By Fiona Czerniawska.
Told that a particular general was competent, Napoleon famously asked, “but is he lucky?” And luck, it seems, is just as important a concept in consulting as it is in war.
Let’s take two recent conversations I had with clients.
The first was one of several, undertaken for a niche firm in order to understand what its clients liked about it, and what it needed to improve. Several of the people I spoke to pointed to the firm’s exceptional quality of people: “There just isn’t anyone who isn’t top-notch,” was how one interviewee put it. In a smallish firm, that’s perhaps not surprising: A typical boutique has a small number of senior consultants rather than an army of junior ones. But were they really all the same? Were they really all brilliant, all of the time? Further probing revealed there had sometimes been problems: people had to be swapped in and out. But the overall impression was positive enough for the firm’s clients to forget about those instances. The halo effect of the many extended to cover the few.
The second discussion was with a client of a much bigger consulting firm. He, too, had had a positive experience, but that wasn’t, he said, because everyone in the firm was good. In fact he suspected there were plenty of B quality consultants around… Although the teams he’d had were always excellent, he’d not extrapolated from that to the firm as a whole.
So why the different interpretation of what was, essentially, a very similar experience?
The first reason has to be size. The second interviewee would be aware that he’d only met, let’s say, 1% of the firm’s consultants, while the first might reasonably have reckoned that he’d met 90%. There’s probably something here about critical mass: If someone has met and been positive about, again let’s say, two thirds of your consultants, then that’s a sufficiently high proportion to erase any negative experience and create an assumption that everyone will be similarly good. But the second factor appears to be more about perceptions. Luck played no part in the first interviewee’s views because he assumed everyone was good, but the second interviewee saw things very differently: “I was lucky,” is what he said. The difference lay in the client’s views, not in their experience.
So, why would a client think of themselves as lucky? Perhaps because they think they’ve made a particularly astute decision about which firm to hire. But I think a more plausible scenario is that they’ve been told they’re lucky, that the partner in charge of selling the work has made noises along the lines of “You’ve really got our A Team here,” or “You’re lucky: we’ve been able to get some really great people off other projects to do this work”. It’s a great sales pitch, but it backfires because it creates the impression that the rest of the firm’s consultants are second-rate.
As Napoleon probably said, you win the battle, but lose the war.
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