05 February 2024
Is Consulting a Joke?
Let's ask the "Bobs"
by Jason Haller
“I can sell anyone a shit sandwich, once.” That was a statement from a public sector salesperson in an organization that sold professional services. According to her, the delivery team often completely botched the engagement, disabling her from growing the relationship with her client and threatening her ability to meet her goals because her “product” was a group of people who could not deliver. Imagine an industry that seemingly operated under the premise of “over-promise, under-deliver” - where you typically get a product or service you cannot use, or you could use it, but it turns out you actually needed something else.
Okay, you can probably imagine quite a few industries like that. What we’re talking about here today is the global management consulting industry, where you are provided solutions presented as carefully manicured pdfs and Powerpoint presentations or under/over-engineered technology tools that will solve all your company's problems. Who will implement these solutions? Who knows? Are the proposed solutions carefully crafted to address root cause problems? Unlikely. Will you need to hire another consulting firm to replace them or redo the work a few years later to straighten out the botched job? Probably.
You go to a doctor and tell him your symptoms; they do nothing to diagnose you but treat you for what you said you have and get you hooked to their solutions. They never tell you what the root cause is, validate you were right or wrong, or teach you how to resolve it on your own with prevention… so now you’re addicted and helpless; great business model, terrible solutions model.
Before we delve into why exactly the world of business consulting may be a “shit sandwich,” we must first explore why there is such a vast need and growing market for consulting - a current global market of $824 billion and growing. To put that into perspective, the global pharmaceutical market is closer to $222 billion annually and the entire U.S. military budget is $753 billion.
So, what are we getting out of this massive expenditure each year? And more importantly, why are we in a position where this kind of spending is necessary? If, globally, businesses and governments are so out of whack that they need over $800 billion worth of help, then maybe it’s worth asking, “Why?”
While it’s easy to sit here and type a simple question like, “Why,” I’m sure professors could teach entire semesters on this subject so I won’t pretend to have any definitive or comprehensive answers today. Increased centralization of decision-making, emphasis on growth over quality of product, reliance on technology and individuals to perform administrative tasks, and new communication channels/technologies are all potential avenues worth delving deeper into to explain how we’ve ended up here. But we’ll save all of that for another time/explore this in a future article.
For now, let’s operate under the premise that various factors have contributed to organizations’ inefficiencies, such as:
- Higher levels of burnout and disengagement
- Limited effectiveness and efficiency
- Reduced expertise, autonomy, and resilience
- Undefined or outdated processes
- Disconnected and obsolete technologies
- Lower productivity levels
- Poorly communicated or absent goals for individuals and teams
- Inaccurate/outdated data and no mechanism to turn the data into insights
So, now that we’ve dodged the bullet of deciphering complex global economics and business paradigms, let's talk about consulting. You make a mess, we come to clean it up… or do we? Maybe it’s more like: you make a mess, you hire us to clean it up, then we tell you what a big mess you’ve made, and outline in detail via fancy PowerPoint presentations and PDFs what you must do to clean it up. Oh, but if you want us to facilitate the actual implementation of that solution, that’ll be a new S.O.W. and we’ll need to negotiate a new contract.
But the real magic is when you hire us thinking you’re going to be getting the senior partner who’s attached to the project, you know, the one with all the years of experience and industry expertise who sold you the promise, the one that’s worth the price tag attached to this project… but when the engagement starts the only people you’re seeing are entry-level level, fresh out of college, junior associates. Plenty of capable and enthusiastic junior-level consultants out there can do great work; they do serve a meaningful purpose, and if that’s what you knew you were paying for, great. But, in some cases, there’s a lack of transparency if not outright deception about who the brainpower behind your project will be.
In some cases, however, that outcome may be desirable, as companies or governments only hire the consultants to gain some third-party reassurance on a controversial decision they were already planning on making. If anything goes wrong, they’ve also lined up the perfect scapegoat. So here we are spending bucket loads of money each year on consulting as a global economy, but still, we see:
- Burnout rates rising, even among incredibly resilient and skilled employees
- Employee engagement declining and costs of employee disengagement rising exponentially
- Absenteeism rising with depression as the new leading cause of disability leave
These are all costly to businesses globally, with estimated losses adding up to trillions of dollars.
"$8.8 trillion. That's how much employee disengagement cost the world economy in 2022 according to Gallup's 2023 State of the Global Workplace Report."
Rarely is anyone popping champagne and launching confetti when they hear the consultants are coming. Nobody thinks they are here to solve any real problems or make life better for them. Mostly, the stigma comes straight out of the movies in that consultants are mercenaries here to “lean” things out. In other words, the goal is to let the top executives know who’s useless and fireable while automating as much else as possible. There’s a reason for those stereotypes, and the consulting industry has had several major players lead the way on driving those stereotypes for decades. Still the demand for consultants continues to grow, so how can those who genuinely wish to solve problems and create new partnerships break through the veil of consulting bullshit? First, it’s helpful to understand the three main roles or types of consultants.
In some cases, the internal staff is not only disenchanted with the entry of the “Bobs,” but are actually offended that the leadership team feels they are too inept to have done the job someone else is being paid double (or more) of their salary to do. This often results in sabotage of good consultants when the internal teams become disgruntled.
- The “pair of hands” style of consulting is intended to have an external resource perform a tactical exercise or execute a predetermined solution to a pre-diagnosed problem. This type of consultant takes orders from their client and potentially delivers or implements solutions, often sub-optimally, and potentially failing to address the root cause.
- There is the “Expert,” who is hired for their subject matter expertise to educate the client or make specific problems “go away.” This type serves a purpose if you get the expert, but it can be expensive, potentially not address root causes, and leave internal resources ill-equipped to manage the solution, which leads to ongoing issues down the road.
- Lastly, we have a collaborative role, where there is shared responsibility and accountability to diagnose the root cause of the challenges and develop solutions as well as paths to implement those solutions sustainably.
The collaborative role is the role that spends the time to figure out what you really need and helps provide you with the tools to implement that solution or solutions, thus avoiding the main outcomes we listed at the beginning of this blog, where money was spent and root causes were not fixed. The trouble is, how do you know which type of consulting company you’re going to get? If we all say the same canned taglines about being values-driven, solutions-focused, and putting customers first etc., how is a potential client or outsider supposed to know the difference?
“We just wanted someone else to tell us what we already suspected/wanted to do… and then if it went terribly wrong, we have someone external to blame and fire far more easily than internal staff who we should be encouraging to take risks…”
It’s not as if anyone markets themselves as shady, ineffective, and expensive; they’re all the best, brightest, most altruistic, and socially just organizations you could come across, and they’re here to solve all your problems! This is similar to when I rebranded from “personal trainer” to “fitness consultant.” I needed to fundamentally distance myself from a label muddled by inconsistency and mediocrity. Ironically, I now find myself in business consulting seeing hints of the same issue.
Once again, the label has become associated not with expertise and value, but with exorbitant cost and middling results. That’s only some consulting companies, however, and many are great at what they do. Part of the goal with our own company was to break free of that label and create a new space to operate from, with a chance to create a new standard.
Our differentiator is that we teach the people who operate within those businesses how to be better at providing value, rather than focusing solely on how to manipulate variables to show growth or some bottom-line-oriented result. It’s the people within the organization who make and innovate the products and deliver the services, but they are not always enabled to create the customer experiences needed to drive the results they are pressured to achieve. The human brain is the most powerful problem-solving engine the world has ever seen, and most companies do very little to leverage that as a resource. In fact, they often disable it with their current ways of working. In short, we are working to make the overall business function better through the lens of employee growth and group flow versus arbitrary expense/headcount cuts or implementing new technologies without considering what it takes to make those technologies work for the business.
The current “top-down” change management model says a few people at the top will make decisions that are in the company's best interest; once everyone adopts those changes, all will be well. An opposing strategy would be to leverage the expertise and on-the-ground experience of the employees themselves and get their brains working on all the possible improvements that could be made in their sphere. (Enter the flow triggers of Autonomy and Mastery.) This not only works to solve the problem, but also drives more adoption of new processes based on a sense of ownership on the path forward.
More minds working to solve more problems to create a cohesive workflow sounds like a fantasy, right? Well, Toyota has been successfully doing this for decades with their Kaizen model and recently overtook G.M. as the global leader in automobile sales and production after nearly a century of G.M.’s dominance. And they aren’t the only ones to leverage strategies aimed at improving employees' autonomy successfully. Apple, Google, Facebook, 3M, Patagonia, LinkedIn, Amazon, and more all have initiatives that challenge their employees to solve the problems they see around them creatively and do so with a less structured approach, leading to greater innovation and engagement.
The point is that Five to Flow wants to leverage that model where we empower and enable the people within the company to add more value than they currently do or are capable of. This improves individuals' lives through increased autonomy and engagement, addressing the massive issues of burnout and attrition. And it makes life better for the company as they become more agile and adaptable, allowing them to be more efficient and resilient in all economic climates.
What organizations need are consultants and consulting firms who follow a hybrid approach of sharing expertise collaboratively aligned to a coach approach that can bring out the best in the people within the organization while enabling leaders to recognize who is a fit in the organization now and in its future.
“In a landscape where the buzzwords, virtues, values, and mission statements have been corrupted and mined for every ounce of goodwill the paying customer has to offer, how can a genuine company with a novel approach break through the noise?”
Consulting may often be a shit sandwich, but to us, that’s great news, because it means there are huge opportunities to actually create positive change for our clients, delivering on what we promise with the resources we presented. In a world where marketing-speak, virtue signaling, and information overload have dulled our senses to the point of cynicism, results are the currency that holds the most weight. And if nothing else, we are a results-driven company... As a bonus, we still have great-looking PowerPoint presentations and PDFs.
Note: Some things we do are difficult to measure, but we always encourage our customers to start from where they are not achieving their desired metrics, define where they want to be, and do what it takes for the individuals in the organization to get there. The tool we use to start this process with any organization is our proprietary diagnostic, the Wellness Wave™. Forget about "The Bobs" and take the Wellness Wave™ today.