A new kind of partnership: what consulting should look (and feel) like
The recently published book “The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps Our Economies” makes some pretty damning claims about the consulting industry. The authors suggest that consulting companies actually stunt the clients they purport to serve by denying them the ability to build institutional capabilities. A direct quote reads: “The more businesses outsource, the less they know how to do, causing organizations to become hollowed out, stuck in time and unable to evolve.”
It may come as a surprise that our first reaction was not to cringe, but to exclaim an emphatic “YES! This is what we have been saying all along!” Furthermore, we have been actively working as a firm to engage very differently with our clients to make sure they – and we – don’t go down that road to ruin.
The book also prompted us to put pen to paper to share our point of view and advice to all companies out there – whether they are our clients or not – on how to expect more and get more from their consultant partner. Below we share a recent conversation on this topic and what your organization can take away.
The good and the bad about consulting
Anne: Kathryn, you are a long-time consultant with a deep love of consulting. Why would you want to share with the world what’s wrong with something you care about so deeply?
Kathryn: When I “found” consulting, I was in awe that companies would pay you money to have so much fun helping organizations solve really difficult problems. But over time, I lost faith in the big consulting model. I saw it delivering too little value, creating too much dependency, while consulting firms keep making money doing the same things over and over again because their clients didn’t learn how to do it themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that there is a place for consultants. Organizations and leaders need outside perspective, and we bring that from working across many companies and industries. They need someone to hold up an objective mirror to see what is no longer obvious to them. They sometimes need skills in the moment that they won’t need over the long term. Those are all situations where consultants make sense. But organizations need to be careful about what they outsource – they cannot outsource thinking, judgment or accountability for business decisions, leadership, and results.
Anne: You mentioned “over and over again” – isn’t that part of the consulting business model? To turn one engagement into the next engagement?
Kathryn: I love having long term relationships with clients. You learn how to complement each other’s skills and knowledge. You build a strong foundation of trust to try new approaches. You stand on the shoulders of your collective accomplishments. But I never want to solve the same business problem with a client over and over again, because that means they haven’t increased their capability and I’ve failed. If clients are not better off – more skillful, more capable, more confident – after our engagement or initiative, we haven’t earned our money. If they have to hire a consultant one to three years later to solve the same problem, was the problem solved in the first place?
Anne: I am interested in your response to this quote from the book, “The more businesses outsource, the less they know how to do, causing organizations to become hollowed out, stuck in time and unable to evolve.”
Kathryn: Unfortunately, it’s an accurate description of how the industry has evolved. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. Companies hire consultants for all kinds of services, but here’s the key: Don’t hire someone to make the decision for you or do the job for you. Instead, benefit from external expertise and build internal capability at the same time. This is the best of both worlds, and it’s actually why I came to BTS in the first place.
The founders of BTS and I share a common origin story. BTS was founded by former management consultants who also got tired of making recommendations that never went anywhere in organizations. They started building high-fidelity simulations that their clients could use to help people more deeply understand the new strategic direction. Then, the portfolio of tools and approaches grew from there.
Changing the approach to consulting for the better
Anne: Explain more about the role and power of simulation and practice, and how they help change the consulting game for clients.
Kathryn: I’ve learned over time that you can’t tell anyone about change, but you can help them experience it so that they become owners and authors of the future. BTS’s history of leveraging simulation to make strategy and behavior concrete and practical with real tools, approaches, and expertise is different. I saw breakthrough possibilities in the way BTS created alignment and excitement about a future that felt real and tangible for their clients. It was compelling for me when I first saw it – and a large part of what I saw was missing in the larger consulting space.
The future is never as scary as we think it is when it only lives in our head. When you can simulate the future, when you can “work through it” with others, then it becomes concrete. Even when the future is uncertain, after experiencing it, it feels less scary, and people and organizations can move forward in a more productive way.
Anne: Another fundamental element of consulting you share is that people are at the heart of an organization’s ability to change and thrive. You have said “you have to pay more attention to the people than the things.” Tell us more about how our clients should think about this.
Kathryn: In almost all cases, strategies don’t fail because they are bad. They fail because people don’t see themselves in the strategy and in the picture of the new future for their organization. Because of the way the consulting industry has evolved, clients think there is a tradeoff between getting stuff done and engaging people. But it’s actually a false tradeoff because at the end of the day it’s people who are doing the work. The paradox is that, the more you try to exclude people from the process in service of speed, the slower you will go. As we saw in stark contrast during the pandemic, while supply chains, processes and systems were challenged and disrupted, people changed, adapted, and improvised to keep thing going. We know this can happen outside of a crisis.
Great consultants work to make sure that your people have more than just an understanding of where they’re going as an organization. They help employees discover the intrinsic motivation to actually work in a new way and make new choices by connecting behavior and strategy, values and vision to initiatives in action.
What it feels like to work with a great consultant
Wondering how to ensure you are getting the most value from your consultant partner? And more importantly setting your organization up for success long term? Consider this checklist.
✔︎ Great consultants don’t make things more complex: they simplify, and help you connect the dots. They go beyond understanding the analytics and economics of your business model, your market, and your strategic aspirations. They bring deep understanding of what it takes to create real change – which only happens through people.
✔︎ Great consultants know how to effectively help your people find meaning and purpose in your organization’s new direction because ultimately that’s what will create progress.
✔︎ Great consultants should make you feel smarter and more capable after working with them. So many consultants have made people feel bad for so long that we almost accept it as a given, which is a shame.
✔︎ Great consultants hold a mutuality mindset. They live out the perspective, “We’re in this together — you bring value and so do we.” Great consultants bring insights AND respect and rely on their client’s wisdom about their organization.
✔︎ Great consultants get to root causes. They get to the underlying limiting mindsets because they come from a place of mutuality, curiosity, and respect.
When should you NOT hire a consultant
At the same time – heeding the learnings from our own experience, and the challenges unearthed in the book – there are instances when you shouldn’t hire consultant:
- Don’t hire a consultant when you want to rubber-stamp a tough decision you know you need to make (layoffs, restructuring, strategy pivots). This is about leadership courage. While it might provide air cover in the short term, in the long term it will damage your leadership brand and organizational trust.
- Don’t hire a consultant to redo consulting work you did with them before. If that way didn’t actually solve the problem, don’t do it over again.
- Don’t hire a consulting company to do something your own employees, or lower priced resources could do – like program management or research.
Check out this podcast if you want to hear more of our conversation on this important topic.
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This article was originally publish on Rotman Management
IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.
The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.
In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.
You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
Learn more about business simulations
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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.
It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”
Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.
We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?
To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”
For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.
This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.
To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.
The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.
romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.
As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.
As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .
Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.