The invisible product

By Fiona Czerniawska

It’s the habits we can’t see which are the hardest to change.

We’re already well into our process of interviewing clients and consulting firms for our report on the UK consulting industry (out at the end of the month) and one of the constant themes we’re hearing is change.  Not change in terms of the numbers – no one expects the UK industry to explode into growth, although people are generally pretty positive – but change in terms of the shape and focus of consulting.  Sector knowledge is becoming increasingly important and therefore valuable to clients, but not necessarily clients in that industry: some of the biggest projects we’ve heard about have involved taking the knowledge of one industry to another (retailing to telecoms and healthcare, for example).  Similarly, the most significant functional opportunities appear to be those which straddle conventional service definitions: ‘transformation’ is only the most obvious of these, embracing elements of strategy, operational improvement and, inevitably, technology.  Yet clients, who, we know, are interested in solutions and outcomes, continue to buy traditionally-defined consulting services, so what’s going on?

Part of the blame can be laid fairly and squarely at the feet of procurement people.  Although breaking consulting firms’ capabilities down by category is better than dumping all firms into the same bucket, the categories themselves are reinforcing the traditional boundaries between consulting services.  But consultants haven’t helped.  For all the discussions about propositions, it doesn’t take much for a consultant to revert to what they know best, for a discussion about business models, for example, to collapse into a conventional process improvement project.

But perhaps neither side is helped by the fact that consulting, despite attempts to industrialise it, to tie payment to performance and to embed software and other ‘assets’ in the consulting process, remains intangible.  It’s easier, I’d argue, to innovate around concrete products, for two reasons.  First, with something tangible it’s easier for you and your customers to see what’s changed, so there’s a positive feedback loop: imagine what it would be like trying to interest people in a new type of phone which no one could see.  Second, mental models are much harder to change than physical ones: think how difficult it would be to shift people’s idea of the colour blue, for example.  The real problem in developing new consulting services is that you have to think differently, talk differently, organise your business differently – often about service lines with which people (clients and consultants) are so familiar they barely notice.  Conceptual ‘products’ aren’t just intangible, but invisible: to change them, you have to see them, but, in seeing them, you reinforce them.  It’s tempting to say that consultants are caught between a rock and a hard place – but at least you can see those.