Data, experience or intuition - what should consultants pay...

Back in 2009 I was a Senior Consultant at Bain & Company. 3 years into the job, progressing fast, with a good reputation in the business.

I'd joined after completing a PhD, so was one of the older members of my start group. I also had some prior consulting experience from interning at White Space Strategy that helped me hit the ground running. I thrived at Bain and the job came naturally to me.

Bain has a meritocratic promotion model that means good performance results in fast promotion. I was used to picking up "5s" on my project reviews, being skipped ahead through minor grades and getting promoted faster than others.

The perfect set-up to push an insecure over-achiever like me, but not a great recipe for humility.

A new chance to shine

I was given a "step-up opportunity". I was asked to act as Manager on a project before I was really ready. The Manager role is responsible for defining how the work will be done, getting the best out of all members of the team (including the Partners), and ultimately cracking the case in a way that is compelling for the client.

We were working for a global FMCG player, a client I knew well from previous work. But the specifics of the project - developing a growth plan for a heritage toothpaste brand in China - were new to me.

I'd never been to China. I'd never done a brand growth project before. But, I did have lots of good data from the global strategy project we'd just completed for the same client.

Armed with these data and a growing sense of certainty that I was damn good at this job, I was all set to tell the client team in China how to grow their business.

I had a couple of team members in London, and two colleagues from Bain Shanghai helping out. One of them was new to consulting, she'd joined as a senior FMCG subject matter expert.

Her previous employer? Our client. Perfect.

Data, experience or intuition - what matters?

My London team and I developed our workplan for the project. It was focused on analysing the data we had, and gathering more data.

Review fact base... Gather & review data... Size future profit pools... Review 6Ps analysis...

We put together a beautiful fact base. 100+ slides getting deep into consumer preferences, competitive dynamics, profitability. There was lots of important insight in there. A perfectly crafted key messages summary, backed up by a selection of the most impactful charts.

Sitting in London, we came up with some new brand positioning statements for this heritage Chinese toothpaste brand, based on what we'd seen in the data.

We had regular calls with our colleagues in China (sometimes when I was still working at midnight and they came back online - one painful consequence of taking on a "step-up opportunity"...), but I found them frustrating.

I judged they weren't paying enough attention to the data. Particularly our new joiner subject matter expert. I mean - she had no consulting experience, what could she possibly know?!

They weren't buying into our new brand positioning statements. If I couldn't even convince my colleagues, how was I ever going to get the client's team in China to believe in the data?

We were building up to a two-day workshop in Shanghai. I had to figure out how to get them on board before then or it would be a disaster.

Then one of my team in London said this:

"Maybe the data doesn't tell the full story. Maybe it doesn't align with their experience of life in Shanghai? Their intuition is telling them we're getting this wrong. We should listen to that."

They were struggling with our analysis because parts of it didn't make sense to them. It jarred against their experience of living in China, of being Chinese.

I was blinded by my arrogant belief in the data.

There's a great saying that I go back to a lot:

??Good judgement comes from experience. And experience comes from bad judgement.

My judgement around the relative importance of data vs real-world experience was... bad.

Fortunately my team saved me and we managed to turn things round. The workshop was successful in the end and the local team left buzzing with the potential opportunities in the brand.

Learning from experience

Often as consultants we need to shift someone's perspective so they can look at a problem differently. Data can be incredibly important for those breakthrough moments. There's a reason we have the phrase "million dollar slide".

But it can be a hard balance to strike. You don't want to just borrow someone's watch to tell them the time.

There's an even deeper paradox here: The more insightful and game-changing your insights, the harder it is for people to accept them.

When something doesn't align with what we currently believe to be true it takes a lot to convince us that we're looking at it incorrectly.

In those situations, there can be a direct conflict between trusting the data and trusting your client's intuition.

But numbers and charts, even quotes and surveys, can only ever tell part of the story. The lesson I learned that day was that helpful information can take many forms, including intuition and gut feel.

Maybe that industry veteran did have some useful insight to bring after all.

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