Hitting the transformation brick wall

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Rome might not have been built in a day, but it was built in concrete. Indeed, it was the invention of concrete, not its civic values or imperial ambitions, that gave the Romans their roads, aqueducts, and extraordinary structures, such as the Pantheon, that still amaze us today.

It’s a salutary reminder of how important the physical assets of our world are, something I was mulling over recently when speaking to Rambøll, the Copenhagen-based engineering firm. Like many other large engineering companies, Rambøll has a management consulting division–in its case covering public policy and planning, surveys (handy if you’re trying to gauge public opinion on, say, the expansion of an airport), and business consulting. But unlike many other engineering firms, Rambøll is keen to avoid the problems that have dogged this segment of the consulting industry in the past–notably too heavy a reliance on lower-than-traditional-consulting fee rates to win business (see this previous article). Key to this will be to focus on its purpose, to enable sustainable societies.

But sustainability works both ways. Any consulting firm’s success relies on the extent to which it can link the type of management consulting services it provides to the biggest driver of growth in today’s market–transformation. At first sight, that feels like quite a stretch: surely, I hear you all saying, transformation is about strategy and technology, it’s about the move away from bricks and mortar to a more virtual world. Yet there’s a danger here that we ignore organisations’ physical constraints: robotic process automation looks good on paper, but you still have to get rid of the people if you’re to realise the benefits; being based on different floors makes it harder for people to collaborate, etc. In the great story we’re all telling ourselves about transformation, I suspect there’s a desire to minimise the difficulties and to believe transformation is only possible where it’s easy.  

But that attitude may be changing. As one client I spoke to recently put it, “The only way we’ll really change our organisation is by confronting the problems not minimising them. We need to charge at the brick wall, rather than pretending it’s not there.” For engineering firms, the symbolic may just be starting to intersect with the literal. We need to deal with the concrete challenges of engineering projects builds, and that requires not only the capability to examine the aspects of transformation we often ignore, but the toughness to break down the barriers in our heads as well.