Why good propositions don’t always take off

By Fiona Czerniawska.

At a recent event in the UK, I and my co-director, Edward Haigh, had a couple of pictures of planes, a nice little bi-plane, and a whopping great A380. We’re both closet plane-spotters, and Ed harbours a not entirely secret desire to do the public announcements on long-haul flights (“Tray tables stowed… “). But that wasn’t the point: We were actually talking about the need to base your proposition on something more than gut feel.

We were talking about transformation. We estimate that the consulting market around digital transformation was worth around $44bn in 2017. That’s considerably higher than in 2016, not because clients are spending a lot more money on consulting overall—in fact, we think that the global growth rate in 2017 will turn out, once we’ve crunched around 10m numbers, to have grown by around 7%—nor because the definition of digital transformation has suddenly changed, but because digital transformation has increased the rate at which it’s colonising other consulting services. The market is a bit bigger, but the portion of that market that’s digital transformation is much, much bigger.

So, why the planes?

Because we’d recently spent time with a small firm, looking at their strategy, how they’re going to market, and so on. They’d got in contact with us, because in reasonably benign economic conditions, they were struggling: A rising tide doesn’t necessarily float all boats. Among other things, they talked about the opportunity they could see to help clients manage large-scale, complex transformation programmes—programmes that, we all know, have a fantastic number of moving parts, multiple objectives, and typically a cast of hundreds, all to be driven to a successful conclusion in months, not years. It was the biplane, a beautifully crafted solution that could really help clients who are just starting out on their transformation ‘journey’. The plane would have impressed people who hadn’t seen a plane before.

But therein lies the rub. Just over the metaphorical hillside, downwind from the bi-plane’s grassy runway, a giant A380 has just become airborne. Bi-plane Inc’s clients, standing around admiring the workmanship of its craft, need only look up, their attention caught by the roar of its engines, to see that others are in this space already, and have already invested huge amounts of time, money and effort in designing a solution. There’s nothing wrong with the biplane technically, except timing. Most consulting firms, including the very large ones, design the propositions they take to market in isolation from that market. Whichever client they talked to last is right and has told them everything they need to know about the opportunity, what their firm’s proposition should look like, what the key messages should be. Never mind that there may be another client down the road, that they haven’t spoken to, and who thinks very differently.

That used to be mildly annoying: As a consultant, you’d turn up to try and win a new piece of work only to discover that you and your competitors all had the same ‘innovative’ approach, but you’d tweak it a bit and optimistically go off to the next pitch in the hope that you’d got it right. And often you had: Yesterday’s world was nowhere near as transparent and fast-moving as today’s. And these days, you can’t simply ‘tweak’ your proposition. As assets and other intellectual property becomes an ever more important part of a consulting firm’s approach to a given market, millions of dollars are being wasted on developing propositions that will simply never fly.

If you want your consulting business to take off (see, we’re keeping going with the flying metaphors), then you need to do more than trust your instincts.

If you'd like to see how we can help you, then please contact us.