Chapter 6: Consultancy Problem Solving

THE VARIED NATURE OF PROBLEMS

In Windsor Great Park there is a path, or more accurately an avenue, called the Long Walk. Extending for three miles in a straight line, it passes through the park towards Windsor Castle. The path is wide - you can wander within its limits, but its boundaries are clear - and, as you walk along it, the prospect of the Castle is always in view. Some consultancy projects are like that path and are conducted by using a standardized approach. From start to finish the path - the series of tasks required to conduct the project - is clear. There may be minor deviations along the way but these will be within the broad boundaries. The outcome will be as clearly in sight as Windsor Castle.

By contrast, there are other consultancy projects that are forays into unknown territory. Like the search for El Dorado, these projects seek a goal that is believed to exist but its detailed nature, its location and the path there are uncertain. Such projects are needed when unprecedented or peculiar problems (often called 'messy' or 'wicked') have to be addressed. As with a journey into the unknown, it is easy on these projects to lose your way; to take wrong turnings; to waste time; to fail to meet the goal. But first you must recognize that you have to deal with a messy problem. The consultant unaware of this is like the young army officer, whose colonel wrote of him, 'Undoubtedly there are soldiers who would follow this officer but, if so, it would be only out of a sense of curiosity to find out where he was going.'

There is a poem about six blind men encountering an elephant for the first time. Each feels a different part of the elephant - hide, tusks, trunk, legs etc - and confidently asserts (quite wrongly), the properties of an elephant based on his limited information. Organizations are like the elephant and those of us who engage with them are like the blind men; at best we have a partial view. If you take a systems view of an organization, then everything is connected to everything else. You therefore have to define some boundaries to the area of your study, otherwise you will be faced with an impossibly complex task in addressing an organizational issue.

The challenge for the consultant is where to draw the boundaries; focus on the wrong area and your intervention may be ineffective. This challenge is depicted in Figure 6.1: clients are faced with many predicaments but well-defined, time and resource bounded projects are designed by consultants to address them. Of course, there will rarely be a perfect fit between predicament and project, but the quality of fit will be a function of how well the consultant understands the client's situation and designs an appropriate approach. It is this skill that this chapter addresses.

Figure 6.1: The critical skill of projectizing

The Structure of Business Problems

A simple model of a business organization is illustrated in Figure 6.2.

Figure 6.2: A simple model of business organization

Top management is preoccupied with the direction of an organization - its strategy; middle management is preoccupied with the design of the infrastructure that enables the strategy to be achieved - process design and operation. Junior staff take action within this framework. Consultants may assist at all levels, but all three are interdependent. In particular, processes can be defined only in the context of a strategy, whilst activity has to be within the process framework - the level above creates boundaries, except in the case of strategy. (Incidentally, I am giving a broad definition here of strategy.)

The consultants who engage at these three levels can be designated strategic, functional and technical, and the characteristics of the problem in which they engage are shown in Figure 6.3.

Organizational concern	Type of consultant	Type of problem
Strategy	Strategic	Many degrees of freedom; problems ill defined; solutions unbounded
Process Action	Functional Technical	Few degrees of freedom; problems well defined; solutions bounded

Figure 6.3: Consultants and problems

The Variety of Consultancy Problems

Technical consultancy is not confined to technology, but also includes consultancy that is carried out by specialists applying standard techniques, for example:

• a recruitment consultant, finding a suitable candidate to fill a job vacancy;

• an accountant advising on a company's tax affairs;

• an IT consultant, advising on the choice of computer system.

On the whole, questions are easier to identify and the answers easier to define at the technical level. For example, a recruitment consultant may be retained to find a candidate for the position of Marketing Director for a client. The question is clear; so too are the features of the answer - the consultant needs to provide the client with a shortlist of suitable, qualified candidates.

Problem solving consists of the process to be followed leading to the answer. In the case of recruitment, the process is likely to follow the sequence shown below:

1. Get job description for new position.

2. Identify key aspects of business and environment in which the new appointee will be working.

3. Determine contents of remuneration package and scope for negotiation.

4. Agree person specification with client.

5. Agree an advertising campaign and copy to be used.

6. Place adverts.

7. Sort responses. Identify long list for interview.

8. Interview and identify suitable candidates.

9. Provide client with shortlist of names and reports on each.

This is a clear process, akin to the Long Walk described at the start of this chapter. By contrast, the questions and answers responding to a client predicament around, say, 'How should we engage best with Western Pacific economies?' are much more like the hunt for El Dorado. But equally, a process is needed to engage with these types of problems.

Of course, technical consultants will seek to reassure themselves of the soundness of the assumptions underpinning their project. Thus, in the examples above:

• A recruitment consultant will want to understand the current operations of a business and how it is likely to develop, before advising on the recruitment of a senior executive.

• An accountant will need to understand the corporate structure and how it might change before advising on optimizing tax.

• An IT consultant will need to know how the requirements of a business are likely to develop before advising on the choice of computer.

If a client cannot provide satisfactory answers to these questions, then there may be functional or strategic consultancy work that needs to be done before a project in a technical area can proceed. Sometimes consultants are accused of commercial opportunism, setting out to enlarge the scope of their projects beyond those set by clients, when in fact extra work is required to provide a sufficiently sound basis for the original project to proceed. Indeed, it is usually good practice for a consultant to be at least thinking, if not working, at a degree of freedom beyond that set by the client's thinking.

For example, a multinational firm was considering reviewing the remuneration packages of its top 200 or so executives. Some worked in subsidiary companies and some at head office, but all were treated for remuneration purposes as a single executive cadre. The consultant looked into the business and personnel policies used by the client and discovered that only rarely did an executive move from one subsidiary to another and the subsidiaries were largely autonomous - they did not depend on one another. The executive cadre was a myth, there was no need for it. Thereafter, each executive was dealt with according to the subsidiary he or she worked for; the only 'executive cadre' was at corporate headquarters. The consultant had, necessarily, extended the scope of the brief to include issues of personnel policy so as to deal with the remuneration review satisfactorily.

This example illustrates the value of thinking at a degree of freedom greater than that of the client. The 'levels of intervention' model described below is a useful framework for doing this.