When strategy consulting actually helps an organization

A practical look at the conditions that make outside perspective useful

Most organizations that hire a strategy consultant do not get much from it. That is a blunt thing to say, but it is true often enough to be worth saying. The question is not whether strategy work is valuable in principle. It is whether the conditions are right for it to be valuable in your situation.

The problem with hiring a consultant too early

Organizations sometimes bring in outside help before they have a clear enough picture of what they are trying to solve. The consultant arrives, runs a discovery process, and produces a diagnosis that the leadership team could have produced themselves with a few honest conversations. The work is not wrong, but it is not worth what it cost.

The situations where outside perspective adds the most are the ones where the leadership team is too close to the problem to see it clearly, or where there is a disagreement inside the team that no one inside the organization has the standing to resolve. An outside voice can say things that an insider cannot, not because the insider does not know them, but because saying them carries a cost.

What the right conditions look like

The engagements that produce real change tend to share a few characteristics. There is a decision-maker who is genuinely open to hearing something uncomfortable. The problem is specific enough to be worked on, not just a general sense that things could be better. And there is enough time to do the work properly, which usually means more than two weeks.

When those conditions are not present, the work tends to produce a document that gets filed. The document might be good. It might even be accurate. But it does not change anything because the organization was not ready to change anything.

A useful test before you reach out

Before contacting a consultant, it is worth asking: what would we do differently if we had a clear answer to this question? If the answer is 'not much,' the problem is not a strategy problem. It might be an execution problem, or a people problem, or a resource problem. Those require different kinds of help.

If the answer is 'quite a lot,' and the leadership team is genuinely stuck on the question, that is when outside perspective tends to earn its place.

The practice at Cedar Cloud Rise starts every engagement with this kind of diagnostic. If the situation does not call for strategy work, Charlotte will say so in the first conversation.