every surface was covered with papers; the whiteboard behind us, strewn with jottings from his management team meeting; outside, it was raining. But it wasn’t any of this that was making him unhappy, but the hefty report from another consulting firm sitting on his desk.
“They’ve listed more than one hundred issues with our supply chain,” he said.
“Ah,” I replied. I was young, and Malcolm wasn’t the easiest of clients (“When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.”).
“But they haven’t given me a single recommendation.”
I’d like to think that consulting has moved on since that conversation, but so—it turns out—have clients. Speaking to one recently I had a sense of déjà vu: Jeff was describing some work done by an HR consulting firm around the structure, responsibilities and remuneration of his extensive, international sales team. Like Malcolm’s, the final report had a serious thud factor—and most of it was bad news. “No solutions?” I asked. “Oh, there were plenty of recommendations,” he responded. “But they’re quite high-level. Acting on each of them would be a project in its own right, and would mean more upheaval internally and more money on consultants.” So, things had changed: Malcolm had problems and wanted a solution; Jeff had solutions but needed something more. The temptation here is to see this in terms of implementation: Jeff needed support getting stuff done. But that’s not what he was saying. In fact, he wasn’t really interested in the recommendations, he simply wanted to get the problems fixed. We would, after all, be frustrated by a chiropractor who simply told us we had back pain (I like to think we’d have spotted this ourselves), or one who told us the solution but did nothing. Yet we accept that it’s OK for consultants.
Why don’t consultants fix more stuff? One argument is that an organisation is much, much more complicated than the average back. Organisations are full of people, not just body parts. Every organisation is different and faces a unique set of challenges: A standard manual would be of little use. It’s a fair point, indeed the premise of consulting is that helping clients diagnose the root cause of issues in complex environments is valuable. But complexity is no excuse if there isn’t an expectation that the problems identified can be solved, so the issue is perhaps more to do with accountability. And here the chiropractor analogy is useful again: When we have back trouble, we’d dearly love the therapist to fix it, simply and instantly, but in reality a solution depends as much on us (more exercise, better posture) as them. Similarly, it’s hard to make consultants solely accountable for a remedy, when success will as much depend on what the client does.
However, the chiropractor does two things that consultants could, I think, do more of. The first is to prioritise: The causes of back problems are many and varied, but a good therapist will identify one or two key priorities, the lifestyle changes that will have the biggest impact. By contrast, consultants often shy away from this: As Malcolm found out to his cost, they’ll prefer to provide a list of things, then stand back while the client decides what to do. The second is that the best chiropractors will provide some simple solutions (exercises you can do at home): Consultants need to put in more effort doing this, creating simple tools that address those top-priority, very specific problems. And we see evidence that this is happening: When we ask consultants what’s changed about their work, it’s clear that many are spending more time doing just this, rather than writing weighty reports.
Diagnose, prioritise, solve: These will be the consulting watchwords of the future.
Applying 35+years of delivery/change experience to setup, assure and de-risk critical programmes
5 年True, so true and so very common! It’s easy to spot 100 things a client could improve on. Advising them on the 1 or 2 things to do first is so very much harder. Good article.
I certainly does not disagree that diagnose, prioritise, solve is the way forward, but let's not forget that this is what McKinsey - and former McKinsey consultants - have done for decades. Problem-solving is at the core of McKinsey do. Yet I've seen many clients not ready to pay for high quality consulting and afterwards complain about the poor quality of the work of the tier-3 firm they had hired. When you offer peanuts you attract monkeys.?To go back to your analogy with chiropractors, some clients prefer a cheap charlatan that promises miracles and instant cure to an expensive, well trained doctor. And when their backs hurt they claim that chiropractic is rubbish. On the other side of the fence I've seen many consultants - even in very well known firms - not being trained to solve problems: they collect tons of data, make complex Excel models, produce thick decks of fancy slides but in the end "paralysis by analysis" prevails and they end up with the kind of reports you describe. Or you have self proclaimed "industry experts" who jump to the conclusion and resell what they've done in a previous life under the label? "best practice" even if the context is quite different. You often have both: the self proclaimed gurus at senior manager/director levels and the untrained consultants below doing the hard work and getting the bulk of the remarks from disgruntled clients. And let's not forget the client who can never commit to the recommendations and delays difficult decisions, implements half of them and sometimes even does the exact opposite of what was advised.
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5 年Strange we need to push the obvious. I attended a company where a consultant had done a fine job increasing the productivity of a machine - unfortunately, it made absolutely no difference to productivity. It fed the line bottleneck, so all the "extra" stuff just added to the pile in front of it. I read a post - a houses analogy - pushing concentrating on the foundations "as most folk start with the roof". Only when we know all the issues and the consequences of the problems they cause, can we decide how to prioritize solutions. We need to consider the bigger picture (the whole process). If the walls are weak, we fix them before the roof. If the foundations are weak, we fix them before the walls. If both are fine, and the roof leaks, we don't redecorate and fit new carpets... We fix the roof. I think too many see the goal as promoting the improvement methodology when the goal is to improve the company USING the methodology. A process, for me, is a best practice set of guides but it does not remove the need for managers and employees to understand the problems and make proper decisions. Steve
Co-Founder @ Xundis Global, LLC | Advisor | Board Director | Speaker | Marine Veteran | Cultivates Resilient Teams that Succeed in Complexity.
5 年Transformation to even smaller adaptive change demands quick wins. Any consultant that has makes recommendations without including quick wins or near term interventions lacks context with thier client. Some challenges do require larger scale projects - yet each will include things that can be done now to change the trajectory of the issue.
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5 年Just a slightly different direction from prioritize ... what to prioritize on. 1. Is the supply chain the culprit for too little profit - I assume making money is Malcolm's company's goal. 2. Analysis might show that whatever is blocking profits? is not the supply chain. 3. The consultant should help fix what truly ails the company - which may be outside Malcolm's responsibility. 4. Consultant's dilemma - help Malcolm or point out where the priority is! Helping Malcom (his organisation is not limiting profit) would cause an improvement, but not much too the bottom line. He would be right to be disappointed! 5. Consultants need to solve that dilemma and manage expectations. 6. NB. If the targeted function is the limiting one the result should be an amazingly dramatic one.