When I reflect on my experiences as a consultant, I often find myself pondering the profound impact a great consultant can have on an organisation. It’s a topic that resonates deeply with me, especially when I consider the distinction between consulting and coaching.
The Consultant’s Role: A Unique Perspective
A consultant is not just an agile consultant; they are a catalyst for change. Unlike a coach, who is typically embedded within the organisation for the long haul, a consultant comes in with a specific purpose and a clear timeframe. This difference is crucial. Here’s what I’ve learned over the years:
Focused Expertise: Consultants are brought in to tackle specific problems. They don’t linger unnecessarily, which can often be a sign of their value. If a company wants you around full-time, it might mean you’re not charging enough for your expertise.
State of Agile Reports: One of my go-to strategies is conducting a “state of agile” report. This involves interviewing a diverse range of employees to gauge the current agile practices within the organisation. The insights I gather often reveal a stark contrast between what leadership believes is happening and the reality on the ground.
Bridging the Gap: It’s not uncommon to hear leadership touting their commitment to continuous delivery and unit testing, while the teams on the ground express frustration over the lack of these practices. This disconnect highlights the need for open and transparent communication within the organisation.
Identifying and Addressing Core Issues
When I step into an organisation, my goal is to identify the significant issues that need addressing. I’m not there to fix minor problems; I’m looking for the proverbial switch on the wall that can be flipped to initiate change. Here’s how I approach this:
Trial and Error: I provide organisations with actionable suggestions to try out. These may have worked in other contexts, but I always emphasise that they might not be a perfect fit. The key is to experiment, learn, and adapt.
Ownership of Problems: It’s essential for the organisation’s leaders to take ownership of their challenges. If they rely too heavily on an external consultant, they may struggle to implement lasting change.
Brutal Honesty: As a consultant, I have the luxury of being candid. I can deliver the hard truths about what’s broken within the organisation without fear of repercussions. This honesty can be a wake-up call for leadership, prompting them to take action.
The Value of Quick Wins
One of the most significant advantages of consulting is the ability to implement changes swiftly. I often liken this to ripping off a Band-Aid. Here’s why quick wins matter:
Immediate Impact: By addressing issues head-on, organisations can see immediate improvements. This approach contrasts with the slower, more gradual changes that coaches might advocate.
Tailored Recommendations: A great consultant knows when to push for rapid change and when to advocate for a more measured approach. This discernment is crucial for navigating the complexities of organisational dynamics.
Common Challenges Across Organisations
Interestingly, I’ve found that many organisations believe they have unique problems. However, in my experience, these challenges are often universal. Here are some insights:
Shared Struggles: The issues organisations face—transitioning from traditional hierarchical structures to more decentralised, self-organising teams—are not unique. They are common across industries.
Cultural Shifts: Moving from a Tayloristic mindset to one that embraces agility and self-organisation requires significant cultural change. This shift is often fraught with challenges, but it’s essential for long-term success.
External Perspective: Bringing in an outsider can provide a fresh perspective that is often lacking internally. I’ve seen time and again how an external consultant can highlight obvious issues that those within the organisation may overlook.
Conclusion: The Consultant’s Edge
In conclusion, the value of a great consultant lies in their ability to quickly identify and address core issues within an organisation. They bring a unique perspective that can catalyse change, helping organisations navigate the complexities of agile transformation.
If you find yourself in a situation where you’re grappling with organisational challenges, consider the potential benefits of engaging a consultant. Their insights could be the key to unlocking your organisation’s true potential. Remember, the journey to agility is not just about adopting new practices; it’s about fostering a culture that embraces change and innovation.
Foreign
How much of an impact can a great ideal consultant have? I think they can have a huge, huge impact because they’re not an agile consultant. A consultant tends not to be interested in hanging around. That’s the difference I feel between consulting and coaching. A coach is going to be there all the time, but a consultant can’t be there all the time. Usually, one, because they’re more expensive, right? So the company doesn’t want them hanging around for too long. But really, the consultant is doing that deliberately, right? If the company wants you around full time, you’re not expensive enough. Because you want to be coming in, helping them with very specific problems. They’re the ones that are going to be fixing the problem. They’re the ones that are going to be doing the work. You’re giving them things to try or perhaps…
One of the things that I’ve done quite a lot with organisations is, I guess I call it the state of agile report, right? And what is the current state of the way things work inside of the organisation from the perspective of agile? And what are the things, like what are the top three things that the organisation should focus on improving? And so I’m not necessarily there to solve any of those problems, right? I maybe come in for a week or two weeks. I’m going to interview 20 or 30 people in the organisation at all different levels, ask them questions about how they work, how they figure things out. And you get a lot of answers that are contradictory in that story, right? Because you get the people actually doing the work saying, “Yeah, we don’t really write unit tests and we don’t really have automated builds.” But then you speak to leadership and they’re like, “Yeah, we’ve got continuous delivery and we’ve got all these unit tests coming out of our ears.” And maybe we’ve got too many unit tests. And there’s a fundamental disconnect there because leadership and organisations will often say, “I’ve heard in my leadership grapevine that we should be doing unit tests.” And then the teams feel under pressure to do unit tests, so they’ll just tell them that they’ve done unit tests because maybe the product that they’re working on is absolutely impossible to do unit tests. But it’s not possible to have that conversation with leadership because there’s not an open and transparent relationship going on there in the organisation.
So being able to find and identify those problems, figure out what it is that… Oh, and these are big things that need to change, not little things. They’re not subtle things like coaches come in and fix subtle things and work on the bigger things over a longer period of time. But that often takes too long because you’re going to put that out there. It takes too long. What you want to be able to do is go into an organisation, see a switch on the wall that at the bottom it says “not continuous delivery,” at the top it says “continuous delivery,” and you want to figure out how do I flip that switch? How do I just turn that on? How do I just fix this problem? And quite often, you’re not always going to be right. And I always, when I go into organisations, I’m always explaining that, right? I’m saying, “I’m going to give you things to try. They might not work for you. They maybe have worked in other places, but things to try.” And they try them, and either it works for them or it doesn’t, right? And then they can come back and say, “Well, we tried this and it didn’t work, but it worked a little bit, right? So what else can we do to figure this out?” And that’s that consulting moment that I think coaches do as well, right? But this is just taking that piece off and saying, “Let’s just do this piece.” Because I feel that organisations and leaders in organisations, people and organisations need to own that problem themselves. They’re the ones that’s their organisation. They’re in the crap that they’re in. They need to deal with figuring out how to get out because if you get somebody in who’s given accountability for changing that problem but isn’t really part of the company or doesn’t really understand the company, it can be very difficult for them to affect change. And that’s why it takes longer because then they have to build all of those relationships before they can change.
But quite often, when you come in as a consultant, you’re not worried about being fired, right? That’s the first thing because you’ve got another gig next week and you’re not coming back. You might not be coming back at all. So you can just be absolutely brutally honest in your reporting and say, “This is what’s going on in your organisation. This is why it’s broken. These are the things you’re going to need to fix. I recommend you go find a coach and help you fix this thing.” But then they know that’s what they need to fix. They have it in the front of their mind and they’re potentially thinking they can see that switch in the wall and like, “If we could just flip that switch,” and they’re figuring out more things to do. And I think that’s why I think that great consultants can be more valuable than great coaches because their focus is on flipping that switch as quickly as possible.
And flipping things quickly, like ripping the Band-Aid off, right? You don’t want to peel it slowly because that’s going to hurt more. You want to just rip it off, do something different, and deal with the fallout of that bigger change. And I’m going to say, “Well, it depends,” right? That’s why you need a great consultant because the great consultant is going to be able to go, “Yeah, you want to slow change that one and you want to fast change this one,” right? Because if you slow change that one, it’s going to be a problem. And if you fast change this one, it’s going to be a problem. And that’s… things that people feel are unique to their organisation, but they’re really not.
One of the things that I always find really interesting is every single consulting customer I’ve ever worked with has said, “We have these magical unique problems and we need your help with them.” And I go in and their problems are not magical and they’re not unique. They’re the same problems that everybody else is having. There’s little fine nuances of difference, right? But the big problem is the big problem that everybody’s having. And part of that comes from a Taylorism to Volatism, right? So from a traditional hierarchical Industrial Revolution thinking focused on things changing to a democratized self-organisation, distributed thinking focused on people, right? So those are the one of the two big bridges that need to happen in organisations. But there’s lots of other things that are small that they can do within those structures that will enable them to do better, right? But you’ve still got those big problems that are the same everywhere because everybody’s trying to do this decentralized self-organising teams, but they’re in a hierarchy with steering and leadership and control from the top. And they’re just… but they’re mutually exclusive, right? You can get a little bit of this inside of this, but you can’t get all the way over here where people want to be, where they see the biggest benefit in what they’re getting.
So I feel that’s the value of a consultant, is being able to come in and quickly identify and point at things that need to change. And a lot of these things are really obvious when you come in from the outside, but they’re not obvious at all when you’re inside of that story. And having somebody come in and do it… I’ll point out also quite often I come in and the sponsor for me coming in says, “Here’s the things we’d like you to tell leadership,” right? Because they already know what the problem is, just nobody’s listening to them. And they need somebody else to come in and say, “Yes, this is indeed a problem that you’ve been told a whole bunch of times.” And I’m only going to do that if those things are actually true, right? If I’m going to look and see. But it’s really valuable to have somebody with knowledge and experience coming from the outside that’s maybe recognised inside of the organisation in that traditional hierarchy to help make that start making those changes across to the other side of the wall.
