‘Best Practice’ Solutions to the Wrong Problems
Here's the answer. Now what's the question..?
"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.". - Abraham Maslow 1
Big consultancies love their ‘best practice’ methodologies.
The branding message is self-evident — what client would want to buy ‘worst practices’ or even ‘average practices’?
The promise of a best practice also plays on the subtle fear that “maybe our practices aren’t so great”, pushing the tried and tested ‘FOMO’ marketing button — the fear of missing out.
But the main reason big consultancies love their standardised approaches is much more fundamental.
One-size-fits-all, so-called best practices are the only way to safely deploy large numbers of inexperienced junior consultants without too much hand-holding.
And that’s central to the profitability of their business model, as described here by David Maister, the world’s most famous consultant to consultancies: 2
“Seniors (partners or VPs) are responsible for marketing and client relations; managers for the day-to-day supervision and coordination of projects; and juniors for the many technical tasks necessary to complete the study. The three levels are traditionally referred to as the ‘finders,’ the ‘minders,’ and the ‘grinders’. 3
The finders, minders, grinders model relies on a handful of senior consultants selling and supervising as many junior consultants as possible.
In the trade, this is known as leverage — and it’s the secret to whether a consulting firm generates gargantuan profits or bleeds red ink.
This operating model works well enough for the bread and butter work consulting firms did up to 30 years ago — providing research-based advice to senior executives, to help them make better informed decisions. 4
That’s why Maister describes consulting projects as involving “the many technical tasks necessary to complete the study”.
But the finders, minders, grinders model backfires spectacularly when clients don’t just need advice but need to build the muscles of a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Here’s how one former consulting firm partner described the problem:
“When you're buying, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger or Dwayne Johnson talking to you. But once you sign the deal you get three 19-year-old kids who've never been in a gym in their lives making a plan for you based on what they read in a book and one of their friends did once five years ago. They promise to get you fit by giving you a diagram of what your body should look like and a bunch of metrics to track your progress”. 5
This highlights the central, critical, and unavoidable limitation inherent to big consulting.
Bright young consultants can do useful intellectual work on study projects.
But they lack the real-world ‘grey-hair’ experience and insight to help an organisation grow its own specific and unique future-fit capacities and capabilities for organisational innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. 6
There’s of course a deep irony in the very idea that it’s possible to create a culture of innovation by copying ‘best practices’ that are being sold to everyone else.
If you do what everyone else does, where exactly is the innovation..?
Creating the future-fit cultures that organisations need to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world involves addressing the complex interplay between the attitudes, behaviours, actions and interactions of multiple people with diverse perspectives.
Each individual will typically identify areas of focus they see as central to future-fitness — the things they’d focus on tackling if it were up to them.
But for most people it’s not up to them, so the HiPPO effect typically kicks in — the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO) tends to dominate.
That’s especially true when that opinion has been formed, shaped, and nudged towards the ‘best practice solution’ of the consulting firm partner who has their ear…
Senior executives invariably have a perspective on the problem, whether they’ve been ‘helped’ to define it or not.
But their perspective frequently fails to take adequate account of the perspectives of other important stakeholders, especially people in the body of the organisation who will ultimately be expected to change their behaviours.
Take this example from the late 1990’s when the newly appointed CEO of a high-tech scale-up asked me to help them “be more innovative”.
At our first meeting, where we were joined by the VPs of Marketing and of R&D, he explained he’d been hired to accelerate their market scale-up and summed up the problem as he saw it: “We don’t come up with enough good ideas for new products”.
He then headed off to his next meeting.
As soon as he’d left the room, the two VPs turned to me and said: “We come up with lots of good ideas for new products. It’s just he doesn’t know which ones to invest in”.
We worked together over a few weeks and identified their real problem was not a lack of ideas, but misaligned views on how to exploit their technology portfolio to create value for customers.
We came up with an approach to resolve this misalignment, secured the CEO’s blessing, and they were off and running. 7
The CEO had started out with a very clear — and clearly wrong — perspective on the problem.
Consider what would have happened if he’d hired someone peddling their best practice idea generation methodology.
Not only would doing so have backfired, it would have further alienated him from the Marketing and R&D VPs, making it even harder for them to work together on future common and shared challenges.
Over the past 35 years I’ve seen hundreds of relationships in dozens of organisations throughout Europe, Asia and the US damaged by the imposition of supposedly best practice solutions to the wrong problems.
When this happens, it results in:
Huge waste of time, energy, and money trying to solve the wrong problems;
Disengagement of people who aren’t adequately consulted or involved;
Frustration at being obliged to participate in clearly pointless exercises;
Anger at having to go through the charade and pretend to be engaged;
Disbelief that senior management could be so misguided;
Vital relationships strained to breaking point and beyond.
An organisation can never build its future-fit muscles unless the people within the organisation do the heavy lifting.
When outsiders do the heavy lifting, you’ll not only fail to get the desired results but you’ll inevitably increase immunity to future organisational change.
So, what to do instead?
Resist the desire to ‘get on with it’ by diving in with the first ‘solution’ that fits any one person’s inevitably partial, biased, and incomplete ‘2D’ perspective. 8
To avoid going off half cocked, explore symptoms and drivers from multiple perspectives — remembering that colleagues in the body of the organisation often see different angles vitally important to any successful intervention.
Steer clear of ‘best practice solutions’ and anyone who seems to believe they know the nature of the problem before you’ve engaged with enough of your colleagues to understand your unique situation.
Ensure that your people, not outsiders, do the heavy lifting — because this is absolutely the only way to build your organisation’s future-fit muscles.
Bottom Line
Anyone with a stock ‘best practice solution’ will define your unique problem to fit their far-from-unique solution.
Often they’ll do this without any deliberate desire to deceive, but from the genuine conviction that their solution is perfectly suited to your every need.
Upton Sinclair insightfully articulated why this happens: 9
“It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.”
Maslow's Hammer, from The Psychology of Science (1966): "I remember seeing an elaborate and complicated automatic washing machine for automobiles that did a beautiful job of washing them. But it could do only that, and everything else that got into its clutches was treated as if it were an automobile to be washed. I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
David Maister gained a business doctorate at Harvard Business School in 1976 and taught there as a professor from 1979–1985. In 1985, he switched to full-time consulting to professional services (PS) firms, publishing his famous guide to “Managing the Professional Service Firm” in 1993. He retired in 2009.
Managing the Professional Service Firm (David Maister 1993 page 7)
Consulting firms developed and refined the finders, minders, grinders business model over many decades from the early 20th century. It’s so deeply embedded in every aspect of their work from hiring staff, selling and managing work, it’s impossible to escape.
Private conversation with a former partner - reprinted with permission.
For a more detailed exploration of the adverse side-effect of the big consulting firm business model, download my 22-page guide to the Five Fatal Habits that have consistently stifled, smothered, and strangled innovation, adaptiveness, and agility over the past 35 years (signup NOT required).
I describe the work in more detail in the second half of this seven minute video.
Find out more about ‘2D’ perspectives and the 2D3D mindsets at the heart of a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness in this six minute video.
Upton Sinclair (1878 – 1968) was an American writer, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California. He was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century and wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres.