A second day in the room

Here is how many consulting firms develop their thought leadership:

• Step 1: Pick an idea it thinks clients will be interested in.
• Step 2: Convene a small group of senior people to decide what the angle and key messages should be.
• Step 3: Hand the output from this to a mid-ranking consultant to write up in their spare time.
• Step 4: Publish.

There’s a lot wrong with way of working: clients’ needs are second-guessed rather than consulted directly; quality assurance and review is negligible at best. But I want to focus on Step 2: the ubiquitous “let’s get everyone in a room together” approach.

It reminds me of a cartoon by Posy Simmonds about writing groups. In the first few frames we see the group’s participants – mothers with young children and office workers – complaining that their new tutor is too dismissive of their creative efforts. “Doesn’t he realise that we have to squeeze our writing in between other commitments?” one complains. Eventually the tutor retaliates: “Writing’s work. Hard work. Grind! Hard, lonely grind.”

So it is with thought leadership. It’s too often regarded as a part-time activity, to be shoe-horned into spare moments. The reality, as the tutor knows, is very different. Thought leadership should be hard work. Spending a few hours in a room with your colleagues bouncing ideas around isn’t enough. At best it gets you to where all your competitors are. Unless you’re a genius (and, let’s face it, most of us aren’t) then even a day simply isn’t enough time to do any seriously serious thinking. The point is reinforced by Nicholas Carr’s new books, The Shallows, in which he argues that the internet age is creating people who are brilliant at assimilating information from a wide variety of sources very rapidly, but useless when it comes to thinking about a single subject in any depth.

Every consulting firm can manage to get people together to debate an issue for a day: the question is whether they can get them to come back the following day and do it all over again so they end up with something that’s better than their competitors.

29th July 2010