There is a moment in almost every engagement when someone reaches for a larger word. The problem is not the slow month, or the product customers quietly route around, or the approval that sits on one desk for a week. The problem is “scale”. It is “transformation”. It is “the operating model”.
The larger word feels like progress because it sounds like the right altitude for a leadership conversation. More often it is a way of not looking at the thing itself. And a business that has not been looked at closely cannot be helped by a framework, however well drawn.
The pull of the bigger word
Big words are comfortable for a reason. They spread responsibility thin. They postpone the specific conversation that would be awkward: the customer segment that costs more than it pays, the team that is busy rather than productive, the decision from last year that was announced but never actually made.
Naming the problem precisely is uncomfortable, and that is exactly why it is useful. A precise name points at a place where something can change.
A useful reading needs sentences a sceptical operator would accept.
What a reading looks at
Consultancy done properly begins as a reading of the business, before any recommendation. We look at a short set of questions, and we look at them in the company’s own material rather than in summaries prepared for us.
- Who pays, for what, and at what effort to serve them.
- Which customers come back without being chased, and which only return with a discount.
- Where time really goes, as opposed to where the organisation chart says it goes.
- Which recent decisions are still open in practice, whatever the minutes say.
None of this requires exotic analysis. It requires patience, access, and a willingness to write down what we find in plain language.
Ask for the unpolished material
The most informative documents in a company are rarely the ones prepared for outsiders. They are the working spreadsheet with a column nobody remembers adding, the escalation thread, the sales notes, the list of exceptions finance makes every month.
We ask for those first. Polished material tells you what the business would like to believe about itself. The unpolished kind tells you how it actually runs.
Keep observation apart from recommendation
We separate what we observed from what we recommend, on the page and in the room. Observations should be checkable: anyone with access to the same material could confirm or dispute them. Recommendations are judgements, and we label them as such.
We also write down what we are not confident about. A reading that claims certainty everywhere is not more rigorous. It is simply less honest about where its edges are.
The memo, the room, and the test
The output is short: a memo and a working session. The memo says what we think is true, what decision it implies, what would change our mind, and the first moves. The session is where it gets tested by the people who run the business every day. If the memo cannot survive that room, it was not finished.
Our test for the work is simple. Afterwards, a meeting changes. A different question gets asked, a different number gets looked at, a decision that had been drifting gets made. If the week afterwards looks exactly like the week before, the consultancy did not happen, however good the slides were.
More on how we work is on the Consultancy page. Or bring us the question the way you would describe it to a colleague.
