Ep. 8: Traditional Consulting Sold You a Great Idea. Now What?
About this episode:
Original Air Date: April 15, 2024For decades, traditional consulting (think “management” or “strategy” varieties now synonymous with the Big Three) has been a go-to move for organizations looking for a shake up. Need a bulletproof vision for the future or a new org restructuring that’ll win over the C-suite and shareholders? You can’t beat their analytical prowess, strategy design, and slick presentation.
But too often clients wind up stuck with expensive change plans they can’t execute on their own. Without real coaching, structure, and experienced guidance, these efforts stand a high chance of fizzling out and collecting dust on a shelf. Facing that reality time and time again lead The Ready to study and understand how organizations actually work and evolve. Yes, we’re also consultants—but the processes, outcomes, and experiences we create differ greatly. And that can lead to a whole bunch of confusion.
In this episode, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin delve into the stark differences between traditional consulting and how future-of-work firms like The Ready operate. Because not all consulting is created equal.
Mentioned in this episode:
“VUCA”
“participatory change”: BNW Ep. 43
cross-functional teaming: FoHR Miniseries, Ep. 1
“strategy pancake stack”: AWWTR Ep. 2
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Sam Spurlin:
We truly believe that the only way many, if not most, of the huge, wicked problems that we face literally as a human species will ever be solved is through organizations. Let's get them right.
Rodney Evans:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I am Rodney Evans. That guy in the black, is that a V-neck, Sam, is Sam Spraylin.
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, yes. Of course. Of course.
Rodney Evans:
It could go either way. I don't know. Also, so our listeners know the AI transcript thinks that Sam Spurlin's last name is Spraylin. We're just leaning into it and we just call him that now, which is fun and you should too.
Sam Spurlin:
Absolutely.
Rodney Evans:
Welcome back to At Work with The Ready. This is a podcast about modernizing organizations as the future of work meets the present moment.
Sam Spurlin:
As you know, each episode we turn our attention to one common organizational pattern that we think is worth digging into. We pull it apart like a fresh piece of bread and we propose solutions for what to do instead.
Rodney Evans:
I feel butterflies about this. This week, we're talking about traditional consulting. Should be spicy. But before we get into it, let's do a check-in so I can get present and calm down.
Sam Spurlin:
I am going to take over this check-in round as an opportunity for you to just give me some advice.
Rodney Evans:
I love this.
Sam Spurlin:
The advice that I want from Rodney today is what's your best piece of moving advice? I'm in the midst of moving. Next week, I'm moving from Virginia to New York, and I want you to just hit me with some knowledge, some wisdom.
Rodney Evans:
Okay. I've moved a lot. Ed and I moved ... At one point, I think we moved eight times in seven years or something like that. Something insane. We've moved a lot together. I have so much moving advice, because I've made some truly terrible decisions. One is ...
Sam Spurlin:
Should we just change this episode? Today should be a special moving episode?
Rodney Evans:
This episode is about life hacks with Rodney and it's just about moving. Number one, do not cheap out on movers. They're the ones who charge you exorbitantly. It's going to make you want to vomit. But it's actually worth it. It's one of the few industries where I think you actually get what you pay for. Having gone the bargain route, it was a terrible mistake.
Number two, when it's coming time to pack, take everything off your walls first. Because once you take the personality out of your house, it won't feel like you're home anymore and it'll be much, much easier to pack your shit up and get it out of there than if you're still trying to maintain some semblance of home. Three, I could do this all day, but I'm going to limit myself to three, get your stuff unpacked in less than 72 hours.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay. Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
I'm no boxes because it's like, even if it's not in its final location, I cannot work and exist as a person with cardboard boxes around my house. Just get it done.
Sam Spurlin:
100%. Yeah. Well, we arrive on a Thursday and I have to fly out on Monday for our retreat. The goal is to be as moved in as possible by the time I leave on Monday.
Rodney Evans:
Ideal. Okay. Since I gave you moving advice, you get to give me advice on a topic of your choosing.
Sam Spurlin:
That is an impossible check-in round.
Rodney Evans:
Why? That's so fun.
Sam Spurlin:
Well, because it's so ...
Rodney Evans:
You love giving advice.
Sam Spurlin:
... it's so vast. Can you help me narrow it just slightly?
Rodney Evans:
Okay. What is your best advice for completing a task you don't want to do?
Sam Spurlin:
Ooh. Okay. One thought, find something you want to do even less than the thing you don't want to do, and then procrastinate doing that one by doing the thing that you don't want to do.
Rodney Evans:
Ooh. Interesting.
Sam Spurlin:
You could also ... I mean this is so cliche, but break it down and do its smallest parts, but I'm talking ...
Rodney Evans:
Come on, Sam. Give me a varsity move.
Sam Spurlin:
... stupidly small parts. The only thing I have to do, the only commitment for me working on this task today is sitting down at my desk and looking at it. That's it for today. Tomorrow, I have to sit down, look at it, and write one word. Eventually you're going to get to a point where you're like, "This is stupid and I'm just going to do the thing."
Rodney Evans:
That's very good.
Sam Spurlin:
This is mostly I think an insight into my brain more than actual advice for you.
Rodney Evans:
That's all right. I'll take it.
Sam Spurlin:
Rodney Evans, what the hell are we doing today? We already said what we're doing.
Rodney Evans:
Well, first, you're doing a review request.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Some people did it.
Rodney Evans:
They did?
Sam Spurlin:
We've been asking for reviews.
Rodney Evans:
No shit.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. We've got at least one or two new reviews in. If you like this show and you haven't reviewed it on your platform of choice, we could really use it. Give us those five stars and some words of encouragement.
Rodney Evans:
Yay. Thank you. We really appreciate it.
Disclaimer: This isn’t a takedown episode of traditional consulting
Rodney Evans:
Okay. Today, I'm giving a little bit more preamble today than normal, because this is a pattern that is a little spicier because we're not just talking about client organizations or our own organization. We're talking about a whole other industry that exists that creates confusion with our industry.
The idea here is to talk a little bit about, I'm going to call it trad consulting, and we're going to talk a little bit about what we mean that is and isn't from the perspective of org designers. The idea here isn't to roast or mock or shit upon the management consulting industry.
The idea here is actually just to clarify what that looks like in our projects and how it is different than what we do both because most of our clients are larger organizations who work with big consultancies, and I think actually it probably does a service for both them and us to be clear in terms of what is different about how we work.
For those of you who are out there who are practitioners and are like, "I'm going to turn this off because I actually don't care about this," you probably should care about it. Because more and more we're all using the same kind of words around the future of work and around adaptive orgs and saying things like VUCA and saying things like participatory change.
It's actually important even if you're a single shingle human out there to know how this is going in the world. Stick around and tell Sam and I what you think afterward. Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I like that single shingle phrase. If you are a single shingle, but you describe yourself as some sort of consultant or something near management consultant, you are ... whether you realize or not experiencing some of the same things that we are in conversations that you're having with potential clients, there is a big body of assumptions that comes along with any management consulting that you should probably really be aware of if you aren't already.
Rodney Evans:
Totes.
The Pattern: Traditional consulting is a band-aid for a broken OS
Sam Spurlin:
All right. The essential pattern that we want to dig into here I think can be summed up initially with just one sentence, which is something along the lines of hiring external consultants as a band-aid to a broken operating system. Traditional consultants often maintain and propagate that operating system because the incentives are aligned. That's how they get paid and that's what the client pays them for. That's the pattern that we want to interrogate a little bit and offer some thoughts and some better ways forward rather than doing that.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Okay. Sweet. Let's give a little lay of the land here. When we are talking about traditional consulting, what we're talking about is the big companies that we all know and love, the McKinseys, the Deloittes, the BCGs, who all have different specialties and different areas of expertise, but who do things like strategy, business plans, process reengineering, spans and layers, restructuring. I know they do lots of other things as well, but those are the things that we typically see in our projects.
Often, we end up in organizations after those consulting companies have been there because they have done work around something like a new strategy that the company is struggling to execute or operationalize, which is again, in the spirit of this is not about roasting a different industry, there's not something wrong with the strategy. The client hired them to make a strategy and then they did, and then the problem becomes ...
Sam Spurlin:
And then what?
Rodney Evans:
... the execution, which is not the fault of the management consultancy, that the OS of the client is not set up to execute a strategy that might be excellent and exactly right for them.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think not to wander down the paths of history, but the original impetus for Undercurrent, the organization prior to The Ready, and then early days of The Ready, that original organization did a lot of strategy work, doing that work and made a lot of great strategies, handed them to lots of very happy clients and then watched that work never get operationalized.
I think a lot of these consulting firms are happy like, "All right. We got our paycheck. We're going to go do our next thing. We did part." To Aaron's credit and the folks who were doing that work back in the day, they became really interested in that question. What is it about an organization and how it works or doesn't that you can't even operationalize a thing that you are legitimately stoked about? That is very, very interesting. That has been our work since day one.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Not just limited to the trad management consultancies. I've heard the same thing about agencies that do purpose work. I've heard the same thing about agencies that do insights work, that do PR or marketing or ad work, anyone who is providing basically the content and getting paid to create the content to a client who then can't make use of that content is what we're talking about here.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. I mean, I feel like we could do a whole episode just on that idea. But it's basically the undervaluing of the seemingly obvious work of ... Well, we have the good idea now. We have the idea. That was the hard thing.
Rodney Evans:
That was the hard part.
Sam Spurlin:
That's one who gave us the idea. Now, all we have to do is execute. All we have to do is make it happen. I think that has proven itself over and over again, both in our work and just in organizations more broadly. But that is actually the hard part.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Okay. We're getting into the thing now.
Sam Spurlin:
We're getting into it. Yes.
The deliverable is often confused with an outcome
Rodney Evans:
The first bit that we already started to allude to is clients are often, and by clients I mean companies, not just our clients, but they're often ... They're buying content, they're buying expertise or strategy or research or best practices. Those things are ultimately delivered to them in some kind of polished asset, whether that's a deck or a plan or a series of communications or the thing that they're buying is that.
Then that becomes this very tangible, very surface level work. I think that they keep buying that because they're like, "I can see this. I understand exactly what I'm getting." Often what they're buying is a new structure. They can clearly see what the headcount reduction of that structure is going to be and exactly how many dollars it's going to save, and it persists because it's like a client is saying, "I have this need. I have this unknown."
A consultant is saying, "Here is the answer to the question that you have." The client is like, "Great. I needed that level of certainty and the dollars or the headcount or the whatever delivery, the box is getting checked." I think that's why that keeps going. The thing that I think is suboptimal about that is that, first of all, clients ultimately to your earlier point about Undercurrent, become a little fiddly and sometimes kind of irritated because they can't execute, which again, not the fault of the asset that the client can't use it, but still true nonetheless.
To be balanced about it, I also do think sometimes consultancies are like, "Well, the client should just be able to fix their operation to do this," which as we've discussed on this show 9 million times, "Easier said than done to just adapt your OS to go after a completely different kind of strategy," especially if you're big.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. In defense of the clients, none of these consulting firms are marketing themselves as, "We'll give you a deliverable." We all know that's what we're getting from this. But the actual dialogue is like, "We're going to help you." It's all about outcomes, because they're smart and they know organizations want to buy outcomes.
But they end up, in many cases, equivocating outcomes with the deliverable and then we just stay at the surface level that is incredibly visible. We can all check the boxes that said we did what we needed to do. Nothing fundamental has necessarily happened below the surface where the real operationalization actually has to happen, which is messy and hard to see often, hard to measure. We're not getting into the work that we do yet. But now we're describing what makes our work fun and difficult.
Executives and C-suite buy projects for the visible work, not the invisible work
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I think that often the consulting work that's purchased is very much a mirror of the altitude that the leader who's buying it sits at. A lot of times when you're at the C-suite level or the executive team level or the senior leadership team level or whatever acronym, they're sitting outside of the day-to-day work. They're not sitting on the production line anymore.
And so for the surface layer of the organization that they see most broadly and most clearly, a surface level solution makes sense. It is likely intuitive to a CEO who probably spends more time looking at the high-level financials and the quarterly earnings and the board metrics than she does at decision speed at the team level. It makes sense at that layer to be buying a solution at that layer.
Unfortunately, that has very little to do with how work actually gets done. That's just the ambition and then the lagging indicator of that ambition, and it totally misses the whole part where something happens.
Sam Spurlin:
Right. I think there's probably this cognitive dissonance between spending a shitload of money for a thing and having that thing be very focused at low level, how are we actually meeting and stuff as opposed to something quite visible, something very high level. The pattern that makes me think of is that often in organizations that we are working with, there's this feeling that it's not worth doing unless we do it big.
It's not even worth doing a thing unless we can scale it. We don't even know if it works yet, but we're talking already about whether or not it scales. I think a lot of the big consulting firms play into that with what they are selling into the organization regardless and separate from whether or not it's what they actually need to be more effective.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. 100%. I also think just in talking about this altitude, I have a lot of thoughts and The Ready is going to start putting out more, so stay tuned around the ecosystem around organizations and at what level various work actually does and does not happen.
Traditional consulting is a hedge for the CEO–Board of Directors relationship
Rodney Evans:
But one of the big ahas I had in a conversation with an advisor last year was there's the old trope of it used to be nobody gets fired for hiring IBM. Now it's nobody gets fired for hiring McKinsey.
I think one thing that recurs in this pattern is like boards particularly ... Well, any board really, even a board of a nonprofit. Boards often have a fiduciary responsibility to the organization that they sit on the board for and they have responsibility for hiring the CEO and setting that person's compensation. At the same time, they have very limited insight into what's actually happening inside of the organization beyond what they're hearing from the CEO or the C-suite.
I think often an external consultant, like an external third party that does this kind of strategy level work becomes a hedge for boards to be like, "Does this CEO's strategy line up or make sense? Or how do we give this CEO the support and research and best practice and industry knowledge to be making a really dialed strategy for this organization?"
Unfortunately, that doesn't do anything either to strengthen the relationship between the C-suite and the board or to even necessarily always make the strategy better. It just creates reliance for the board's certainty on a third party and creates a validation requirement for the person who should theoretically be stewarding the ship on a third party. It's like everyone is outsourcing some level of responsibility and accountability for being right about the direction of the business to someone who they believe knows better.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Who they have also paid to tell them the answer.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
Weird incentives abound of that.
Rodney Evans:
Weird incentives abound. I think that there's a lot in that dynamic that gets funky. But I think that what is certain about it is that it's not creating capacity in the board–C-suite relationship for collective continuous steering.
Sam Spurlin:
Right. Right. You need that third party there more or less indefinitely to keep that dynamic working. If and when they go away, then you have not built the muscle memory about how to work together in a productive way.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Exactly. What else do you see in this one?
Traditional consulting works around and outside a broken OS; it doesn’t fix it
Sam Spurlin:
Well, yeah, I was going to ask you, when I was describing the pattern, there was a line about how traditional consultants maintain and propagate that legacy OS within organizations. I was wondering, have we talked about that already or are there other aspects of that that come to mind for you?
Rodney Evans:
I mean, I think the biggest thing, and I'm curious if you've seen this in projects I certainly have, I think that it goes to your comment about the band-aid thing. What I often see with consultancies that do more of the business process re-engineering and digging into workflow optimization or doing project management T-type stuff is like cross-functional teaming, getting something done across an org chart doesn't work well in most places, as we've discussed in an entire episode of this show.
I think sometimes when a consulting firm is brought in, they are vested with the authority to make that work happen. What that does is then the third party is driving the project and creating accountability structures and acting as a proxy for a leader who doesn't have the time or attention. It basically doesn't create the pressure on the OS to figure out cross-functional teaming.
You're just outsourcing the thing that's messy to someone else rather than fixing it. Those people then are working in and upholding the existing power structure, the existing org chart, the existing siloing. They're just able to work around it in a way that people inside the organization can.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I think that's exactly right. The way that I have thought about it is that you can make cross-functional teaming work in traditional or legacy OSs through brute force. The way you can really do brute force is by hiring external consultants or external people to do that and handle that and provide you that extra capacity to make a really gnarly process actually work.
As opposed to what we would likely do is question some pretty fundamental assumptions about how this organization is actually working together and what we need structurally or authority-wise to actually get the work done. But that doesn't necessarily just create a bunch of knowable visible work in a legacy operating system that we could just go do.
We are allergic, deathly allergic to anything that feels like make work. We're just going through the motions, busy work. There's no busy work at The Ready. If I ever feel like I'm doing busy work with a client, it's like a red alert alarm. Something is broken here, because there's no way this is how it's supposed to work. I think busy work is part of a lot of traditional consulting in a traditional operating system.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's right. I think what you're pointing to that's important to call out is that brute forcing of something like a cross-functional strategic project is then basically creating a false operating system that lives over there and allowing the existing one to persist. A lot of times the reasons that we don't see cross-functional cooperation go well is misaligned incentives, lack of clarified strategy, lack of dedicated resources, lack of coherent authority, who has the last word, blah, blah, blah.
When you just say, "Okay. Now there's this team of consultants here and they're going to tell you when to be in what meetings and what templates to fill out, and then they're going to make sense of it and create a plan and then check in with you every Thursday on your status, and then they're going to be the ones reporting the work," then we never investigate.
Well, the fact is that these two leaders actually don't value the same strategic priority and there's a lot of dissonance between their teams as a result. Or the fact is that the CEO is saying, this is the most important thing, but is starving this project of resources so it doesn't feel like the most ... This external capacity lets those things persist and those things will still be there and be problematic at the end of the project even if the project is successful.
Sam Spurlin:
Well, and not only will they still be there, they'll probably have gotten worse because generally problems that are left in the dark don't spontaneously resolve themselves. They tend to fester and get worse.
Rodney Evans:
They don't fix themselves. It's so weird. It's such a bummer.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Well, it makes me think, too. I have not worked for a traditional consulting firm. But I have friends who do. I wonder if actually one of the things that often goes on is that the consultants have permission to have a more adaptive operating system to ...
Rodney Evans:
I think so.
Sam Spurlin:
... get the work done. They get to dart in and out of the existing operating system getting things done, and it looks like they're getting a lot of things done. The client is happy. But once that consultant entity leaves, they don't leave behind the operating system that they themselves were getting to use. They leave behind what they originally found. You're no better off, to my previous point, probably worse than you were before.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's right. I mean, I have been the client of a large consulting firm and that was very much my experience.
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, you mean that time The Ready hired McKinsey to fix this?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. It was weird. No. No. Prior life. Prior life. But as a client, that was very much my experience of the person that I was working with from a large organization was much more nimble than I was in terms of the norms of the company that I worked in. She was able to just go get information that I would've probably been scolded or side-eyed for asking for. But it was her remit. She was able to go and do this work that I think probably most of us could have done but did not feel like we had the authority to do.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. To be clear, that's what we do, too, at The Ready. But I like to think that we do it in a way where we are creating positive disruption along the way where we are telling the organization like, "Hey, notice this thing how I get to avoid all of this bureaucracy to go make something happen? This is the work for us to be digging into. Let's put it on the backlog. Let's make sure we don't ... just pretend that if I'm able to go do something as the external consultant, that is okay that we fixed it, because remember, we're working to the day that we get to leave and you all are continuing the work without us."
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Absolutely. I think one of the ways that you see that show up in the work is that we are not just ignoring the org chart for ourselves, though we usually are. We are also very much encouraging leaders to put the org chart aside. When I'm in a project and a leader says like, "Oh, you should go ask this person for this." I'm like, "Why don't you ask them? Or why are we not in a conversation together?"
Or when the leader says, "How is my team doing on this?" I'm like, "Well, you should come to their meeting and see." I'm not there to messenger information so that the org chart can stay tidy and people don't have to be in dialogue with each other. My job is to be like, "Look, I can do that and so can you and also I'm going to leave here and then what's going to happen? It'd probably be good if you had a way of getting this intel yourself."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Totally. Totally. All right. Is there anything else worth digging into about that initial pattern of using external consultants to band-aid a broken operating system?
Builds dependency on a third party for expertise or sensemaking the market
Rodney Evans:
We're going to talk about this a little bit in terms of what to do. But I think the only other thing is I think a lot of consulting firms in many spaces really survive based on their expertise, being seen as experts in a particular industry or a particular technology. Some of that is just from them having a lot of experience and portfolio of clients and gathering those lessons.
Some of it's just they have really good research engines and things like that. I think the thing about that that makes it quite sticky is that most people in large companies are a little bit paranoid about what they don't know. I think it's very easy in this world that spins so rapidly and operates at the speed and complexity that most of us do to really feel like you do not have your finger on the pulse in the way that you would like to, especially since most of our clients spend a lot of their days and a lot of their times not looking externally.
I think that the feeling is that sometimes these organizations are filling an information gap. Either filling a gap that exists or, again, are able to be the symbolic validation so that when the client goes, "I think that the next wave for us geographically is in Sub-Saharan Africa." The consulting firm goes, "Well, that's right, and here is the data to support that." That's very calming and validating.
I don't think that that's bad on its face. I just think that clients forget that, first of all, best practices are always backwards looking, which means that if they've been proven, that doesn't mean they're bad, but it also doesn't mean that they're going to serve now or in the future.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. You're not on the cutting edge ...
Rodney Evans:
They're not on the cutting edge if they're a best practice.
Sam Spurlin:
... if you're getting it from the consultant. Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
I think that again, it's creating a dependence because clients who I've spoken with occasionally have the feeling that they don't know and they couldn't know and they have to get this information somewhere else. I think to a certain extent, external sources are really good and really valid. But I also don't think it's okay for companies to just say, "We don't have a mechanism for sensing the external environment, and so we will always and forever depend on someone to tell us what should be important to us."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. It's like the difference between augmenting a practice of looking externally and sense-making around yourself versus completely outsourcing it to another entity really to do your thinking for you.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Exactly. That's the part of it that bugs me is that I'm like, "Do it in collaboration. Do it in partnership. Do it as augmentation." But don't be like, "I don't know. I'm just so busy propping up the core business. I have no time to think about what the next big idea is." It's like, "Bro, the thinking part has got to be part of the job."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Okay.
Sam Spurlin:
Cool.
Tip 1: Prioritize effectiveness even/over growth and extraction
Rodney Evans:
Now I want to hear about what to do. If the pattern is like clients are hiring trad consultants to uphold an operating system that they're not satisfied with and then occasionally getting us confused with that, what would you invite our existing or future clients to do instead of that?
Sam Spurlin:
I mean, this is the place where I'm supposed to say they should hire us. I mean, this is the entire section. It's just like, "Well, just don't do that and hire us instead and it'll be better."
Rodney Evans:
Don't turn that dial. Sam's about to do a tight-20 on selling The Ready.
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, no. That Was it. That was all I had.
Rodney Evans:
No? That was it? Oh, good. Good insights, bud. I'm glad you're here.
Sam Spurlin:
This is why I'm not on the growth team at The Ready. Actually, no, I'm okay at selling our work. But I say all of that in jest. But I think this is the opportunity for us to talk a little bit more about how we get after the work instead. If you're not going to use your existing reckons about management consultants for us, what should you replace them with, I think is worth talking a little bit more about. Does that make sense?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay. I guess a good starting point, the one that I'd want to dig into first is I think the one that we have written here about principles besides growth and extraction. Those are principles that do not really show up in how we talk about the work. What that doesn't mean is that we don't care about effectiveness or financial results for organizations.
I think sometimes people will actually swing way harder the other direction with thinking about who we are. They assume that we're just about warm fuzzy feelings, making ...
Rodney Evans:
Selling vibes.
Sam Spurlin:
... yeah, make vibes, making people feel good at work, happiness at work, that sort of thing. Yeah. All those things are great and worthy in and of themselves. But we do not pursue those in a vacuum away from how does the organization actually work? Everything we do and believe about organizations and their operating systems is around effectiveness.
We do this stuff, all the stuff that we believe because it makes organizations more effective. We truly believe that the only way many, if not most of the huge wicked problems that we face literally as a human species will ever be solved is through organizations. Let's get them right. That's what we care about. If along the way we get to be humans, that's amazing and awesome and let's do that, too. But it's not just that.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I think that's exactly right. In terms of what to do and whether this involves talking to us or just doing it yourself, the invitation that I would have is to think about how you create clarity in your organization, not just outsource the clarity to someone else, to the point that Sam made earlier.
Tip 2: Figure out where you’ll always want an outside partner, and where you want to learn to do it internally
Rodney Evans:
And to the extent that you do find a partner outside of your organization to do whatever you need partnering on, how do you find someone that is interested in and incentivized to and knows how to create that capacity in you or to change your operating system so that you are capable of doing this thing the next time, whether that's changing your purpose, whether that's rethinking what kind of leadership models you have, whether that's looking at your comp structure, whatever the thing is doing that you feel like you need outside help to overhaul, how much do you expect to just always need that outside help?
How I'm always going to need an external tax provider, and how much do you want to hire someone that's going to teach you to fish? I want people to be asking themselves that question.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Absolutely. How do you know if what you need is someone like us because it's truly an operating system thing and not just a thing that you can externalize. We have tax professionals who don't necessarily work for us to do our, because that just makes sense. We don't need to bring that in. How do you differentiate between those, do you think?
Rodney Evans:
I've never really thought about it till right now. But I think that where just straight up outsourcing stuff makes sense is where it doesn't really take a shift in the operating system to make use of it. We don't need to change the way that we work at The Ready to partner with a tax advisor. Also, it's not core to our business.
I think anything that feels like it is part of the DNA of the organization, how we meet, how we make decisions, how we structure, how we create and steer strategy, how we decide and communicate how we use tooling, those things are things that are evergreen in terms of how an organization operates. I don't want the thinking and doing of those things to be separated.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I'm realizing because I also have not thought about how to answer this question until I just asked it. But I think there's something about things that you do very frequently and are just part of how we work, how we meet, how we talk about strategy, how we operationalize strategy as opposed to concrete, distinct things that happen either on a rhythm or maybe even stochastically, but they are their own entity that can be carved off from everything else.
But if you're talking about anything that is happening regularly, that means you have probably a lot of opportunities where even minor improvements will build on top of each other over time in ways that can have impact that is hard to think about early on.
Tip 3: Seek out partners you want to be positively disrupted by, if you want to be disrupted
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. That's cool. The other invitation I have here is ... This is going to maybe sound a little hippy-dippy, but bear with me. When you're considering a partnership with someone or with an organization that is meant to change something about how you actually serve your customer, bring your product or service to market, how you actually do the work of your business, I would invite companies to look at whether they want to be the people they are hiring.
Something that we hear a lot in client engagements is there's often a little bit of like, "It must be nice to work at The Ready." We have former clients that work at The Ready. Clients ask to work at The Ready all the time. I think that the reason for that is because, first of all, to your point, Sam, they see that there's not a lot of bullshit work in our work, which I think feels refreshing for a lot of them coming from where they're coming from.
Two is I think they see the way that we relate to each other that is not particularly hierarchical, that is not command and control, that is quite authentic generally in nature. I think they see the creativity in our work because we prioritize the time and space to be thoughtful about the work that we do and the designs that we create and things like that.
I'm saying this because I learned once, in a therapeutic coaching related training, this idea that in the room between the coach and the client is a place to practice something different that then can be translated to the broader world. I think the same is true in a consulting partnership. It's like, "Pick the team of consultants that are the way that you would like your team to be and practice with them."
I often say to clients that are struggling with something like candor, I'm like, "Tell me the thing. I can take it. Say the thing to me in an unvarnished, super direct, maybe kind of shitty way that you would never say to a teammate so that you can start to get reps of seeing that the sky doesn't fall and we are going to be okay even though this is hard."
That was a long-winded way of saying, "Seek the kinds of partners that you want to be positively disrupted by, if in fact you want to be disrupted, otherwise just ignore the last three minutes."
Sam Spurlin:
Well, and then I love that because that last little bit there about if you want to be disrupted, when I think about especially early client engagements that didn't go well and we either mutually fired each other or we fired the client, it's because there was a misunderstanding about what was expected from them to do the work.
You use that word reps, which implies we are going to practice. We are going to show up and do the work, and it's not going to be this thing where we come in, do our smart consultant thing, give you a thing and then leave. That's not the modality. Sometimes, especially in the early days, we didn't do a great job of filtering or setting those expectations.
Then there would be a real culture shock of like, "Wait. What? We're going to do what? You're going to be in the meetings with me and we're going to actually try to do things differently. You're not just going to give me your report?" You have to be game for this to go well, which means you have to be game for actually wrestling with some uncomfortable stuff, with guidance, with help with folks who have been on that path before. But it'll be more effective, but it won't necessarily be easier.
Tip 4: Contract for the partnership you want and what your needs are
Rodney Evans:
Right. Right. I think in terms of our contracting and where we've certainly missed in the past, but I think we're getting better all the time, is just understanding that partnership is partnership.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
Even if you are the client and you are paying the consultant, whoever that consultant is, both sides are going to have needs in order to make a successful partnership. What we might need is your time or your dedication or your feedback or your patience. I mean, this is one, I just had a conversation today with someone, whereas saying and just validating their experience that it does often feel for the first three months nothing is happening right up until shit is happening everywhere.
Something that I often will say to clients that I need is like, "I'm going to need a little bit of grace from you and for you to trust me for a little while, that the seeds are under the ground right now, but shit is happening and you will eventually have flowers. But I can't force them out of the ground because you set an arbitrary date. We have to contract around this."
I don't know, that's an aside. But all of these things feel to me like if you're going to try to do something different in your operating system, these are really important considerations for doing that, whether you're doing it yourself or you're doing it with someone else.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. Totally agreed.
Tip 5: Decide for yourself what you need and then ask for it, rather than having a third party tell you what you need
Rodney Evans:
Another idea that's not just outsource your strategy to someone who will give it to you, whether that's like a super cool dude agency or whether it's like one of the old guard is create your first strategy stack of pancakes. See also the strategy podcast episode to tell you about those pancakes. Try doing one yourself and then create the tension of what is actually missing.
Say you're on a leadership team and you know that you need to be doing some experimentation around AI. Say that at your quarterly daylong strategy meeting, you all revisit your long-term essential intent. Then you're looking at your 90-day outcomes and you're like, "Uh-oh. We have an outcome here around a first bite at the AI apple in our roadmap, and we actually have no idea how to do that or how to get after that."
This is a very good moment for buying external expertise or doing external research or finding an expert to help you. The reason that I'm using this as an example is just I think that there is a lot of value in getting external advice and expertise. I just think that you should dial in what you're trying to do and then ask for it rather than asking someone else to tell you what to do instead.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I wonder if there's a rule of thumb. I don't know if the numbers would work at all about this. But for every X dollar that you're willing to spend on external person or entity to tell you something or give you something, set aside an equal amount for internal resourcing around actually operationalizing that or actually doing something with that information.
That means you have to spend half as much as you normally would then do that and use that other half to actually focus on spinning up a mission-based team or otherwise resourcing a group of people to go do something with that information.
Rodney Evans:
Yes. If you're going to get external support for the content, get external support for the context. That doesn't have to be The Ready. Maybe it is agile coaches or maybe it is psychotherapists. I don't know what the particular team needs. But don't just go, "Okay. Now we have the thing and let's hope for the best on the inside of the organization."
Now we know where we're driving, so hopefully this is the car that gets us there. Don't do that. If you're going to invest in the map, then also invest in the car and you're just going to have a much, much higher chance of getting where you're trying to go.
Sam Spurlin:
I like that. Don't just invest in the map, invest in the car.
Rodney Evans:
Thanks, Sam. Deep thoughts for 5:10, midweek.
Sam Spurlin:
I know. Wednesday, too.
Rodney Evans:
This is what we get when I go to a spa for a week. Ding, ding, ding.
Sam Spurlin:
I know. We are representing opposite ends of the human psychological continuum. You're coming back all refreshed and wise. I'm on the front end of a multi-state move and my brain is just falling out of my ears. Together, we make one great podcast.
Rodney Evans:
We make one great podcast host, two people, one great host.
Sam Spurlin:
One great podcast host, two-person podcast.
Rodney Evans:
That's very good.
Tip 6: Be clear about what you’re buying, and what it will require from you
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, yeah. Is there anything left unsaid or anything that we've been dancing around in this moment of talking about what it is like to work with us or someone like us? There are other organizations, friends of ours who do similar work to us as well. It's not just for The Ready. I very much hope some of our friends in other orgs use this episode as a growth tool for themselves.
This is what it's like to work with us. We really do care about this type of work, spreading into more and more organizations. It's not about just The Ready becoming as big and as successful as possible. That is not the endgame here.
Rodney Evans:
Definitely not. If anything, the intention of this episode is less about us and it's more about clarity. I just want clients to be clear on what they're buying from whom, that's it. To me, that is the whole banana so that they're not mad at me when they don't get a fucking PowerPoint deck and they're not mad at the strategy consultants when they don't get a new operating system.
I'm just like, "No. You're buying two different things. On the one hand, you're buying from us personal training. On the other hand, you're buying a training plan." Those are two different things. Let's just not be confused about them. I don't know. The only thing that is probably worth saying is it's really tricky if you do what we do for a living, to be in the situation where the person who is trusting you and paying you is also going to be made uncomfortable by you almost immediately and for a protracted period of time.
Everybody's got to just have the stomach and the spine for that because that's what's going to happen if the work actually works. Leaders say to me all the time like, "I went through some dark nights of the soul on this project where I really questioned if we were on the right track, if I was up for it, if I could make it through this, if I could hold off the forces around me long enough to show that this was the way, it's hard."
It's fundamentally the only way. It's fundamentally worth it to have an operating system that can do shit. But it's not the smart business to be in, for sure.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Totally. I think that's why when it goes well, it goes really well and it's transformational. You get those literal friendships that have emerged from our work. I mean, Friday, I'm going to lunch with a former client who we worked together with for a long time and I've stayed in touch with, because we went through some shit together. It's hard to not emerge from the other side without having that really deep respect for each other that you get from doing something like that.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I mean, I think that the truth of the partnership is that it is almost always transformational in both directions. I have never had a long-term client that did not fundamentally change how I think about something significant. This is how it goes. I think that feels like a pretty good place to wrap things up. We're going to do that in a new way today. All right.
Closing round: Rodney and Sam’s reflections on the consulting landscape
Sam Spurlin:
Closing round.
Rodney Evans:
Closing round. Y'all you've heard 200 check-in rounds, because there have been 200 episodes of this show. The other practice that we do at the end of meetings is a closing round. We've never done closing round on this show. But we're going to start now, because we didn't really like the hot take thing, even though it had great music and great vocals from Sam.
Sam Spurlin:
Sure did.
Rodney Evans:
We just think it's fun to add another practice that you all can be using. Sam, I'm going to go with the old school. What did you learn from this time together?
Sam Spurlin:
What did I learn?
Rodney Evans:
What did you learn?
Sam Spurlin:
I really just appreciated hearing you give a more nuanced take about what traditional consulting is trying to do and what they are actually selling. I am a baby in all of this. I'm just a little baby man and that I came right out of grad school directly to The Ready. My only interaction with traditional consulting has largely been like ships passing in the night within large client organizations, and then what I read in the media.
That is a very, I think, skewed sense of what these organizations actually are. I feel like I have a better appreciation, dare say, empathy, maybe, for what these organizations are really good at. If you need what they are selling, how they're actually quite good at that. Then by you doing that, I really appreciate that greater clarity now about what it looks like to buy the map versus work on the car, to use your metaphor.
Rodney Evans:
Sweet. I mean, I learned a lot making this episode. I think that there have been times at clients where feeling like we're batting cleanup after a new strategy or purpose statement or structure has been purchased, has not felt great. Even in sales processes where people are like, "Well, we had a bad experience doing this."
I'm like, "Okay. I don't know what to tell you, because these things are not related to each other." Like, "I didn't do it and I wasn't there, and that's not what I do for a living." I think though it's very easy for me to have an emotional take on that, that is from challenging lived experiences and having this more nuanced conversation about just creating clarity and articulating the difference between the content and the context and understanding that there's tons we don't know, because neither of us work in that field and we're mostly hearing and seeing things third hand.
But I really learned through the conversation and the research that Jack did beforehand about what is valuable about the map and why the car is ever so important to invest in as well.
Sam Spurlin:
Cool. The main thing I'm taking away is that apparently, I am a mechanic because I'm working on the car.
Rodney Evans:
Good.
Sam Spurlin:
That's what we're going with the metaphor. I'm really handy. I know where all the car things go, the different parts, the filters and the pipes ...
Rodney Evans:
Oh, good. The car things. Perfect.
Sam Spurlin:
... and the catalytic converters and whatnot.
Rodney Evans:
I trust you implicitly with this.
Sam Spurlin:
That's why I'm always showing up to every meeting with grease all over my hands from working on the car.
Rodney Evans:
I love it. All right.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. Well, we're always looking for new topics. If you have an organizational pattern that you are having trouble changing, please, please, please shoot us a note at podcast[at]theready[dot]com.
Rodney Evans:
Also, send your guest pitches there. If you send them to my email address, you're probably not going to get a response. This show was engineered by Taylor Marvin and produced by the inimitable Jack Van Amburg. At Work with The Ready is created by The Ready where we help organizations around the world change the way they work, whether that's what they really want or not. Thanks so much for listening.