Advanced consulting theory 4: thinking as an organization

"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 first of many parts, we explain advanced consulting theory concepts you should understand and apply.

In life, most choices you consciously make have no systemic downside. They either affect you alone or a small mix of direct and indirect downstream parties. While you will knowingly make some choices in spite of their consequences, more often, you'll prefer to ignore said consequences altogether, move on, and get away just fine. Other choices you face don't register as choices—you handle those autonomically or emotionally without perceiving any possible complications.

In work, your choices affect a system and have a broad impact. Despite the stakes, you make more of those choices less consciously than you should.

Businesspeople balance individual-good choices versus system-good choices every time they face a decision. And, just like in some hypothetical org-wide zipper merge scenario, some people—those stacked up in line patiently inching forward—think they're doing it right because they've made a conscientious unit-level, individual-good decision to join the queue. Meanwhile, those uncivilized animals hurtling toward the merge in the empty lane and cutting in fulfill the true promise of the zipper merge, creating the systemic benefit the organization requires.

At best, an ideal answer for an organizational system or organism will feel complex or counterintuitive to the individual decider. At worst, that answer can appear individually and specifically detrimental to that participant, who'll feel discomfited and overrule it.

Consultants, you don't get the luxury of avoiding uncomfortable thoughts. In yet another example of counterintuition, you were almost certainly hired to help a gang of longtime, serial discomfort-avoiders face down a strategic inevitability with grace—and give them a fighting chance to thrive.

After jailbreaking yourself from your past methodologies, old victories, current perceptions, and need for validating personal heroics, you'll begin to help clients act from their common center and toward an organization-first outcome. Once you finally feel comfortable with that, another perspective will emerge—an unexpected sequel to your transformation.

The day your escape pod crashed on your client's threatened world, you promised to help.

Your client's hungry for progress. They're enthralled by your stories of an exotic land where workers succeed at what they're doing, but they can't absorb your wisdom or execute your directives the way that worked for you, then, or there.

Fate and sales skills brought you here. Your client does need you. They need what you can do. Their individuals and teams exist on their alien planet, one with a different atmosphere they're amazed you can even breathe. They reside in an ecosystem with an immune response that can and will ruthlessly reject incompatible strategies, tactics, and…species.

You have to decide, o gallant adventurer, who, exactly, are you advocating for? The roguish locals who rescued you from your escape pod? The chittering fluffbunnies scampering through the fields? The singing trees with the moon-sparkling pollen? You were entrusted to save their planet, and that will entail personal, individual, and group discomfort for the benefit of their ecosystem.

Nature's harshness conceals a beautiful simplicity inside individuals' lives and stories. Beneath their often inexplicable fates, complications, tragedies, and triumphs, survival is every species' ultimate goal. As a senior executive or consultant to senior executives, you're responsible for a species, not a tribe or a team or a town in a village. Survival requires you to think both broader and simpler.

Individuals and Individual Consultants focus on achieving success. They want themselves, their families, nations, and related groups to succeed against or relative to…other members of their species. They have perception—the world as seen from their two little screen-fried eyeballs.

An individual's performance in life over time (read: their lifespan) can typically be evaluated against species-specific, context-specific criteria. In the modern world for a modern person, this includes things like opportunities seized, goals fulfilled, happiness, education, children, income, etc.—all the Instagram milestones we can post atop the individual-focused demographic data we live to cherrypick.

Pretend that I've placed you in charge of guiding the whole human race. If you now represent the global population of human beings, you've gained a wildly different perspective. Suddenly all that mammalian status-jockeying is really just a method to improve individual fitness and, in turn, improve some species KPIs. They're not what guards against the externalities that could extinguish the species.

A population's performance over time (a timespan that hopefully doesn't end…) pits its survival against the harsh entropy of its environment. Success pivots around defensive strategies like preclusion, risk mitigation, diversity, and resiliency. A population must be able to:

Replicate itself
Sustain itself efficiently
Function in multiple environments
Retain the ability to adapt to changing circumstances

Existence, then, is a paranoid-defensive act. If, as a species, we can't replicate and renew, we're fragile and one plague will kill us off. If we binge on variably-scarce resources, we suffer, then die. If an environment disappears, we die. If we can't adapt where others can, we die. We have to grow, but if we overgrow we overexpose ourselves to risk, and many of us will die from some cyclical peril. When we take an L, we need the resiliency to come back stronger. Sound a bit like business?

Managers' pro-organization and anti-organization decisions depend on the context guiding their personal perspective. Consider how a superior's specific position in an organization might affect their perception and their resulting decision to support an SME's pet project:

Team lead: Supported. "Cool man, I support you."
Team manager: Declined. "I need you focused entirely on your main job. Gotta hit numbers."
Group director: Supported. If you can provide a business justification, go for it."
Unit VP: Declined. "You're wasting the group's time with this." (Code for "If we miss goal, I take the fall.")
Big boss: Supported. "I need you at your best. You'll either get it out of your system so you can focus, obsess about it madly and reveal who you are, or produce something we can use. The org wins all ways. Be sure to meet your obligations along the way."

This could be the same individual over a 20 year timespan. Their answer depends on two things: their structural viewpoint and the gravity they feel strongest. Do they feel the pull from above and the often imagined implications of that? Do they feel beholden to an internal team? Are they helping their former peers/friends? Or are they positioned to feel the draw from outside, from those who pay the organization for the value it delivers? Simplistic arguments about incentivization always miss this piece because they focus on intention—and therefore illusory personal control—while ignoring a contributor's information access, subjection to belief, and external influences. Consultants, if you're architecting an organization, be aware of the gravities affecting each position.

The highest-performing consultants see and judge events, challenges, and responses from the organization's perspective. How do they do that? By mustering incredible self-restraint.

When tasked to figure out what to do, you as a consultant might ask:

What does my client's team need?
What does my buyer/main point of contact need?
What does their boss need?
What does adjacent, upstream, and downstream teams need?
What do I need?

Resist each question.

Instead, think like the organization through a process of elimination:

What does our ultimate external customer need?
What do we need to do to provide that?
What pieces comprise that promise?
Who needs to own and deliver each piece?
What's in the way?
What's missing?
How long and how much?
When can we begin?
How do we know we're done?

Then make a quick pre-action, paranoid-defensive check. If we, the organization, do all of that, do we:

Sustain ourselves?
Improve our function or position?
Adapt to circumstance?

At least one of those has to be "yes".

Once you begin to see business situations this way, all the system's drama, superfluous behavior, and vestigial tools, functions, and roles lose importance in your mind (and maybe become progress inhibitors). It's all why a company's executive team acts the way it does. Executives' analyses typically possess appropriate breadth, but sometimes lack organizational/implementation depth or external perspective—both of which consultants help provide.

You'll first notice yourself adapting to this perspective when you can inherently dismiss a client's urgent fireball problem under the benevolent wisdom that this won't be a thing in 24 hours. You've still got to help them through difficulty and make tangible progress, but how?

Bacteria routinely acquire and incorporate DNA from other bacteria. This is how an otherwise benign enterococcus faecalis can pick up a nasty trick or two from clostridioides difficile in your gut and make you feel like hammered dog shit while all your financially-crippling tests come back A-OK.

These free-loving bacteria pick up DNA a few ways:

Conjugation: Direct transfer of a plasmid from one bacterium to another.
Transformation: Bacteria hoover up loose DNA fragments from their environment and plug it into their genomes.
Transduction: A third-party virus transfers DNA from one bacterium to another like a mosquito giving you malaria.

As a consultant, you're a bit of a transducing third party yourself. And your host is paying for that sweet, juicy DNA! Your problem is that transduction-based influence itself won't scale in an enterprise setting. How many of your one-to-many speeches or workshops transferred the whole consulting lesson your client required to a critical mass of that client's team, enough for you to have a resultant, measurable operational impact? None? Thought so. That's not on you, that's just organizational nature.

Fortunately, your mere presence, your fighting the common challenge alongside your client, seeds the petri dish for transformation. If 20% of your work gets directly transduced and absorbed as a finished compound, the other 80% of your effort leaks into your client organization in primordial forms. Incomplete thoughts, newly-unnecessary efforts, and great conversations ooze into the system like precursor components subtly fueling others' contributions, improving overall system health by nourishing its participants.

For people inside the client organization, this transformative sublimation is mostly autonomic. While that's occasionally frustrating to an outside consultant, this offers systemic benefit even when specific individuals, teams, or process czars feel aggrieved or behave in an unaligned manner. How can you know if you've had this effect? Look at what people aren't doing now that they were doing when you arrived.

Additionally, while consultants can arrange conjugation between client team members, you shouldn't do this terribly often. Conjugation must occur as part of a flourishing organizational transformation, but most of it occurs naturally between the team you advise and the teams they affect, and most of that well outside your direct influence.

No matter how strange it looks, successful organizations operate in balance during initiative execution, allowing teams to work as bizarrely as they want so long as:

They align to organizational expectations and norms.
They're able to come together at the interfaces between teams to transition work and insight seamlessly.
Their method does not create additional burden on adjacent teams.

Weak consultants nitpick their clients' weird behaviors and non-best-practice activities even as they're moving the org forward. Valuable organizational consultants align the business's common center, specific strategic need, and operational imperative, then effect their plan via an appropriate method of influence, whether conjugal, transformative, or transductive. You can't disrupt success, you can't do everything yourself, and you can't add burden, so it must be this way.

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.