In November, I joined Indigogold – and it’s changed the way I think about consulting, and shown the need to ‘grow up’ if one wants to do it well.
I have worked with consultants off and on throughout my career, and have run leadership and change management programmes in a couple of very large organisations. I also have more than ten years’ experience of professional consulting for multinational corporates. So, I thought I knew what good consulting was about.
A few months down the road and my views have shifted.
The first thing I noticed was that – unlike most consulting firms – people were not buried deep in their laptops tallying up billable time, creating endless project decks or obsessing over which psychological sub-factor best predicts whichever X-factor is flavour of the month. Instead, they were ’in it’ with clients on the phone, giving them good advice; less concerned with creating the ‘perfect model’, more with dealing with the practicalities of facilitating good decisions, building momentum and transferring skills. (Yes, we rely on good psychology to inform our approach – but Indigogold doesn’t lead with product, it leads with people.) This wasn’t abstract or cut-and-paste advice; there were no playbooks being used, no standard templates being followed. Conversations were about specific people in real roles, and were dealing with difficult problems in real time. And that meant I had to step up my game.
Client meetings with Indigogold were an eye-opener. My colleagues are fearless in asking hard questions, quick to spot the wider consequences of easy action, they can cut to the quick; but it starts the real debate about “What are we going to do about it?” The lesson I was learning was that while my previous consulting work had come up with advice – often good advice, I think – it hadn’t helped the client actually do something useful with it.
I remember a project where my consulting work had presented a client with highly nuanced reports with detailed data on people and their organisation… only to get a call, three years later, where the client was asking what they could do with all this information; “was there an algorithm that could simplify sorting of talent?” In short, no: I had provided the information but not enabled them to find answers when they needed it.
I realise that, for some of my past clients, the act of getting the consultants in was an achievable and sufficient goal in itself; they had ticked the ‘let’s do leadership’ box by being thorough and gathering data. If anyone asked, they could show benchmarking, lists of high potentials, aggregate organisational strengths and weaknesses, and individual reports for their top 100 leaders – but, of course, this data is just describing, not being actively used to create useful change. Other clients had genuinely wanted to solve problems, but felt overwhelmed by the enormous challenge of taking action after the consultants had disappeared. I understand now that the consultancy practice I had been used to allowed me to hide behind process, and left my clients ill-equipped when it came to the crunch.
It also occurred to me that the large consultancies I’d seen in action are not really equipped to take on that necessary but messy task.
Big firms work on a well-established model: they get experienced, clever and expensive people to create ‘black box’ templated solutions, which can be operated by less experienced (and therefore cheaper) people, whose job is to ask scripted questions, feed the results into the black box, and crank the handle. Don’t get me wrong, the big consulting model can work brilliantly when the scale is enormous, and the need is immediate: global change management, restructuring, or mergers and acquisitions; processes that have to manage thousands of moving parts simultaneously in minute detail, and have defined start- and end-points.
Big consultancy is, often, tailored product delivery and not a service; they want to deploy their well-tuned product and move on. The ideal scenario is that lead partners show their face at the initial engagement stage and then hand off the process to someone more junior. It’s how they make money.
I think that anybody senior reading this will already know, instinctively, that there are no ‘silver bullets’ out there; managing people well is a process without end, and one which is all about the most wriggly factor of all, which is the human mind at work in a constantly-changing business context.
What I have now seen at first hand is that a consultancy can accompany the client on this very difficult and hands-on journey, so long as it has people with long experience of business and with the psychological understanding required to deal with really big people issues, and the guts to engage in unflinching questions and discussions that get to the root of problems.
Often, there is no ‘right’ answer – or, at least, no right answer right now. But even in the absence of obvious answers, there are still choices to be made; and Indigogold is right there for the clients, helping them every day to be brave, helping them to work through the complexity to make decisions that have positive consequences for their organisations.