Advanced consulting theory 3: the common center

"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.

One bizarre paradox tests consultants like you more unconsciously and sorts them more ruthlessly than any other: the ability to think beyond one's individual contribution.

As a consultant, your level-up to broad-impact, scalable, next-level effectiveness and executive value hinges on your willingness to set yourself aside.

Methodologies and tools that make you individually effective or made your old team hum like an electric motor do validate your credibility and experience. They also mollify you with the cloaked hubris that what worked for you will work for someone else. For that to be true, their circumstances would need to match your own to a tee which…never, ever happens.

Wisdom begins with admission, and crossing this consulting event horizon into executive utility requires understanding:

• That the context is different
• How the context is different
• How systems and populations needs and priorities differ from individuals and small groups
• That you cannot personally control the situation you must improve

Until you allow the above to shape your consulting prescriptions and consequent therapeutic actions, you'll behave like a less garish version of that revolving senior executive who became a millionaire 25 years ago and hasn't been wrong since. To consult at the highest level, you'll need to shuck your individual and small-group reflexes in favor of those that empower the system you were brought in to bolster.

"You must unlearn what you have learned."
— Yoda, Jedi Grand Master

You doth protest, "but what I've learned makes me a ______ consultant!" Correction, it makes you a contributor consultant. Becoming an expert consultant, a Consulting Jedi Master, requires a revamp. The price of your new self is your old self, the saying goes.

To transcend the methodological malaise, it's important to start by recognizing your place in it. If you've been doing anything long enough to consult on it, you're particularly susceptible to survivorship bias.

Take whatever you consulted on this morning. You spot smoke, and the powers-that-be ask you to intervene. You get to be here because:

• You've successfully deployed x tactic, method, or process in the past.
• That other group is also doing x and it's working—or not working—great for them.
• This situation feels similar, identical, or even like a rerun, and like Elrond, you were there 3000 years ago.

You face a conundrum:

• Your effectiveness is and will be deeply contextual. The challenge may be similar, but the people, situationships, histories, starting position, and burdens make the path to your objective different this time.
• Your effectiveness isn't measured by your individual performance. Others have to succeed because of your enablement.
• Pursuing lies becomes easier the higher you climb. False gods like vanity metrics, tyrannical KPIs, #trending ideas, and business book strategies will pollute your perspective. It's all smog meant to fill unknowns with counterfeit certainty, like nicotine in an adrenal receptor and prepare justification for foreseeable failures ("but we hit our metrics…"). They're excuses for ignoring the scarily simple responsibility of helping your client be valuable to their customer.

If that feels unwinnable, you're thinking from your false center, where you live in the middle of the situation and you venerate:

• Effort and the belief that any activity always precedes positive results
• Dichotomies like correct/incorrect
• The story behind your own and others' individual successes

Escaping the false center requires you to convert your expression of value from control to influence. Then, find and embrace the client's common center.

Your consulting client's common center is the core purpose of their organization. Not "delight customers" or "deliver value" or any other happy euphemism. (Nobody ever wanted to grow up and deliver value.)

The common center's essence will typically be so simple that most people drive right past it each day, seeing it without noticing it like a landscape feature in the background of their mental commute. Most of the time, the common center will germinate around the undecorated, plainspoken version of the company mission. Instead of "Provide Industrial Lifting Solutions at unmatched Quality, Speed, and Performance" it'll be more like "help construction dudes lift heavy stuff without dropping it on themselves".

That's the essence. Now, bridging that purpose into something graspable and tactically usable requires a little work (called "leadership"), but that clears the guesswork, smoke, and distractions that push people into their false centers. To prevent that, place someone else in the middle with this simple exercise:

• What people does this organization serve?
• How do we help them?
• What do those people need from us?
• What can we do about it next?

Briefly, for a consumer products company:

• What people does this organization serve? Everyday consumers.
• How do we help them? We improve consumers' daily quality of life.
• What do those people need from us? Enable customers to use our new product X.
• What can we do about it next? Get our new version of the app out the door.

Defining all this is the AI-simple part. The majority of your consulting time will be spent constantly recalibrating your teams' perspective and work around this common center. Team success, when seen outside of (or more dangerously, in lieu of) overall success, will damage good work unless there is a clear, constantly visible common center target.

Preventing interface barriers

Cross-disciplinary teams working differently towards a common center will still fail unless they can agree on their interface. "Interface" does not mean uniformity.

Accept that your teams will and must work differently from each other, but define and perfect the interactions between them so everyone understands:

• What must cross the interface for one team's work to contribute to another's
• How to intake work and requests in a way that's helpful to their team, and harmless to others. Classic example: creating work for someone else to make your work easier.
• Ensure people outside the system can see what's happening such that they don't tell you how you should work.

Attention here helps well-intentioned teams make meaningful progress by reducing confusion, increasing certainty of action, and nipping drama before it starts.

Tools build progress and confusion

Progress after common alignment can choke on tooling. While Slack is considered a pillar of modern development kit, it's often used alongside or surreptitiously in corporations where Microsoft Teams exists, segmenting away content that should belong to the system but doesn't.

Tools also rewire behavior. Nobody individually likes Microsoft Teams and its all-surveilling-eye-ness, but the organizational benefits from common rooms, individual channels, scheduling, and searchability. Team-sized attempts to upend systems like Teams usually fail because organization health trumps group and team perfection.

The oldest tools are often the ones most effective in this moment but overlooked in favor of something that feels more consultant-y like Traction, 40X, or Six Sigma. If you aren't extra careful, each of those puts a lot of structure around a false center!

Special caution: effect first, efficiency last

Even when consultants and executives act from the common center, there's one offramp into temptation that claims many: the pursuit of efficiency too soon.

An offering needs to be valuable before it can be cheap. Efficiency-biased thinking feels logical when the team's under pressure to deliver something without annihilating their budget. Efficiency focus makes sense once engineering tasks are well understood and the offering itself is known to be valuable.

Early in a software or IoT program, highly-efficient and overly-cheap activities close the door on the experimentation and value orientation necessary to make something that isn't garbage. For consultants, if the team you serve has three five-star apps, how you got there won't matter. If you've built five three-star apps, you won't be rewarded for being tactically efficient, you'll be reprimanded for your strategic failure.

Efficiency's commonly the refuge of the functionary consultant who doesn't know what else to recommend. The consultant who can save money or time, but cannot make either. Clearly, efficiency is important to long-term success, but it's a counterproductive first target. What's the single most impactful precursor for long-term success? Short-term success!

When efficiency metastasizes into homogeneity

Commonplace efficiency-thinking can destroy efficiency when applied sporadically. When institutionalized, its impact can be cataclysmically inefficient.

Homogenous systems fail in open ecologies and economies, either spectacularly or by slow death. Some of the mainstays of technology started as disruptive innovators but grew to such immense size that their unilateral worldview and monomaniacal modus operandi now consume more value than they create.

Inside of a business, homogeneity failures start from a singular focus on a singular issue, becoming more and more self-insulating at the expense of all context. Even when they implode, they continue undead, animated by the premise that the problem was right and the solution was right in principle, but wrong in method. We just have to do the same thing better!

Unkillable zombie programs lead short- to mid-length (un)lives as major headaches that destroy value fast enough to poison the well for all company digital projects. Each incarnation veils the same promise under slightly different words, promising exciting changes while eerily persisting because it's failing less fast, delivering less often, inviting less scrutiny after causing years of agonizing scrutiny fatigue.

Survivors become part of the cost of doing business, living their life as obstacles to be overcome or tolerated in order to get anything done. Many ERPs, SAP installations, and Salesforce fit this model. They are the Glerp, swallowing everything in their way, at the expense of their health.

But wait, you say. These systems are everywhere. These companies are huge. There are squadrons of consultants focusing entirely on this work. They prove the point!

As consultants we are required to turn off auto-pilot and operate intentionally such that our work method becomes something that contributes positively to the success of a system. Depending on your particular flavor of consulting, this may be harder than you expect.

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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.