The Consulting Pyramid Just Flipped: Here's Why That Changes Everything

It wasn’t the hike I wanted, but this morning’s rain felt like showers of insight?as I hiked the trails in Rachel Carson Conservation Park this Thanksgiving morning, my canine companions Charlie and Lucy managing to find every mud puddle available. There's something profoundly fitting about listening to yesterday's episode of Aidan McCullen 's The Innovation Show , " Rita McGrath , Alexander Osterwalder , and Ryan Shanks – The Future of Consulting in an Age of AI," while walking trails named for the woman who taught us to question conventional wisdom about complex systems.

In 1962, Carson's "Silent Spring" jolted society awake to the interconnected nature of environmental damage. Her genius wasn't just in identifying the problem of pesticides – it was in helping us see the patterns that had been there all along, hiding in plain sight. And it struck me how my partner, mentor, and boss, Rita McGrath, has helped so many spot early warnings of strategic inflection points.

Just as Carson showed us how our "control of nature" was an illusion masking systemic damage, Rita's insights lay bare how traditional consulting's pyramid structure – that seemingly unshakeable foundation of the knowledge economy – is built on assumptions that no longer hold. We're not just witnessing the disruption of consulting; we're seeing the inversion of its fundamental architecture.

The Pyramid Problem

With surgical precision, Rita dissects the fundamental flaw in traditional consulting's business model:

"If you think about traditional consulting, it was based on a leverage model... you've got the role of the finders, those are the people that gate the business, the role of the minders, the people that actually run the engagements, and then the grinders are the ones working at the coalface who are doing all the work. And the traditional model was you marked up the work of the grinders, and that fed the others."

For decades, this pyramid scheme has been consulting's dirty little secret: sell the partner's expertise, but deliver the associate's work. You might get 1% of the senior partner's time while paying premium rates for fresh MBAs to grind out PowerPoint decks.

The Great Inversion

But what happens when AI can do most of that grinding work in seconds? As Rita explains:

"One of the things I would argue that AI is highly poised to do is eliminate the need for a lot of the grinder kind of work, because if you can push a button and get the answer to an analytical question in a matter of seconds, why would you pay for that kind of consulting?"

This isn't just disruption - it's inversion. The traditional pyramid model isn't just being challenged; it's being flipped upside down.

The Future is Flipped

Instead of leveraging junior consultants' time, the future of consulting is about maximizing access to senior expertise and actual capability building. As Rita notes:

"I think you're going to increasingly see people charging for the outcome or the end deliverable whether it’s consulting or anything else...I think the by-the-hour thing, you know, we should bid farewell and good riddance."

This means fundamentally rethinking how consulting creates value. Instead of getting 1% of a partner's time and 100% of junior consultants, organizations need 40-50% of experienced leaders' time focused on building real capabilities.

The shift is being accelerated by what Rita calls the democratization of expertise:

"If AI allows you to have both sides to a transaction to have the same information, information transparency, I know what I'm getting, I know what the costs are, and then you can make that a marketplace transaction."

The implications are profound. When expertise is increasingly accessible through AI and digital platforms, value shifts from hoarding knowledge and expertise to building capabilities.

"If you've got one person in your firm who does something that breaks the mold and it takes them ten minutes and it completely changes the value proposition in a whole sector, well, that should have a lot of value, even if it only took them ten minutes."

In a world where AI can automate analysis, the real value comes from senior expertise and pattern recognition - exactly what the traditional pyramid model minimizes.

Seeing Around Corners: The Consulting Market Evolution

This isn't just theory. Rita points out it's already happening:

"What we're seeing now is that in more and more places, companies are actually behaving much more like markets than they had before. And that gives rise in turn, to this notion of ecosystems competing with ecosystems of individual gig people plugging themselves in."

As Rita explains, these transformations often seem sudden but have been gradually building for years:

"Strategic inflection points feel when they burst into the world as though they came out of nowhere. 'Oh my goodness, it's crypto! Oh my goodness, it's AI!' But when you really look at them, they've been building up for a long time, sometimes even decades."

The signs have been there:

• The commoditization of analytical work through AI
• The growing demand for genuine senior expertise

• The shift from episodic to continuous transformation

• The focus on capability building over deliverables

The Path Forward

As my dogs and I finished our muddy morning hike, it struck me how perfectly this moment embodies Rita's research on strategic inflection points. A soggy hike reveals brilliant revelations that shine brighter than the sun: the consulting industry isn't just being disrupted - it's being inverted; the pyramid that served as its foundation for decades is finally flipping over.

The future belongs to firms that can deliver what organizations actually need: real senior expertise, genuine capability building, and transformative insights that create lasting value.

Everything else is just grinding.

What do you think? Is the consulting pyramid finally ready to flip? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[Augmented Post Acknowledgement: this article was co-created with Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic ]