The (lack of) herd instinct in the consulting industry

By Fiona Czerniawska

Consulting isn’t so much an industry as a collection of people in search of interesting work and a bit of cash.  Try to orchestrate this activity within a consulting firm and the phrase you’re most likely to come across is ‘herding cats’.  Whether you’re trying to build consensus around a particular strategy or simply get people into a meeting, ‘it’s like herding cats.”  Cats, of course, are a nice analogy to make: cats are smart and sleek; they lend grace and charm to the houses they inhabit and – if their owners are lucky – catch a few mice into the bargain.

But I’m beginning to wonder if a better parallel would be with rhinoceros.

The rhinoceros, together with other animals of that ilk, are one of the reasons why Africa, despite its abundant natural resources, is such a poor part of the world.  Economic development, in its earliest form, depends on a surplus of food (which leaves time and energy to do other things such as trade and innovation).  But you only get a food surplus from farming, rather than hunting and gathering – and farming depends in part on the domestication of animals.  Neolithic Europe was blessed with horses, cows and sheep, all of which shared two prerequisites to domestication: they weren’t dangerous and they were naturally social animals, making it possible to herd them.  But would-be farmers in Africa had the neither gentle nor sociable rhinoceros.

Consultants may not be dangerous, but they also don’t work easily in groups.  That’s partly due to predisposition – the process of consulting puts a lot of pressure on individuals to perform if they’re not to get kicked off the team by clients.  But it’s also reinforced by a business model which still mostly incentivises people to sell work which keeps them and their immediate team busy.  (When I first became a consultant, the firm I worked in divided people into ‘hunters’ and ‘farmers’; ‘hunters’ tended to make it to partner; ‘farmers’ rarely did.)

A hunter-gatherer consulting industry works well when projects are small, but it can’t cope with large-scale programmes which typically cut across disciplinary areas as well as geographic borders. That’s why organisational structure is such a hot topic at the moment.  Should a firm in which each country is run autonomously change to a regional or even global structure?  Clients want increasing depth of specialist knowledge but can’t (can they?) expect to find it in every office, so should consulting firms create centres of excellence for country-based teams to tap into?  Many of the fastest growing consulting markets in Africa are ones where few consultants are based (the market is too new, the environment too unpredictable), but how do you create a structure which enables you to move resources quickly and seamlessly from one market to another?

Whatever structure you adopt – and the jury is still firmly out about which is the best – you still have to deal with the lack of herd instinct.  Consultants, certainly outside the more homogenous technology market, have never really been domesticated.  Roaming the savannahs is more their kind of thing – but does that mean that the industry, rather like Africa, will struggle to reach its economic potential?