Before we became consultants, ourselves, we worked alongside them... a lot. And, as we worked alongside these consultants, we began to notice a common theme: we rarely, if ever, saw the consultants partnering with the individuals who were actually running the business on a day-to-day basis, the "Doers." Oh, sure, there were sometimes meetings with team leads, and more junior managers, and a lot of great information came as a result of those meetings... but the picture the consultant painted was never really complete. 

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We've been onlookers as innumerable strategies and product roadmaps come unraveled by a handful of questions from the Doers.

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We've also been the end users being forced to adopt a consultant-crafted framework that our executive leaders loved and signed off on... even though it had no viability in terms of actually implementing it. So, by our vantage point, our company had spent a capital on temporarily hiring "experts," who would provide unrealistic solutions, disrupting the work of the Doers, and lending more confusion and frustration to the mix.

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We began to dread hearing the word "consultant." Consultants meant shiny slide decks and trademarked methodology. Consultants meant validating leadership's existing assumptions rather than testing them. The result was polished recommendations that looked compelling in the boardroom but struggled to survive in day-to-day operations.

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We became staunchly anti-consultant, without our even realizing it.

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What finally changed our perspective wasn't meeting a better consulting firm.

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It was realizing that consulting itself wasn't the problem.

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The problem was how it was being practiced.

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Somewhere along the way, too much of the industry had become optimized for producing deliverables instead of producing understanding. Consultants became experts at presenting answers before fully understanding the questions. They interviewed executives, documented processes, facilitated workshops, and disappeared, often leaving the people responsible for doing the work to figure out how to make an elegant recommendation survive contact with reality.

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We didn't believe organizations needed more polished slide decks.

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We believed they needed better partners.

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Partners willing to ask uncomfortable questions. Partners willing to admit when they didn't know something yet. Partners willing to spend time with the people closest to the work before proposing a solution.

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Most importantly, partners willing to build solutions that fit the organization instead of asking the organization to fit the solution.

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That's when we stopped thinking of ourselves as "anti-consultant."

 

We realized we weren't against consulting.

 

We were against consulting that prioritized appearances over outcomes.

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So we decided to build the kind of consulting firm we wished we'd had sitting beside us throughout our own careers.

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