Manifesto
Good consulting isn't hard. It's just rare.
I believe in clarity over jargon, substance over process, and a rigorous chain of reasoning. Advice should be simple, meaningful, actionable, and should survive contact with the client's reality.
I've organised my convictions about consulting into a ten-point manifesto. It allows me to clearly articulate my beliefs, sets expectations with clients, and gives me something to continually refer back to as engagements progress. The ten points fall into two groups of five:
- Good consulting — how to approach the engagement: the process.
- Good advice — what the final recommendations should deliver: the output.
Good consulting
Good consulting is about understanding the brief, extracting and absorbing information from the client, analysing the data, building clarity, exploring options, and anticipating consequences.
Every brief is an open brief.
Regardless of how tightly a scope is defined, the broader context and the real purpose beneath the engagement are relevant. Every initial assumption is open to question. Alternative routes to the deeper objective deserve consideration, and unconventional approaches are seriously evaluated rather than reflexively dismissed.
Clarity is the product.
The consultant's job is to strip away complexity. The brief should reduce a muddled business mess into a few simple questions. The analysis should distil masses of data, opinions, and perspectives into the handful of data points that actually matter. At every stage of the engagement, the consultant should extract clarity from overwhelming complexity.
Process is not the product.
Large engagements are often heavy with process — steering committees, terms of reference, project control boards, approval gates, progress meetings, sync sessions, status decks, and weekly reports. Some of it is useful. None of it is the point. Participating in the meetings and producing the artefacts about the work must never be mistaken for actually doing the work.
Address why it persists.
Identifying the root cause of a problem isn't the end of the analysis. Look for the “why” behind the “what”. A problem that has survived years of capable people is held in place by something. Why hasn't anybody already fixed this problem? Why hasn't this opportunity already been exploited? The reason may be mundane — maybe nobody owned the problem, its true cost wasn't recognised, or somebody was served by the status quo — but it needs to be addressed.
Think multiple moves deep.
Consider what will happen after the client acts on a recommendation. The direct impact is usually on customers or employees. But how will competitors react? Will they adjust their offerings? Or their prices? How will partners, suppliers, regulators, and other stakeholders respond? How should the recommendation be adapted to account for these second- and third-order effects?
Good advice
If consulting is the journey, advice is the destination. But not all advice is good advice — some advice is objectively wrong or obviously short-sighted. Even accurate and well-articulated advice is worthless if it tells the client nothing new, nothing meaningful, or where to aim rather than what to do. These principles describe what good advice looks like and what makes it good.
Good advice is simple.
Advice should be presented as clearly, concisely, and objectively as possible. The best recommendations feel obvious the moment they're said out loud. But obvious in hindsight is not the same as easy to devise. Brilliantly simple advice is a rare and valuable thing. Convoluted recommendations, on the other hand, are cheap to manufacture — and a glaring red flag.
Good advice has substance.
Consulting advice must tell the client something new and important. It must matter. No jargon, no fluff, no buzzwords. When the situation calls for a bold recommendation, make it. No hedging. Restating the problem in tidier language is not advice. Nor is breaking it into its component parts, mapping the current state, or convening the discussion.
Good advice is actionable.
A recommendation says what to do. Goals and objectives are not recommendations — they describe the destination and leave the route to the reader. Telling a client to reduce their costs gives them an objective. Telling them to negotiate bulk discounts with key suppliers is actionable advice. Prescribe actions, not aspirations.
Rigorous analysis is airtight.
Every recommendation must rest on an unbroken chain of logic — from the evidence, through the reasoning, to the conclusion — and that chain must be clearly articulated. Rigorous analysis is traceable, defensible, and airtight. It takes meticulous analysis to arrive at clear and simple conclusions. Nuance and complexity are to be acknowledged, not flattened to fit.
Soft factors are the hardest.
What stands between a client and the result is usually human — ignorance, resistance to change, cognitive bias, risk aversion, self-interest, office politics, and ego. Behavioural barriers are part of the problem, so they must be addressed in the recommendation. Advice that assumes rational actors faithfully executing an agreed plan will not survive contact with the organisation.
None of this is radical. It's what you thought you were buying the last time you hired a consultant — and, if you're reading this, you probably didn't get. This time, you can.