This is part two in the Professional Paradox series.

Other Posts in the Series:

• Introduction

Expectation

If you are a business person in search for help, probably one of the first things you will do is to write a request for proposal or a request for service (you may even hire a consultant to help you do this). In this process, you figure that if experience is good, then more experience must be better. You probably place a strong emphasis on experience in your industry, experience with a particular type of problem, with a particular software application, with projects just like yours, and years of experience overall. And then you begin to think of it as a numbers game. Considering the shear volume of people who are likely to see your RFP or RFS, why not set the bar high? Surely there must be many people out there with the depth and breadth of experience and skills to fully encompass your needs. So for good measure, you sprinkle in such things as project management expertise, knowledge of a specific technology or architecture, strong analytical skills, and leadership ability. By the time you are finished, you may as well be asking for a guy who walks on water and can feed the masses with a handful of fish and a few loafs of bread.

Amazingly, most of the consultants and consulting companies who respond appear to be exactly what you are looking for. There are a few odd ones who emphasize problem solving processes and their track records in addressing complex issues, but their examples aren't specific to your industry, and they didn’t seem to focus on the specific skill sets that you asked for. You reject them immediately. You interview a number of respondents. Some of them are actual consultants, and some of them are sales people for consulting companies. Some that looked great on paper turned out to be total goof balls. This might make you a little uneasy, but eventually you find a consultant or a company that seems right.

The Consulting Value Proposition

Having made your selection, the consultant (or team of consultants) shows up at your site to begin working with you and your team. You made it clear in the selection process that you were looking for Superman. The consultant, having no real benchmark for comparison, believes that you know better than he does the skill sets and experience levels that actually exist in the consulting market place. Yet somehow, you picked him. He knows that he isn’t Superman, but he’s up to the challenge. In this first contact with you, he feels tremendous pressure to meet your expectations. His first priority is to convince you that he is all that, and that he in fact, does have all the answers.

Nothing irritates customers more than consultants who think they have all the answers. So from the outset, you are off to a shaky start. The team’s initial perception is that the consultant is arrogant and self-important. This perception is reinforced as the consultant offers up vignettes of experience and expertise that are painfully inappropriate to your particular context because he isn’t listening, and he is making assumptions about your needs based on what he has learned from other engagements. The team is compelled to enlighten him. You now enter a downward reinforcing loop: 1) You asked for Superman; 2) The consultant tries to convince you that he is Superman; 3) You try to convince him that he is not; 4) He senses danger and tries even harder; 5) You respond in turn. The process finally ends when you become very irritated and try to make it abundantly clear that he doesn’t know @#$! about your company or your problems and that he needs to shut up and listen.

This may be an extreme example to make my point, but many engagements begin with some form of this scenario. It is basically built in to the exiting structure of the client expectation and the consulting value proposition. Consumers of consulting services express a need that emphasizes depth of experience and specialized skills, centered specifically around their particular industries, problem types, and anticipated technology needs. This is what consultants and consulting companies perceive as the market need, and so they respond accordingly. Individual consultants are driven to specialize in a particular industry, and further in a particular type of problem within the industry. They focus on developing skills with a particular tool or set of tools. Consulting companies are driven to be all things to all people. They attempt to hire and maintain a stable of consultants to satisfy every possible need. They, too, tend to specialize in particular industries, problem types, and technologies. To increase the breadth of their markets and their economic potential, they try to hire individuals with some experience in different industries. They must present themselves as the experts with all the answers, because that is what the market demands.

Cutting the Practice Situation

This structure creates the potential for other, more insidious problems. Remember that the professional consultant fears complexity for the same reasons as everyone else: complexity means uncertainty; uncertainty means risk of failure; failure may be career-ending. As Schön put it, “For [professionals], uncertainty is a threat; its admission is a sign of weakness.” 7 This is compounded by the perception, real or imagined, that the consulting value proposition rests on being the specialist and having all the answers. Consultants have invested heavily financially, intellectually, and emotionally in their particular marketable basket of skills, experiences, and tools which they need to believe will allow them to tackle any situation they may come across. They are strongly incented to make every problem fit within their particular scope of skills and experience. Their economic survival depends on it.

Schön described this tendency in professionals as “cutting the practice situation to fit professional knowledge.” He identified a number of ways that professionals “misread situations, or manipulate them,” which amount to ignoring or explaining away aspects of problem situations that don’t work for them. One is “selective inattention” to details that are problematic. Another is the use of “junk categories” to dismiss details or outcomes that they otherwise could not explain. Forcing a situation into a “mold,” or over-simplifying it to fit a particular solution pattern or tool set, is a very common approach in the IT consulting world. 8 In the end, your consultants may not be solving your problem at all, but some version of your problem that fits nicely within their professional spectrums.

This tendency is not exclusive to the consulting side of the relationship. Clients also fear complexity, and have their own ways of “cutting the practice situation.” Clients tend to resist the notion that their problems are truly unique. It is a paradox in itself: from a competitive point of view, they want to be unique. But operationally, they would rather be the same. The problem is, you can’t have both. Competitive differentiation is not simply a matter of what you say makes you unique. It actually manifests from what you do. But uniqueness defies “patterns” of understanding, and in the business world, this tends makes people very uncomfortable. Business people love patterns. Patterns can be studied, learned, and applied. Clients tend to be obsessive about “best practices,” finding pre-built solutions that meet “eighty-percent of our needs,” and then fiercely resisting attempts to customize the pre-built solution to meet their remaining twenty-percent.

The Sprial

Between clients and practitioners, we have created a reinforcing downward cycle that inhibits our ability to solve problems and increases our odds of failure. 1) Customers experience project failures, 2) they respond by demanding more specialized expertise and experience, 3) consultants respond by becoming increasingly specialized, 4) consultants (and clients) are deeply incented to force problems into their patterns of specialized understanding, 5) solutions are awkward, narrowly and poorly defined, or simply make no sense relative to the problem at hand, 6) customers experience project failures. And the cycle begins again.

Next in the series: Financial Matters