Can hedgehogs make love?

Well, they can certainly breed.

If my experience in college, where my second year room backed onto a rambling garden, is anything to go by, mating hedgehogs make quite a racket – a point I vividly recalled when talking to a client about his organisation’s use of operational improvement consultants for our forthcoming report on this topic.

Asked how his (massive) organisation was planning on using such consultants in the future, he said that expenditure was generally polarised between the very big firms and a handful of small specialists. The problem with this approach, he added, was that the big firms couldn’t always provide the depth of expertise required, but the smaller ones didn’t have the scale. His solution was to ask firms to work together, to get them round the table, pooling their ideas and experience. But it was proving a painful strategy in practice – hence the hedgehog analogy.

27th June 2010

Consulting firms can, indeed, be prickly about this kind of thing. Many are nervous about giving away the corporate silver to competitors who’ll take it to their clients; many, if we’re honest, are also concerned about coming up short, having nothing to say in the face of impressively articulate rivals.

That view is both ironic and damaging: ironic, because consultants are the first people to propound the virtues of collaboration to their clients; damaging, because it constrains innovation (much of which, we know, comes from sharing ideas). On the other hand, it’s surely also understandable. Asking a consulting firm to give away its intellectual property is surely a bit like asking a manufacturer to rip up its patents. Time and money has been invested in its ideas, so why should a firm give them away?

I think there are two answers to this, both of which might make the experience of getting consulting firms to work together a more pleasant experience.

First, although consulting companies are tempted to see new methodologies, tools and techniques as the equivalent to manufacturing products, the analogy doesn’t really stack up. Consulting firms don’t invest anything like the amount of effort in new product development that a manufacturing company does. Perhaps they should, but that’s another story. The analogy also unhelpfully distracts consultants from what clients want. Clients rarely want weighty, prescriptive processes, but genuine, practical insights into what they could do better. This is the bread-and-butter of consulting and it doesn’t require huge amounts of investment but an attitude of mind that is willing to see things afresh and is confident that, by reinventing the wheel again and again for different clients, we not only get a better wheel now but have an endless supply of better wheels in the future.

The second point is that ideas only get you so far. Consultants aren’t academics. They’re people who take ideas and implement them – and that’s a skill you can’t give away to your competitors, however much you talk about it.