Advanced consulting theory 2: the consulting absorption rate

"Consulting" work once connoted expert guidance. The past 25 years of tech work muddied that definition to include "anyone who bangs on a keyboard"—engineers, designers, testers, data scientists, vibe coders, and Agile Certified PMP Scrum Masters alike!

If predictions about AI hold true, then digital's undergoing its own "CNC machining moment". The labor requirement of mass tech production will shrink dramatically…but true expertise in this reshaped context will become considerably more precious.

If you're in a consulting role, you'll need to operate at an elevated level. In this series, we explain advanced consulting theory concepts you should understand and apply.

Consultants, most of your work will be ignored or thrown away. Not by malice, but by your clients' necessity.

Initially, their disregard feels like it looks. When clients fail to notice your strategic brilliance on slide 11 or immediately wad up your masterwork and snort into it, a little piece of you lands in the trash underneath the deck you stayed up all night tweaking.

Take it in stride. They're not criticising you—this was always for and about them. The sting comes from your broken attachment. Your client's behavior will tell you what matters—therein lies the key to impact, along with the less-is-more tricky part:

You're only needed for your impact.

When your client ignores something or tosses it out, it lacked the requisite impact. Again, it's not about you.

Unlike your client's full-time employees, their consultants aren't subject to the tyranny of performative effort but are subject to brutal utilitarianism. Why? A consultant can't be perceived as dedicated like an ambitious FTE can. Putting in 50 hours, rambling through a megadeck, and sending screenplay-length midnight emails makes you look like malfunctioning equipment instead of a hardworking company person.

Your client needs the result, not the journey. They definitely don't want the hourly play-by-play of your workweek. When judging your work in aggregate, look at the scraps on the floor. If your blood, sweat, tears, and waste drove you to your ultimate strategic recommendation and final work product, that's a great sign—good waste, you could say. If you put your client through every single step, thought, and idea, that's bad waste. Even if you ultimately delivered, you incinerated a bunch of their time (and yours).

Your consulting client can only utilize (or withstand) so much of your consulting, so you start any engagement limited by the consulting absorption rate: on average, clients uptake about 20% of your consulting effort, implement just one of your recommended changes, and read a handful of lines from your epic dissertation.

Consulting clients face obvious bandwidth restraints, but the core problem is that the effect of many consulting suggestions individually (and certainly all of them together) would grind their operations to a halt. Here's what your clients ask themselves as they listen to your presentation:

• How would we make this happen?
• How long would it take to operationalize?
• When and how would we feel the effect from this change?
• Does the work required make my/my team's life easier, or is this more work than reward?

Moreover, your consultees receive anything you say skeptically. Your thoughts and recommendations won't feel novel to them, and their specific context is still an alien planet to you despite associated similarities to past experience. As you speak, they doubt your every breath because:

• They know things you don't.
• You can't fully understand the ramifications of your proposed actions.
• Overly-milquetoast or blindly-ambitious recommendations taint your remaining credibility.
• When you're arrogant enough, you mistake their skepticism for misunderstanding and start arguing.

None of the above makes you useless. It should make you selective.

Selectivity requires practiced restraint and high empathy, both of which are in short supply in business.

One of two phenomena breaks consultants' nerves. For most, there's a doubting voice, the Jerk Self, snidely whispering anxious, guilty, or shameful missives—whatever it takes to motivate that person to produce and look useful. Volume won't win them accolades, but it will keep them from being fired first.

For a select few other consultants, their absolute certainty about what's right for a client will drive them over any norms and engagement barriers like a monster truck crushing others' ideas and voices. Client, team, manager, it doesn't matter, they're an indiscriminate force, and unleashing that force exhilarates them.

Any consultant, no matter how gifted, can break discipline, overconsulting and underperforming for their customers by overpowering their consultees, overreaching their purview, overworking their directive, and overmaking their communication.

Consultants overwhelm consultees in their vainglorious attempts to appear intelligent and productive. Most do so unwittingly while high on the felt purpose of their work instead of minding their impact. Consultants make themselves impossible to absorb when they:

Work their process instead of the client's problem. Even if you began an engagement with empathetic listening, you made that listening useless by falling into your routine. One of the hardest things about some projects is realizing that you can't employ either your process or industry standard processes because your client's methods are unique—and probably their secret sauce.

Require too many precursors. Consultants often ask for too much before they make an impact. We get it, customer context is the single largest critical component you need to understand, and the one thing you can't extract directly.

Fail to transition theory into practice. "It didn't work because you didn't do it my way." More likely, you didn't understand what you were jamming your ideas into.

Garnered no respect. Clients will work with you, but how exactly do they see you? If you can't answer this question, you might not have the emotional intelligence or empathy to lead a consulting engagement.

Hit too hard. Always right ≠ always effective. Neither does running too far ahead. Instead, play sacrificial chess. Be just wrong enough to let someone else finish the job and carry the torch, like a correctness vaccine.

Most consultants are intense by nature. Tamp down your overwhelming shows of force by remembering that:

Consulting's not a show. It's an actual relationship where you get to know each other, transact sometimes, unpack problems, then solve them together.

Consulting's not bootcamp. Your clients are experienced professionals. Don't patronize them by pretending they're green recruits you can drive through basic exercises.

Consulting's not an industrial process. Modernist org architects see replaceable cogs, but you need to see human beings if you want to change behavior instead of swap people.

Occasionally, we've seen the productization mentality poison others' consulting efforts. When you productize your offerings, you do that for message simplification. Your customers didn't buy your offering independently, they bought the offering, they bought your meetings, they bought your staff, they bought your temperament, they bought your personalities, etc.

Consultants notoriously overassume customers' attention, automatically believing their clients' worldviews are identical to their own. You'd expect then that consultants should have no trouble sticking to the tasks outlined in the SOW they wrote.

Wrong! We've watched countless consultants wander away from their own plan within the first week. Consultants, please, you were hired to solve a specific problem. At the enterprise level especially, that requires you to stay in your box and deliver as expected.

Sales-oriented consultants overreach by immediately escaping their contractually-defined box, darting around, sniffing the org for opportunities like an anxious foxhound under the belief that they need to "land and expand" beyond their current point of contact. Insatiable consultants shapeshift into that guy, sullying initial trust by stepping on toes, making proclamations that make enemies, and broadcasting skeevy vibes. Your prey can smell your hunger, and you haven't earned those opportunities yet because your company hasn't delivered. It hasn't even been 60 days!

If you're this person, chill out and grow your account in three easy steps:

Prevent stupid mistakes. Manage early engagements delicately, preventing bad behavior by staying focused. Keep your team on task and keep your senior management out of your account unless they're somehow useful. Big swinging recommendations, especially process recommendations, will always be met with full-body eyerolls and make you sound like a know-nothing know-it-all. Doubly so if you make them too early.

Quench the dumpster fire first. You're new, untrusted, and eminently disposable. Even if you were hired on reputation, you've got to earn the right to a. have your work and advice taken seriously, b. be considered for future engagement, and c. actually return after this engagement. Do the thing you were hired for. Over the course of your dumpster firefighting work, you'll learn enough about the client to understand which alley this dumpster came from, how it became an inferno, and how the hurricane surge floated it away.

Propose the next thing at the end. "Soo, aaah, whaddya want us for next?" Argh, be an expert instead of a servile clown! Repeat after me: "You've got Agile-itis and it's creating a bevy of problems. If I were you, I'd tackle X, Y, and Z next. We'll help you with X, here's how: sales words." Don't ask the client what they want, and don't propose something 10x–30x bigger than what you just completed. If they want something else, they'll counter. If they don't want anything more from you, they'll equivocate and ghost.

Consultants think clients buy what they're selling and buy who they say they are. They don't. Most prospects see right through the dog and pony show. When a client brings your firm on, they realize they're bringing your implicit baggage, like your methods, reputation, and specialties. You don't need the circus—you really just need to deliver meaningful impact.

Overworked consulting, e.g. consulting that produces mountains of non-critical deliverables and communications, smothers impact by subsuming it with its own noise. Mighty expensive noise, depending on team size! What's happening when you overwork? Ask your ma:

"Ma is the time and space life needs to breathe, to feel and connect. If we have no time, if our space is restricted, we cannot grow."

When you produce too much consulting output, you dump paint on an already busy canvas. When the sprint backlog's endless and the story points accumulate, your additional noise chokes off space you and your client both need. Worse, by gradating your signal into their noise, you smudge the perceptible contrast your work requires to differentiate itself from their status quo. They're paying you for signal, and it doesn't matter how much signal they're receiving if it all looks like noise. No client cares if you shoot 50 shots in the 8 ring. They have people who can do that. Hit the X on command, please.

The undisputed heavyweight champion of unforced errors, overwrought consultant communication unsparingly torches millions of work hours annually. Whether too many pages, too many words, too many meetings, or too many participants, consultants have bandwidth and they're not afraid to use it.

Unfortunately, you weren't hired to soak up your client's time, mental cycles, and emotional availability. You were hired because their bandwidth to solve problems or tackle projects became scarce, and you offer a shortcut. Be a shortcut. There's one right way to communicate as a consultant: the way your clients are used to.

Forget what you learned in college composition. Writing for effect means architecting a message for consumption. You've heard of ethos, logos, and pathos, the core rhetoric underpinning your message. We're imploring you to start with kairos, finding the right time and place.

You already know what you need to say, so how should it be consumed, o consultant? Should your payload be delivered by:

• Deck?
• Email?
• Text/chat?
• Call?
• Other?

Then, make a few bullets that capture your message payload's salient points.

Now comes the 1 weird trick…does your audience need anything more? Probably not! Congratulations, you're communicating as a peer to senior executives!

Florid olde tymey novels and posturing Substack screeds make sense in a world where people had time between decisions, gaps in information reception, and the chillaxedness to become engrossed in the fiction (or non-fiction) of somewhere other than where they were. That's the world our species was bred for, but it's not the world we live in.

When working adults read a novel today, that's their escape time, me-time, a sleep hygiene ritual, or most likely, a podcast. Your clients suffer trauma-grade information bombardment. As a communicator, you have to slip through the incoming fire that comprises their day and deliver meaning.

If you can't communicate small, you're not clear enough. If you're ever presenting to the CEO of a multinational as a consultant, you get one slide.

Your client can only take so much action, especially for those of you in expert advisory roles. Like any non-professional-services professional, corporate and executive consulting clients possess limited capacity for:

• Action against your recommendations (they have to turn a huge ship)
• Satisfying your attention demands alongside everything else
• Communication to read, understand, and act upon your messages

Unread text walls, unreviewed AI notes, and unseen recorded calls sizzle like the background static of their lives. That can't be how you deliver value.

Given customers' capacity, we've defined some rough constraints that consultants should adhere to over the course of a project. This won't be easy:

Action priority: You can make 5 recommendations maximum after an audit. Only 1–2 will ever get done. Be extremely clear on what those should be.

Action capacity: You're probably consulting for a going concern, so everyone's already got a (likely unrelated) full-time job. Your stakeholders and their subordinates have a ~2–4 hours per week to execute whatever you're consulting on.

Communications: You get one 3-bullet email focused on one core point per week, texts and team messages restricted to 2 sentences per, 1–3 1-on-1 calls per week with your sponsoring stakeholder.

Meetings: 1 of your own per day max, participation in others varies considerably.

Presentations: You get one slide, 3 minutes to explain it, and ~5 to discuss it.

It's a tight space to maneuver in, and few consultants ever realize that. Does it feel claustrophobic? If so, you're getting it!

"Where others do, don't. And if you have to do, do less."
— Calvin Coolidge

Before you lift a finger, remember that your consulting value comes in two forms:

Advice. Ways of thinking, knowing, and behaving—your insight, expertise, guidance, knowledge transfer, etc. We say "perspective" at Next Mile, a.k.a. applying your expertise to their context (their position, situation, frame of mind, capabilities, and constraints.)

Execution. Things you can act on: labor, solutions, operationalization, delivery, oversight, etc.

Advice and execution combine to yield impact.

When working alongside other consultants, we continue to find that most know the motions of consulting, but can't calibrate their impact with serious intentionality or regularity.

Again, your perceived value isn't a function of some cosmic total account of your raw outputs and KPIs satisfied. Instead, your perceived value is a derivative of the function of what you emphasize. You're probably overdoing it.

Ruthless precision about what matters will help you avoid drafting text wall emails that don't get responses. Most people have the instinct to act—the rest can't resist their instinct to talk. Your misfortune, dear consultant, requires that you resist both…just until it makes sense to give in.

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Next Mile consulting helps businesses navigate troublesome technology transitions. If you need guidance from experts who truly care about the effect of our work, contact us today.