Hack:
"The clients can" rather than "the consultants can"? - a quiz for the creative consultant

TINO - Consultancy that solves problems with much fewer advisors and consultants 

In recent years I have met with a great number of consultants. Many of them were searching for new products and services to improve their offering, while also hoping to enhance their position in the market.

To those who were curious about what HUMINT was offering, I often suggested the following idea:

"How about joining hands in offering an integrated consultancy solution, composed of both TINO and your specific expertise?

For an example, this way, when your client needs better information, your KM (Knowledge Management) consultant will offer ‘documented’ solutions, and TINO will add its ‘undocumented’ ones."

In this post I would like to share with you insights resulting from many interesting conversations I had in various locations, cultures and business segments, concerning this suggestion.

The client's advantage – Assuming the client would recognize the value of both components being offered, such a solution will be considered highly cost-efficient since it prevents cases where two separate solutions overlap. And while an integrated solution may seem like paying for more than is necessary, the benefits are in fact easy to see. Taking a construction project as a metaphor, it is clear that buying too much of a specific material may seem wasteful in the short run, but avoiding unexpected problems which may stall the project and raise costs is a very good reason to do so.

The consultant advantage - from the supplier’s perspective, the benefits are also clear. Consultants, I would argue, can enlarge their business opportunities by offering better-structured client-side solutions. These will not only provide financial benefits, but would also achieve greater competitiveness versus other consultancies in the market.

The conflict – "Well, all this surely sounds logical and straightforward, but in practice it is much more complicated," is what I often hear in reply.  I am repeatedly told that basic conflicts exist which must be resolved for such a combined approach to become feasible, if at all. The reasons I am usually given are these:

• Why do clients hire consultants - Clients supposedly hire consultants mainly because they think consultants would know what the problem is, and even how to solve it. But the real reason for hiring consultants is usually the feeling that managers do not have enough time to address the issues, or because they wish to deploy an ad-hoc solution. For example, the transformation of a business process would probably be perceived as such a targeted project. In such cases it seems reasonable to apply the unique experience of a contracted consultant to the problem. In short, I was told that typical clients do not have the time or the necessary expertise. We (the consultants) are there to help.

• Why do consultants want to be hired - Consultants are always on the look for new opportunities for projects, for problems their clients have yet to identify or solve. And the larger they are the better; consultants are expected to present themselves to the client as capable of offering more than help in addressing time constrains or limited ad-hoc services. Simply put, consultants have little incentive for convincing their clients they already know enough, and may be better without the consultants' real or assumed knowledge.

• Why we want to be hired - TINO is a framework of profound internal value to the client. We teach our clients how to study and solve problems on their own. Moreover, a wide range of problems can be solved without any additional resources. Naturally, such an approach would be perceived by most consultants as conflicting with their practice: If TINO can identify problems faster and provide accurate low-cost benchmarking, most typical consultants would be wary of working alongside it, risking an unfavorable comparison.

• There is an even bigger conflict - TINO leaves with the client an internal process which usually runs almost independently. This conflicts with the proclaimed objective of most consultants in the market, to obtain as many projects as possible, and increase their scope as much as possible. Improving the clients' capability to solve their own problems independently is simply not in the consultants' interests.

Most of these conversations, therefore, progress similarly. At first my suggestions create excitement about the opportunity for generating unique value and a competitive edge in the traditional consultancy market. But the excitement quickly fades when the other party gets a better sense of what we are offering, and the deep conflict which lies between it and their product.

The future challenge for consultancies - The future of company–consultancy interaction, I believe, is about to become more complicated, but challenging and promising as well. The main reason is what I see as gradual structural changes:

• In the last decade, more and more companies have recognized that by contracting traditional consultancies, they were not only paying for exposing their strategic vulnerabilities and strengths to the competition, but were too often paying for information and ideas they already had, which the consultants just 'picked up from the floor'.  Companies are also increasingly in need of solving problems quickly rather than receiving advice on how to do so. All this makes the sale of traditional consultancy services more difficult.

• As far as I can see, Its seems that many consultants still ignore the fact that more and more top-level executives announce openly to their companies that avoiding the hiring of consultancies is their preferred policy. And many of these say so precisely because they have dealt with consultancies in the past.

To summarize, assuming that TINO is able to provide what we believe it can, forward-looking consultants seeking to reinvent themselves should be interested in incorporating a TINO-based solution. For example, risk management experts, who have dedicated many years to risk analysis, will be able to offer their clients more than their core-expertise. They could also offer a completely different internal risk management, based on interpersonal, networking, and intelligence skills. The challenge, I argue, is for consultants to focus on their real expertise while finding the right synergy with internal based solutions, like TINO.

Finally, an open question for everyone, but mainly for current or former consultants: Assuming that you are a leader, an innovative and smart consultant, what would you do?          

 Insights are most welcome : haim AT humints DOT com