The Five Fatal Flaws

The Five Fatal Flaws of Conventional Consulting

The Five Fatal Flaws of Conventional Consulting

We continue to draw heavily on Robert H. Schaffer in this section as well.

There are “five fatal flaws” in the conventional consulting approach that contribute to failure RATHER THAN success. Do you have any of them in your organization’s projects? Are you possibly heading toward any of them now?

Fatal Flaw #1 – The Project is Defined in Terms of the Consultant’s Deliverables

  • The project is defined in terms of the work the consultant will do and the “products” the consultant will deliver, but NOT in terms of specific client results to be achieved.  
  • No matter what goals a client may have in mind when engaging a consultant, it is UNLIKELY that the consulting project will be defined in terms of achieving those goals.
  • The assumption, of course, is always that the consultant’s deliverables will eventually be translated into the client’s desired business results…but that is only an assumption, it is rarely part of the contract.

Fatal Flaw #2 – Project Scope Ignores Client Readiness

  • The project scope is determined mainly by the subject to be studied or the problem to be solved, with little regard for the client’s readiness for change.
  • Rarely do consultants, in planning a project, consider questions like these:
- What kind of recommendations might we make at the completion of this work?
- What kinds of changes would the client have to carry out to make it work?
- How likely is it that our client will want to carry out those changes—and will have the ability to do so?
  • It is possible to spend months of time and millions of dollars generating imaginative recommendations that never have a chance of being implemented…and this happens all the time when consultants focus too much on the business issues they are supposed to study and not enough on the client’s readiness.

Fatal Flaw #3 – Grandiose Solutions

  • Projects aim for one big solution rather than incremental successes.
  • This comes from studying the client’s situation in its totality and trying to offer a complete remedy.
  • The aim is to go as far as possible toward having the problem COMPLETELY diagnosed and solved.
  • Large, complex sets of recommendations usually end up taking many months or even years from the time they begin until the consultant delivers the recommendations. While the engagement inches forward, life moves on, customers and competitors change their habits and actions, the economy and regulations change, and turnover impacts employees and leaders.

Fatal Flaw #4 – Hand-Offs Back and Forth

  • Projects entail a sharp division of responsibility between client and consultant; there is little sense of partnership between them.
  • Conventional consultants gather loads of information, conduct surveys and interviews, perform extensive research and analysis, discuss all this WITH ONE ANOTHER, and begin to develop important insights. BUT, usually the client’s people are not involved in this analytical and creative process! Of course, the consultants present periodic progress reports…but listening to progress reports IS NOT THE SAME as doing the analysis and creative thinking!
  • By the end of a project, conventional consultants are usually strongly coalesced around a set of well-conceived concepts, in which THEY have real confidence…but to the client the recommendations can still seem very new, very strange, and very risky.  
  • The more work the consultant carries out WITHOUT close client involvement, and the longer the cycle time from start to finish, the greater the likelihood of missed connections, and the more likely it is that the recommendations will call for actions that are too complex for the client to comprehend and carry out.

Fatal Flaw #5 – Labor-intensive Use of Consultants

  • Projects make labor-intensive use of consultants, instead of LEVERAGED use.
  • This flaw is the INEVITABLE consequence of the other four flaws! When the consultant is oriented toward a comprehensive solution, and the client and consultants agree that this will require extensive study, and it is understood that the consultants will do the bulk of the work, then it IS NOT SURPRISING if the project involves a large number of consultants!
  • Conventional consultants believe that “expertise” of all sorts must be brought in to assist with the project’s vast scope, and this expertise must be provided by multiple teams, all of which must be coordinated and managed, much as a general contractor manages the experts required to construct a building or a house.
  • When consultants FAIL to get client personnel to play major roles on projects, and FAIL to transfer knowledge to client personnel, that is the essence of labor-intensive consulting.
  • Many consulting firms RECOGNIZE that this is not a good way to work, and may even make attempts to get their clients “involved” in project work. But the great majority of consultants, however, seem to be UNWILLING or UNABLE to depart from the conventional, labor-intensive consulting model.
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