Unless this changes it will continue to erode the clients’ confidence in these service providers and they will be seeking increasing internal solutions to tackle their problems. I think if this trend continues it will be a mistaken course.

Consultants are not addressing many of the changes occurring and ignoring opportunities to adapt to different circumstances, they are simply not putting up a strong case of their engagement by redesigning their business models or opening themselves up to different forms of collaboration.

In many ways, the consulting industry specializing in innovation is its own worst enemy.

It is highly fragmented, often highly specialized in certain innovation practices, and much of the advice comes from a cottage industry of independent practitioners, caught up in executing and little time for advancing their own knowledge.

There is this sense that consultants are resolutely staying very internally driven, self-promoting, still trying to convey the story of innovation mastery, when clearly this is lacking in rapidly changing market and technology conditions and due to this staying ahead of the knowledge curve are actually failing the client.

Many consulting firms have spent the last decade trying to make themselves more efficient, going from craftwork to selling one solution as a mass production to many, to yield ever-increasing fees, so as to gain a re-occurring return on a one-off invested solution. Innovation solutions simply need to be crafted to each set of circumstances mostly, in my opinion, and that conflicts with this repeating model.

When clients were pushing down prices it made sense to offer general solutions but the disruptive forces occurring in clients’ markets are requiring far more the return to crafting individual solutions.

Larger Consultants have been offering body shops, and set-piece solutions, to offset client resource shortfalls. This sits less well in a time where demand for unique innovation is required to offset these disruptive forces coming from often unexpected sources.

The two, quality versus quantity of consulting, are difficult to equate coming from the same consulting firm. Bespoke needs to be recognized as necessary for innovative solutions.

The scrabble for consultants is to re-position themselves back at the high-value end but they need a greater depth of knowledge, expertise and experience to convince clients of this need to change differently than simply providing resources. Both clients and consultants are struggling with their own legacy of where resources reside and what value these can provide.

The mismatch of client needs and consultants’ offerings.

The client is increasingly requiring more organic or holistic solutions not a ‘piecemeal’ innovation offerings. These separate pieces often don’t dovetail into one complete innovation system because they are supplied by a variety of different service providers, all having their own ‘pet’ approaches.

Perhaps there is a real mismatch between clients’ needs in aspirations and budgets and the available innovation consultants’ ability to match and relate to specific industry practices and scale to meet client needs.

There also seems this perpetual dilemma of clients’ wishes that are hard to reconcile with operational realities to turn their organizations from being focused on effective and efficient into agile and adaptive, required for innovation.

Often the two are caught in the classic “who does what”, “how much each can and should manage” and the ability to handover or what happens when the consultant finishes the project and leaves, taking a level of knowledge with them that was never given time to reside inside the clients.

Consultants are far too cautious for their own good

Consultant firms, on the other hand, are moving far too cautiously to any form of collaborative form, they tend to bring ‘experts’ in for ad hoc, one-off assignments when they need deeper expertise. Wherever possible consultants want to manage as much as possible internally to ‘keep’ the fees generated inside. This is not a recipe for building lasting relationships that have mutual value in growing understanding.

Often this ‘keep it in-house’ whatever it takes, promotes that in-breed fault and is not reflecting the commonly held view today, “that all knowledge does not reside within its own walls”; they still reluctantly hang on to the closed system of inventing only inside here.

This often manifests itself in the host of variations in what is claimed as their ‘unique’ versions of “common innovation” where they constantly reinvent the wheel in their own approaches to processes, definitions, tools, frameworks, systems of working and idea management etc. I often feel those “unique solutions” are often just simply mutton dressed up as lamb.’

The resultant cost of rework if clients bring in a different consultant grows.

Today I think part of the clients experimenting and learning internally is due to this disappointment with the consultant. Clients are becoming extremely selective for the use of any outside advice. Many clients are simply building their own innovation teams with individuals that have had some given time consulting to offset, defray and strengthen their own in-house capabilities.

The reality is these are often more ‘at odds’ with the business units, seen as elite, out of touch often just pursuing their own agenda, not accountable, and often less supportive of the current business needs.

Also, innovation itself is going through really a massive change.
The need for ecosystems, platforms, the greater use of analytics, big data and reliance on technology are all crowding in on innovation delivery.

The emphasis on thinking through new business models, combining design thinking, lean management, customer development, prototyping, experimenting outside the lab, collaborating with clients, finding different partners, the different exploitation of research techniques are all breaking out in different forms and combinations is radically altering approaches to innovation.

Also collaborating and networking are far more essential to innovation exchange, be this in the early idea forming stages but increasing in the development and execution of innovative solutions. Partnerships are diverse, delivering on the need of the job to be done. Orchestration is increasingly playing its part to manage all the assets and knowledge coming into play.

The innovation consultant can lead or can be simply a bit player in this synchronizing of innovation activities or offering ‘leading’ advice.

I have suggested in past posts that we all need to think differently:

innovation is based on the thinking around the shift from products to solutions, from transactions to growing far more value-adding ongoing relationships, from a supplier of product services, into highly valued network partnerships, exploring innovation across all options, instead of delivering on discrete elements; this requires managing the whole ecosystem of the innovation design differently.

The external innovation consultant needs to change

I get the distinct impression the focus of most innovation consultants is still locked into product innovation or improving the process of the pipeline/portfolio, the idea generation and project execution model. It is not evolving into broader services or accounting for the transformations underway at the clients end.

While the consulting firm stays closed-up, intent on delivering their own solutions,will mean they are often far too busy catching up, lagging in their own emerging practice and due to this ‘lag’ have lost any leadership position in many things relating to innovation.

To overcome this you need to be engaged, to be able to piece together fragments of information to gain the insights that independence can offer. Consultants need to explore and experiment themselves in a laboratory and pilot testing environment, that allows clients to work alongside them to learn and gain from this in collaborative ways. Both learn and both benefit going forward in new ways.

Sadly general well experienced innovation practitioners are actually thin on the ground. You do need to search hard for these but they are available. This exploring and extracting insight requires dedicated experience and constant involvement in broader innovation understanding

Often even the large consulting practices can’t afford to have more than a few experts scanning this innovation terrain yet clients, again and again turn to the broad consulting provider for specialist advice.

The one real change that is occurring is in thought leadership from consultants

Clients often lack real deep insight or draw out the implications of these emerging practices, they want to work more alongside others in experimental practice spaces to truly figure out how to respond to them or understand the implications to their own business. It is only part of the innovation knowledge puzzle for the client.

They need to constantly look elsewhere to piece this together, if at all they can, as so often the reporting loses much of its value as it is not translated into suggested solutions if the consulting industry fails to provide these services or knowledge laboratories.

There is increasing value in the thought leadership pieces emerging from the large, well connected consulting firms. Their ability to extract knowledge from their clients and increasingly match this with merging practice is valuable.

The work of many of the larger consultants in the field of thought leadership, including Deloitte’s, Bains, McKinsey, Booz, PWC, A D Little, PA Consulting and some others, has begun to provide a much greater insight through their access to C-level people and their ability to provide reports on best or emerging practice.

This is helping understand changes occurring and the emerging practices around organizations’ current thinking of innovation, yet it is failing to be fully translated into the client application.

Translating thought leadership to new practice is a real opportunity for all
Presently much of this thought leadership is failing to be translated into practical solutions, they remain research findings.

Thought leadership seems to be increasingly dominating the marketing activities of consulting firms, and with some good cause: clients require evidence and good thought leadership, it does matter to them, to figure out their internal solutions.

I’m not unhappy with that, I’ll be honest, as my competitive space is largely about understanding emergent innovation practice to relate and absorb the findings and then attempt to connect the thinking to improving innovation practice within client thinking at individual, team or organizational level.

I’ve been shifting my business model in the past few years, into a far more advisory one than consultative for clients, attempting to connect the multiple and different dots coming in from multiple sources to help this thinking and understanding.

We come back to the reason why, what used to work before, often doesn’t now.

If the innovation consultant needs to question the changes occurring all around them, then they need to ask “why not develop a different type of sustaining collaborative arrangement?” One where they, the consulting firm have scale and resources, become far more aligned with people like me, who have the entrepreneurial energy and zeal that explores and exploits, probes and connects, offering a further validation path that clients might value.

There is so much convergence, linkage, networking, and integration pieces occurring that none of us can remain islands of specific knowledge, we must find innovative ways to collaborate, to build an ecosystem of knowledge that provides clients a real competitive advantage. I want to participate in far more scaling, proving and validating.

Consultants must learn within themselves to collaborate, exchange and value a greater ‘collective pool’ of innovation knowledge, otherwise, solutions being offered to clients remain incomplete, stilted and lack the real diversity of understanding they require to combat a different set of market conditions than in the past. They need greater transformational services.

Collaboration in the making?

Perhaps we have here a collaboration in the making, that is for the clients (markets) benefit and bridges some of the current client / consulting gaps that I feel are there.

I wonder if the larger consulting company can see beyond their own noses for the value in this?

The post The Challenges Being Faced by Innovation Consultants first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

So why did I call this blog post “client engagement- full of whipped cream and lumpy gravy?” Often both are ‘heaped’ onto the poor (final) solution found underneath the client- consulting engagement process. Both are layered on to mask the truth that the ones responsible don’t really understand how to make this process really work.

Managing innovation suffers from this an awful lot. We do need to understand all the ingredients that make up innovation, often we just try to’ top’ them off, failing to understand everything that needs to become part of the final solution.

I’m sure many of you have witnessed or been involved in poor client- consulting engagements. Often the root cause of poor end results within this process stems from a poorly structured engagement briefing process – my lumpy gravy.

This creates the effect of creating many problems in delivering back not the best advice or solution to the real problem, offering up the lashings of whipped cream to cover up the bland solution dish underneath.

The engagement process does still rankle for me as it causes many of the difficulties and tensions within the emotions that many projects seem to swing through –  trusted and distrusted — loved and despised — all in equal measure where many variations could be reduced with a little thinking and challenging.

Avoiding some of the pitfalls

So I thought I’d take a  look at some of the problems within the client – consulting engagement process that can mask what is really lying underneath.

Firstly we more than often than not, get the lumpy gravy served up from the client’s side. The client serves up the lumpy gravy as they want to cover up the problems and challenges they really have or  they even can’t describe it as they are not sure of the outcome they are looking for.

All they want to do, is to call in the consultant to get them to try and chew their way through the existing meal, hoping they can eventually sort out the issues, make it more palatable. They react and call for immediate help, rather than go back to the basics and think through the ‘connected’ issues. Let others sort that out and leave the consulting brief very open, cover it up with this lumpy gravy.

On the other hand, the consultant layers it on with their whipped cream. Those that are delivering plenty of whipped cream to make for a finished presentation that often has little substance but lots of sugar.

Hopefully also a little addictive and fattening so that the clients is always appreciating the finished effect, delivered in that final flourish, yet not really understanding what makes up the dish and asking simply for more.

So why do we have an engagement process?

Actually it is to stop the covering up of poorly conceived and hastily developed and deficient executed solutions without clearly thinking these through.

Often good innovation is never delivered on the plate easily, it is hard work. Often good engagement results are lacking, as the depth of understanding of the complexities are often ignored.

Often the trap is failing to have the right understanding, skills and application to be applied, leaving for just adequate end solutions offering mediocre and further erratic results. Sorry but that is it!

I believe through decent in-depth discussions pre-engagement we can achieve better results

Surprising this ‘decent’ pre-engagement often does not happen, and you can spend a fair amount of your time revising your proposal after certain discoveries.

The problem today is that caused by the pressure of time, as most the issues always seem to have a certain ‘burning platform behind them. The pressure is to quickly find solutions that fix immediate problems without the necessary depth of discovery to resolve the underlying cause.

I would strongly argue clients should invest in a discovery phase before everyone gets deeply involved in project structures, costs or possible solutions. Sadly the majority of clients are not prepared to pay for this, often believing their rambling brief, many times just verbal and often in snatched, scrabbled conversations is good enough. To be totally honest they are not.

On the consulting side, if you probe too much, early on, it makes the client uncomfortable when that should actually be the effect, as it brings out and confirms the real issues in potentially a better proposal. At least it can get you closer to the real issues underneath.

Sometimes the client suddenly is unavailable, they do not return the calls but by then you have either lost out because you were not the mind reading expert they expected as they are too busy fire-fighting and little time for putting quality time into their thinking.

So let me offer some of my favourites where clients serve up ‘lumpy gravy’.

• Briefs that are so limited that you have to spend inordinate amounts of time painfully extracting the real underlying challenge or issues. Often you lose out because you were not the mind reading expert, as they were really waiting to read the different submissions to decide on what they needed to do as they did not have a clue and were on a ‘fishing’ expedition.
• Another one is clients hand over such a short brief, pushed through to the procurement department and just let them go through the discussions and evaluations. The consultant can’t even talk to the eventual client.
• Then you have procurement who does their job of looking for the most economical proposal, leaving the eventual client often forced to work with that provider of services irrespective, eventually complaining of “that consultant was no good”- surprise!
• One other favourite is a reworked and passed around document, one that has been revised countless times by all internal stakeholders to make the end briefing result as exciting as flat warm beer – still just about enough strength but no character or uniqueness but it “wets the whistle” as we say.
• Often you experience  the one where the brief arrives months after it should have, due to this internal dialogue process being interminable. The client has that sudden fear someone above them is beginning to ask questions about this. Equally the year-end is coming up and the client races to turn the investment commitment into actual and push the consultant to reply within forty-eight hours or something as ridiculous.
• One more, is to take out the real issues; I mean who honestly wants to admit they have real issues?  Heaven forbid, that might be carer limiting if it gets out. Just offer a hint of excitement and flavour to the consultant and once they are ‘on the inside’ the client opens up, Caught often by surprise, the consultants scrabble to draw in additional resources, rapidly try to revise their solutions and get into renegotiation mode creating tensions and questioning for the broader stakeholders, making all go on the defensive. Not a good place to start any engagement process.

I can recall where one potential client deliberately ‘released’ a tender over a holiday weekend, opening the tender offer on Friday, late afternoon, with a cut off on the Monday – the holiday day. That way the number of submissions were significantly limited and his favoured one ready to be submitted, could be chosen by the committee, set up to review all tenders. That perhaps is a ‘lumpy gravy’ of another kind.

All these ‘lumpy gravy’ moments have real tension  within them, due to the lack of a well thought through brief.  Often so many with ‘vested’ interests enter the discussions all getting ‘stuck in’ to fix the lumpy gravy of a poorly conceived proposal.

As they say “too many cooks spoil the broth” and the end result ends up with blander, watered down proposals. Conflicts and issues are put off until later.

Examples of adding more whipped innovation cream back to the client.

• If you want to make everyone purr with contentment just keep throwing in “best practices” and “benchmarking competitors” or “evaluating market leaders” as one part of the topping off
• The other is laying out the ingredients of the innovation solution dish to make sure there is sufficient taste appeal such as “we provide a diagnostic” or “we believe in conducting in-depth interviews” usually triggers and ticks some of the taste boxes.
• When consultants receive a short briefing call, asking for help, the consultant ‘grabs’ all his pre-cooked solutions off the shelf or from the deep freezer and turns these into instant solutions and uses these to offer up quick answers.
• Then you get a number of consultants who have formulated their solutions before they even arrive at the clients for the kick off meeting and irrespective ‘drive’ solutions towards this but work very diligently to squeezing them into the solution box.
• Or, after a brief period at the clients busily gathering data, conclusions are made and with the on-site consulting team locking themselves away for a few days producing their ‘all singing and all dancing’ Power Point deck of 200 slides, full of the ‘mind numbing’ structure and process descriptors, leading to their conclusions with those all listening simply ‘blanking out’.
• How often does that growing sense of the consulting company, that was brought in, actually seems like they have gone beyond their own competence level and begin to ‘gain experience’ at the clients cost and famously ‘tap dance’. Whipped cream can cover much!
• The last one here, is the client only real reason in calling in another consultant was to clear up another consultants mess. That puts a really different spin on things and suddenly reputations are far more at stake. The new whipped cream might briefly foam up and then go flat as the situation was simply not really a recoverable one.

So the consultant has to often be ready with lashings of whipped cream to mask the content underneath. Sometimes a little honestly, which often is in sparing doses, might be a better solution. I’d rather lose an engagement than work in highly constrained situations where no one is eventually happy.

Clients, I believe value candour, some humility from consultants and a high level of transparency than often consultants like to project:  fully confident, the authority and masking the solutions with the pretence of perfection. Whipped cream can only go so far.

Avoiding whipped cream and lumpy gravy.

It is a pity, especially where we are dealing with innovation as it is often a messy process and this should be a clear recognized on all sides. Solutions need to be unique as no two situations are the same. Solutions often ’emerge’ through an open, sometimes highly experimental process that requires this collaborative approach, where client and consultant truly do work alongside each other, complimenting and contributing together. Here is where by really combining they can offer different insights for ‘emerging’ solutions that tackle unique distinctive challenge and learn from each other.

I like working through four principal steps in any engagement process. They all need working through really well – discovery, generation, conversion and finally, diffusion and acceptance. I adopted my approach from learning from others and provided a visual of this can be seen in a previous post.

Try to avoid the whipped cream and lumpy gravy within the client- consulting engagement process, it masks some fairly unhealthy outcomes if this is not managed well.

The post Client Engagements – Full of Whipped Cream and Lumpy Gravy first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.