A letter to young consultants

I have nearly 30 years of experience in business consulting, and I am proud to have trained generations of consultants during my career with great joy. I have shared with them the lessons I have learned working with more experienced and exceptional consultants in my life, as well as passing on practices that I discovered on my own. Thus, I have decided to write this article in order to share some good practices with the young consultants and more experienced professionals alike.

Step 1 - Understand the problem?- Consulting is strongly correlated to problem solving, as are most of the jobs on this planet. The managers’ actual value added is their capability to solve unprecedented problems in their scope of responsibility. The consultant’s job does not differ, but the consultant is doing so on behalf of their client and in close relationship with them. My first advice to a young consultant would be first to make sure he clearly understands the problem he has to solve. A wrongly formulated problem will lead to a wrong solution. But what is a problem? From my perspective, a problem is the distance between a current state and the desired state of your client. The desired state can be as simple as a targeted Key Performance Indicator, but it can be something more difficult or impossible to measure as well, such as ??Innovation capability??. Which state are we talking about? What is the current and the desired state? Is it measurable? Can we quantify the ??as-is?? and the ??to-be??? Thus, a problem is not a ??why we are here today? ?, it is “where does your client stand today” and “where does he want to stand tomorrow” ; the distance between this current situation and this objective is what defines the problem to solve. This must be crystal clear to a young consultant. A solution then can be defined as the path of actions to be undertaken to reduce the gap between the current and desired state.?

Step 2 - Know where you are going: make assumptions & test them?- I am fascinated to see how much energy unexperienced consultants can throw into the ??battle?? of a consulting project, either reading numerous studies, making plenty of searches over the Internet, multiplying the interviews, or producing tons of slides (or waiting until the last minute to write a presentation). However, I often faced convoluted answers when I asked them what they were searching to demonstrate, the ??So what?? of their slides? And more unassured answers when I asked them for an elevator pitch, that is the 30 second story they want to tell the client. This is not a lack of intelligence; it is a lack of proper method. And this method can save them hundreds of hours of work. The point is: once you have understood the problem, one should first brainstorm to create a story about the ??why?? of the problem (the root causes) and the ??what?? to be done and the ??how?? (the solution). This story will be built on several assumptions you have to clearly identify and state. And the miracle happens: you know now what needs to be validated or unvalidated, you have a purpose for your searches, interviews, working sessions, etc. You are now focused on solving the problem. The very important point is to accept having to rewrite repeatedly the story in order to adjust with the validated assumptions, but more importantly, the assumptions contradicted by the collected facts which might completely change the story. In other words, intellectual honesty. This method is called ??Issue analysis?? and should be part of the training of any new consultant.

Step 3 - Deduction is your enemy, induction your ally?- This statement is a bit provocative, as it supposes you should have a limited trust in your deductive capabilities. Let me explain my point: as a consultant you will tell a story about the why, the what and the how. This story will be based on a series of statements about the situation, the action to be undertaken, and how they must be undertaken. You can expect the client to challenge each of your statements: each statement will raise in their mind an implicit question, such as ??why??… Let’s now assume one of your statements is based on a deduction ??Fact 1 + Fact 2 → Statement??. If the client contests the Fact 2 then all of your reasoning is lost, and your conclusion will be rejected. This is the risk of deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning proposes a different and more robust approach: in regards of a statement, find a minimum of three proofs, independent and self-sufficient, to demonstrate your statement. You can easily understand that, even if one proof is challenged by the client, you will still have two proofs to demonstrate your point. Finding these three independent and self-sufficient proofs is a must-do exercise because, once this practice is integrated in your working habits, you will never again propose weak statements to your client, but rather very robust facts-based ones. This method is called the ??Pyramid principle?? and has been popularized by Barbara Minto decades ago. Her book is a must read.

Step 4 - Understand your role?-?Consulting has a dark side: some consultants may develop the false beliefs they are cleverer than their client and develop a kind of misplaced over confidence. This is why sometimes, consultants are perceived as ??arrogant??: this minority of consultants entertain a bad reputation of consulting, but my experience is that the vast majority of consultants are humble and fully dedicated to solve the problem of their clients. It is of upmost importance for a consultant to understand their role and why the client has asked for their services: the client and their team may not have the time to solve the problem, do not have the required expertise nor the methodologies, but they know their business better than anyone else. Sometimes the problem may need to be solved in a way that is the most acceptable solution to all parties, requiring someone external to negotiate the solution to streamline possible conflicts of interest, typical to organizational transformation initiatives. My belief is that the client and their teams, the majority of the time, already have the solution of the problem: the role of the consultant is to help the client to formulate the solution, as a midwife if I dare compare the two. This may be the source of another criticism about consulting: ??Consultants are stealing our ideas to give it to our boss??. In fact, the consultant’s job was to listen to all the proposals and to make a selection based on pros & cons assessment and a prioritization of solutions. It means respecting the client’s opinion as well as the expertise and experience of the client teams: a win-win combination where the consultant brings the methods and their time and where the client brings the content and expertise.

Step 5 - Better together than faster?- The temptation to produce tons of slides can be strong, but this is to the detriment of the client’s team onboarding: it may somehow be very reassuring, but it has to be understood that the objective of a consultant is not to produce slides, it is to have a durable and positive impact on the client’s way of doing things. It is about the changes made. As a consultant, working mainly alone with minimum interaction with the client and mainly occupied with producing slides should raise a red flag in your mind. Thus, my advice would be “better together than faster”. Take the time to organize the discussion & working sessions to share the problem with the client, to co-design solutions, to take the time to explain the ??why??, the ??what?? and the ??how?? of the proposed changes, to listen to remarks and proposals, etc. That’s what successful managers do in their organization.

Step 6 - Numbers are just numbers?- Do not be fooled by it. Developing a savant Excel spreadsheet can be very reassuring. I have seen in my career generations of consultants developing very sophisticated P&L models to evaluate projects’ ROI but missing the most important point: what do we know about our hypothesis? Does it make sense to have complex and expensive machinery that we are feeding with unreliable materials ? The majority of one’s time should be dedicated to checking the reliability of the hypothesis of the models, with the minority of the time dedicated to actually developing the model. And having reliable hypotheses should not hide the fact that we do not know about the future. And probability is of no use because your future is a unique and singular draw and probabilities is about infinite draws.

Step 7 - The magic ??Satisfaction?? formula?- It is interesting to notice that all issues in business can be reformulated using a math formula combining multiple factors, with no exception. Thus, making improvements can be broken down into improving individual factors. If there is a formula to keep in mind, I would prioritize the ?satisfaction?? formula: Satisfaction = Perception of the results - Expectation. When your client launches a project, drives an organization transformation, communicates about a corporate strategy, enters a new market, etc. then the satisfaction of their stakeholders (investors, clients, employees, suppliers, etc.)??will be the results of their perception of what the company has been done minus their expectation regarding what the company should have been doing. Then, if you are a consultant, ask yourself about what is expected by the stakeholders and what can be done to mitigate these expectations and drive them in the right direction; ask yourself about how the results will be perceived and what can be done to increase the perceived value.

Step 8 - The ultimate question: ??why has it never been done???: this is my last advice to young consultants. During my consultant career, I have tried to solve many clients’ issues and, what always surprised me was that the apparent solutions were most of the time obvious. But these straightforward solutions were hiding a deeper problem that I can summarize as follows: why have these obvious solutions never been implemented? Your actual value added as a consultant is in fact not by answering the question ??what must be done??? but to be able to answer the question ??why has it never been done???. And most of the time, the reason is that no one has been able to or took the chance within the organization to sell the business case justifying the costs/benefits of implementing the solution, because of an indemonstrable Return on Investment (ROI), because of the risks or the uncertainties, because of the lack of resources and time, or because no one was willing to take the accountability for the outcomes.