Why most consulting is bullcrap
The consulting industry has had significant successes, but its reputation has taken some hits lately.
A reason for this is that consultants frequently impose time-tested methods on companies that, for many reasons, aren’t ready to use them. For consultants to be effective, they should be like medical doctors diagnosing significant underlying problems rather than just attempting to correct symptoms.
There has been a long-running joke about how a consultant can be compared to someone who, say, removes your wristwatch and instructs you on the time. It gets laughs because there’s some truth to it. Sometimes, anyway, that’s what consultancy feels like. To some infrequent and unfortunate observers, consultancy appears as if it were a 24-7 con on large organizations. A ritualistic gouging of dissociated team members, parting with their dollars in return for ill-conceived PowerPoint slides and overlong reports that could just as easily have said, “It is a good idea to follow the objectives you set for yourselves and to overcome obstacles in your way.”
This is something I speak of from personal experience. For more than a decade, I have been in the business of consulting, with clients spanning diverse industries and of many sizes. Some consulting engagements are great, and they go on seemingly forever. Some have a slow, moribund existence and a ghostly presence — they shouldn’t be there, and yet they are.
Consulting has its problems, chief among them being the necessity for the work to frequently change mid-stream. Too often, a consultant starts with one premise, which then metamorphosizes into a series of rabbit holes and misdirection from which the consultant must draw the right path forward. This nature of the work often renders it impossible to evaluate by output or outcome. For example, one client contracted us to help reduce employee attrition, only to insist the solution was to rewrite the organization’s mission statement and values. This is not to say that clients are always to blame for these convoluted situations. In fact, many times they don’t know what they want. Or, if they do, the organization changes mid-stream and suddenly the path we’re on is no longer relevant.
Two conflicting mindsets
You must hold two conflicting mindsets as a consultant — one of expertise and knowledge, and the other of humility and naiveté. In essence, there are things you know from your experiences and education, and other things you are clueless about within the client’s organization that you’re serving. The problem with most consultants is they ignore the latter — believing their insight, methodology, approach, or perceptions are correct, and that the organization simply needs to adapt its behavior and mindset to embrace the new.
Nevertheless, this is exactly what not to do as a consultant. In fact, this is the main reason why a lot of consultants have very little staying power. They seem to be unable to adapt and pivot quickly and early when the environment and context start to change. They seem to plow ahead with their methodology and think that this is really what they were hired to do, and that with just a little more convincing and a little more persistence, the organization will have that “Aha!” moment and truly embrace it. And I can tell you, and I can attest as living proof, that this is a futile endeavor. And this whole outlook continues to stench up an industry that really does have the ability to and has produced decent value for some parts of some companies that have succeeded.
As consultants, drinking your own Kool-Aid can seem like a natural act. The problem arises when you get so toasted that you’re unaware of the effects. “The Big 4” has even made an industry out of this by serving up proprietary processes at ridiculous hourly rates. There’s no question that these firms have taken the time to study and understand what kinds of common business problems demand solutions and then to develop applicable ways (by no means all the same ways) to tackle those problems in a repeatable, scalable, and measurable manner. But companies aren’t static. And if you’re in a company that is hitting the wall and you try the method that worked for an employee at another Big 4 company with a different client, it’s kind of like asking someone in the Army to get pumped for a high school football pep rally because a drill sergeant channeled the spirit of Jimmy Johnson to get the first-time troops all “in the zone.”
Maybe this partly explains why consultancies received a low satisfaction rating in a recent study. Source Global Research studied consultancy satisfaction in 2022. It found that worldwide, client satisfaction has been flat (around 75%) for the last five years. And really, the number hasn’t seen a lift until recently, when the environment forced firms to change in ways that probably brought about a certain level of improvement.
Consulting should be like a medical diagnosis
The needs of consulting have to transform into something much more focused on the aspect of diagnosis, not so much on cure, like a doctor assessing a patient’s various symptoms. But when the doctors are heart surgeons, spine surgeons, and brain surgeons, the only solution is always surgery. Likewise, consultants are specialists: in leadership, human resources, strategy, industry verticals, marketing, and much more, and definitely less in the environment around us. Their solutions will and must fall in line with those specialties.
Yet, just like patients, businesses are not often the best and most effective judges of their own problems. Sales are down, so let’s get a sales consultant. Employee retention is spiraling, so let’s get a human resources consultant. Firms often see the manifestation of symptoms rather than the true, underlying cause. It’s like having a bad itch and buying a back scratcher when you’re really dealing with eczema. What this situation requires is a firm with a “family doctor” who has a wide breadth of knowledge (business acumen), but perhaps lacks the skills to solve specific problems.
This isn’t a position to be in if you are trying to turn a profit. In this analogy, the surgeons make the big bucks. So, the industry conducts itself in the two most common ways: specialty niches or exclusive methodologies associated with powerful brands. This means that consultants continue to work in the same patterns as before, and the industry continues to have a not-so-great reputation.
Three crucial skills.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Most consulting is bullshit because it chooses to be. The consultant jargon, puffery, fluff, one-size-fits-all, overlyrote, duplicative, misguided, narrow-minded nirvana fallacy makes for a poor experience and results that lackluster. The illusion of knowledge is a far greater danger than ignorance.
Although organizations perceive their issues and needs in different lights, only those approaches that truly serve the whole organization (and not just the C-suite) can possibly result in any real, meaningful change. To shift the focus from the needs of the high-flying few to the needs of the many (and to overcome the monocausal mindset), we first have to understand what consulting could be (and be like) if it were not full of, well, you know, “consultant stuff.” I contend that if consultants were to focus more on three specific (and vital) skill sets—diagnosis, practicum, and adaptation—we’d all wind up much better off.
Diagnostic ability means more than just figuring out what’s wrong at the moment and with the systems that are supposed to serve the client. It demands insight and understanding of the client’s world—the cultures that shape the client’s life and the kinds of people, structures, and powers that interact in that life—for truly knowing why problems exist, why they persist, and why certain solutions fail or succeed.
Skills learned from practicum are really good for understanding how to do whatever it is they are going to do in a given organization. All implementation failures I have witnessed are not from a lack of skills, resources, technology, or funding. They happen because the instigators cannot overcome inertia and disengagement. This means they have to be really honest with themselves about the realities of the front line, not the executive suite.
Adaptation competencies
encompass operating in a constant state of flux with a fluid, ever-changing environment. Organizations are not static; any change in one area inevitably impacts other areas. So, to adapt, one must be conscious of the tunnel vision that comes with focusing on a singular problem and must constantly examine and address the larger environment.
In the past, I took pride in being a consultant. But these days, it’s something I feel close to embarrassed about. Many of my colleagues avoid the word ‘consulting’ because they feel it makes them look like they aren’t able to do anything real that helps organizations succeed. It’s understandable to shy away from a term that can carry such a negative connotation. But it is what we are. One of my clients told a story that I love, about one of their previous consultants, who went into an organization that was in a state of panic because all their previous attempts to drive change had failed.
The industry must take what it has dished out for others to take and learn from it what needs changing in order to create “positive brand equity in the marketplace.” After all, I consult on this type of thing.
