A good start

Hello friends,

tl;dr: I explore why amorphous consulting is rare, and why starting with amorphous consulting is faster, cheaper, and more effective in uncertain situations.        

I received a pile of notes and emails from self-identified consultants after sending out the previous issue on amorphous consulting. They observed that demand for amorphous consulting is still vanishingly rare even though consulting engagements invariably start with amorphous consulting (even if the client doesn’t recognize or want to pay for it). So this issue is about why amorphous consulting is rare, and why/when it makes sense to begin with amorphous consulting.

(A reminder: Amorphous consulting is a type of illegible, hard-to-scope consulting that identifies and addresses emerging/not-well-understood problems in organizations. Amorphous consulting contrasts with the much better-understood concrete consulting, which addresses legible, well-scoped problems organizations already know they have.)

The problem always needs reframing

I’ve been working with an international commodities company for a few months. They first approached me last year with a concrete consulting proposal in mind. They wanted me to train their employees to see the difference between risk and uncertainty and build their capacity to be strategic in taking advantage of market uncertainty.

From the beginning, I had a hunch that the company had other opportunities to take advantage of first. Over several long meetings, I probed deeper into how the company is organized and the challenges it sees itself facing. The result of all my dumb questions: We decided to start in a different place, with customer education about new product development.

This halting approach to finding the real problem to solve is a typical consulting engagement trajectory, even for a self-described amorphous consultant like me. And it seems to be generally true. The consultants I know say that a) it is almost impossible to imagine a situation where the consulting client begins with wanting amorphous consulting, but b) the engagement always starts with amorphous consulting because the concrete consulting is rarely what the organization needs, and c) the organization is never happy to pay for the amorphous consulting that it actually needs.

This is because the structure of consulting is currently that of a solutioning system.

A solutioning system

When I feel vaguely unwell, I don’t go to the doctor immediately because I don’t have specific symptoms to talk to a doctor about. And it’s a rare doctor who has time, inclination, mindset, and organizational support to accommodate a patient presenting with no more than a feeling of malaise. At the same time, it sometimes happens that a patient presents for an aching shoulder and, after a bunch of questions and a blood test, the good doctor discovers that the root cause of the shoulder ache is chronic deficiency in vitamin D caused by lack of sun exposure from living in a perpetually overcast climate. (Ask me how I know about that one.)

The conceptual and practical framework for how we think about doctors servicing human bodies is analogous to how we think about consultants servicing organizations. The healthcare system (the consulting system) is set up around legible symptoms (organizational problems) that patients (consulting clients) bring to conventional doctors (concrete consultants who are expert solution-providers in particular problem areas) to solve.

This is why the healthcare system often obstructs less legible, emergent symptoms and problems from being examined and treated … except on the off-chance that an emergent/illegible problem is found while treating legible symptoms. The same is true for the client-consultant system.

The value of being amorphous

I’ve had several instances of prolonged (though fortunately minor) malaise in the last two decades and several interactions with conventional doctors and healthcare. What I really want now is to have an unconventional doctor like Jonathan Hullah, the title character in one of my favorite books, Robertson Davies’s The Cunning Man.

Hullah is a physician known for his cunning. He diagnoses and treats illnesses which stump more conventional doctors using an approach to medicine which is diffuse, interdisciplinary, highly unconventional, and illegible. Hullah’s cunning originates in his amorphousness. Amorphousness is the feature that explains his ability, not a bug he has to surmount.

In increasingly uncertain times, organizations need the consultant-analogue of a Jonathan Hullah … but they may not have realized this yet. Which is unfortunate because starting with an amorphous consultant is less expensive, faster, and more effective.

Cheaper, quicker — and better

The surface-level reason to start with amorphous consulting is that it’s less expensive and faster. You won’t spend time, effort, and resources to scope a job, hire a concrete consultant to do it, have them do some work to realize that the scope they were hired for is not the right one, then have them negotiate space to re-examine and re-scope the job.

But the actual reason to start with amorphous consultants is that their approach is subtly but fundamentally different compared to concrete consultants. The concrete consultant’s persona is to be the Acknowledged Expert on their domain. It’s nearly impossible for a concrete consultant to be the silly outsider who asks the dumb questions about apparently irrelevant things which every insider takes for granted.

In contrast, the amorphous consultant’s persona is to be That Silly Outsider trying to figure out the organization, asking the dumb questions that sometimes turn out to not be so dumb after all. Finding not-yet-understood problems or nascent opportunities requires an approach like this, which is designed around the emergent, the not-yet-defined, and the unexpected.

The distinction between concrete and amorphous consulting is not semantic. It reflects two fundamentally different approaches to consulting. Concrete consultants are always the right people to call in for well-defined problems. But call an amorphous consultant when there is uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity — or just a vague sense of organizational malaise.

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