Making a killing in Benelux

We should probably apologise: our recent report on the consulting market in the Benelux region wasn't the cheeriest report we've produced this year - finding, as it did, a market contracting by more than 3% - but then the consultants we spoke to in the region weren't exactly in a good mood to start off with. Of course our reports aren't designed to put anyone in a mood, good or bad, but rather to inform people about what's going on, as accurately as possible. Nevertheless, if they did make anyone feel downbeat then we're sorry about that.

We're saying that partly because some of the conversations we've had with consultants recently have made us genuinely fearful for the Benelux consulting market. An air of resignation seems to have set in and some people, to put it plainly, appear to have given up.

It would be arrogant of us to accept the blame here, but we know we play a part. The trouble is that anyone who reads the reports of analysts and economists is simply looking at a market dashboard. We like to think the section of our report that deals with opportunities for growth helps people to identify where their bets are best placed, but even so all we're really doing is helping people to see the forest when they're standing amongst the trees. What we can't see is what we can't see.

Think about this: if you'd stopped the average Dutch person in the street seven years ago and asked her which country she thought the next hit TV series would come from, what are the chances she would have said "Denmark"? Pretty much zero, right? Nobody saw it coming. Denmark would have seemed as unlikely a source of internationally successful TV drama as...well, pick any country you've barely heard of. And yet The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen have created the greatest upsurge in cultural awareness about Denmark since...someone, please, persuade me its not since the vikings. Not even Nate Silver (widely-feted forecaster and author of The signal and the noise) would have seen that coming.

So consulting leaders could read the indicators and decide to call off their efforts in the Benelux region, but to do so would be to  abandon one of the concepts consultants themselves hold most dear: the art of the possible. What they could do, instead, is stick around and either help to create something out of nothing, or at least create the environment out of which something can happen. One of the main people behind the success of DR (the Danish TV company that created all three hit series), Morten Hesseldahl, attributes much of the success to luck. But read what he told The Independent and you start to realise there was a lot more going on than simple luck. So, is there any reason that a Belgian company can't create the next hit TV series? Is there any reason that the Netherlands shouldn't build cars? How do you create the conditions that allow that to happen? Because what DR has demonstrated is that something never having happened before doesn't mean it can't happen.

The trouble for consultants is that they spend too much time perfecting things that exist and not half enough time creating things that don't, and it's hard to see how they can change that without clients inviting them to do so. But isn't that the ultimate role of thought leadership? Rather than spend time worrying about whether to pull out of Benelux, why doesn't a big consulting firm pool all its resources and produce just one piece of thought leadership for the region in the next two years? One, big, bold piece of thought leadership that says "we've got an idea: who wants to build it with us?". After all, building it may be no guarantee that they'll come, but not building it is an absolute guarantee that they won't.

What is there to lose?