We Know How It's Done

There's a consulting business model that has worked for decades. It goes roughly like this: a large company faces a complex transformation. Management calls in one of the big firms — let's call them the Mc's of this world. They arrive with a team, with slides, with a methodology that deserves the name. They say: we know how it's done. And they execute. Strictly, efficiently, at scale.

The company pays a lot of money for this. Really a lot.

The question that has occupied me for years: for what, exactly?

The Insured Transformation

At first glance the answer is obvious: for expertise. For industry knowledge, benchmarks, proven frameworks. For people who've done this twenty times before.

At second glance it gets more interesting. The success rate of large transformation projects has been modest for decades. The numbers vary by study, but the fact that most such projects fail to meet their original goals is no secret. The Mc's know this. Their clients know it too.

And yet the bookings keep coming. Why?

Because the actual product isn't the transformation. The actual product is the insurance. If the Mc's fail, at least no one on the executive team made a visible mistake. We hired the best. We did everything right. That it still didn't work — well, that was execution, or the market, or the timing. Anything except the decision to hire these consultants.

This is institutionalized delegation of responsibility. And it's a brilliant business model.

There's another mechanism that rarely gets discussed: when the grand strategy doesn't pan out, it's often the employees who compensate for it through sheer effort. They find workarounds, keep things running, deliver results in spite of the strategy. And that's precisely what makes the failure invisible. In the end it looks as though the transformation accomplished something. That the results emerged despite, not because of, the consulting work — nobody wants to admit that after the fact. Not the consultants. Not the executives. Certainly not the employees, who did, after all, deliver.

First-Order Cybernetics, Premium Edition

In an earlier post I wrote about the difference between first-order and second-order cybernetics. First order: you steer a system from the outside as though it were a machine. Input in, output out.

The Mc's are the premium version of this. They arrive with the conviction that organizations are steerable — if you just know the right levers to pull. The methodology becomes the machine, the consultants become the engineers, the outcome supposedly predictable.

The problem is the same as with any first-order approach: organizations aren't machines. They are living systems that respond to interventions — but not predictably. What worked at client A can fail spectacularly at client B. Same method, different system, different result.

The Mc's solve this problem by ignoring it. Or more precisely, by burying it under scale. Enough people, enough pressure, enough slide decks — something is bound to move.

What Uncertainty Does to the Model

In stable times, this can work. When the underlying conditions are reasonably predictable, a good methodology can actually provide orientation. The question is what happens when times are no longer stable.

And they aren't. Geopolitical upheavals, technological disruption, markets that shift faster than any five-year strategy can represent. In a world where the basic assumptions are moving, "we know how it's done" becomes a risky claim.

The consultants themselves are often excellent — that isn't the point. The point is that the model itself rests on a premise which no longer holds in times of genuine uncertainty: that anyone can know how it's done.

Socrates would have had something to say about that. But nobody tends to hire him.

The Alternative Is Less Comfortable

What would the alternative look like? Consultants who say: we don't know. We can observe, form hypotheses, set small interventions and see what happens. We bring respect and humility. We work with what's there.

That doesn't sound like a winning pitch. No CEO walks into the supervisory board and says: we hired consultants who don't know how it's done, but they are very mindful.

And that's exactly the dilemma. The more honest stance is the less sellable one. The Mc's sell certainty in an uncertain world. Anyone who wants to sell not-knowing has to first explain why it's more valuable. That's a harder conversation. It requires the client to be willing to let go of the illusion of control — and to take back the responsibility they were about to delegate.

Some are ready for that. Most aren't. And as long as that's the case, the Mc's will keep getting hired.

To be fair, though: there's a good reason to delegate change to outsiders. Organizations sometimes need someone who can shake loose entrenched patterns, question the rituals, violate the unwritten rules. Anyone doing that from inside pays a price. The Mc's can do it — and then leave. That's their privilege and their actual usefulness.

What happens afterwards is the real work. The organization has to find its footing again, figure out what remains from the disruption and what doesn't. And for that it might in fact need the other kind of consulting — the Socratic kind, second-order cybernetics, which works with the system rather than rolling over it. The Mc's can push a door open. Walking through it remains the organization's own task, and it takes longer than any presentation says.

If this resonates — for you, your team, or your organization — get in touch.