Enter the orchestrator?

By Fiona Czerniawska

Clients want to have their cake and eat it. They regularly tell us that they’d like to use specialised firms, but in practice they tend to stick with larger ones (and the bigger organisation, the more likely this is). That’s because larger consulting firms can pull together the type of flexible, multidisciplinary teams needed for transformation projects; they’ve also got the global coverage big clients ask for – though don’t necessarily need in practice.

At the heart of this is a debate about whether it’s possible to marry specialisation with scale. The conventional thinking is that consulting firms diversify as they expand, partly because they run out of space in their ‘home’ market (they’re usually wrong, but that’s another story), and partly because clients, when they trust them, actively encourage them to work in new areas. The larger a firm becomes, the more varied its services, and the more diluted its expertise: the specialist grows up to be a generalist.

Conventional thinking also presupposes you’re talking about a single firm, one that develops new capabilities over time, and (probably) supplements them by acquisition. Alliances between niche firms only seem to work well when the firms involved share a lot of common ground, so they’re better at enabling cross-border working in the same market than at bringing together firms that specialise in different fields. But, given the on-going debate around consulting business models, it seems reasonable to ask whether there’s an alternative approach.

The term that’s coming up more and more is orchestration, where one large firm brings together the skills and experience of a host of smaller and far more specialised ones. The theory is that this gives clients their cake – and allows them to eat it. Depth of expertise isn’t compromised because each niche firm continues to focus on its field, and the ‘orchestrator’ firm can in any case swap niche firms in and out, depending on the requirements of a particular project. The approach also gives big firms flexibility (they don’t have to have every skill in-house, just in case it’s required), but clients accountability (the orchestrator is in charge of finding and deploying the expertise, and is ultimately responsible for success). Cynics would say that this is the prime contractor role re-badged, but orchestration is intended to be a more equitable partnership between suppliers: yes, one firm is co-ordinating activity because someone has to, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going mistreat its partners, extracting every last ounce of margin as prime contractors have typically done.

If we want a good example of where orchestration works brilliantly, it’s the film industry, where the full-service studios of Hollywood’s golden era, have given way to a much more fragmented environment in which the input of hundreds of highly-specialised firms is ‘orchestrated’ by a single production team.

The key to success in the consulting industry, as it has been in films, is transparency. It helps that film producers can so easily see and evaluate the work done by, say, a specific special effects company, but it’s hard in consulting to disentangle one firm’s input from another. Niche firms will have to compensate by becoming better at articulating what their focus is and what makes them special, and the would-be orchestrators need to take – and be seen to take – a systematic approach to identifying possible niche firms to work with. The best consulting projects, like the best films, will depend on having the best partner organisations involved.