This is an unusual piece for a consultancy to publish, because part of the honest answer to the question is: often, it does not make sense. Outside consultants are expensive, they take time to get up to speed, and the best thinking about your organisation is almost certainly already inside it. Here is a more careful account of when the outside perspective genuinely earns its place.
When the Problem Has Been Discussed to Death Internally ¶
The most common reason to bring in an outside perspective is not that the organisation lacks the intelligence to solve the problem. It is that the problem has become entangled with internal relationships, histories, and politics to the point where the people closest to it can no longer see it clearly. An outside consultant has no stake in the existing answer. That is not a virtue in itself, but it is a useful condition for asking the questions that have stopped being asked internally.
When a Decision Needs to Be Documented ¶
Some decisions are significant enough that the reasoning behind them needs to be written down, not just agreed in a meeting. A board decision about market entry, a structural reorganisation, a significant partnership: these are decisions that will be revisited, challenged, and second-guessed. Having a written account of the reasoning, produced by an independent party, is useful not because it makes the decision right but because it makes the decision legible to people who were not in the room.
When the Leadership Team Is Too Close to the Problem ¶
Proximity is an asset for operational decisions and a liability for strategic ones. The people who know the most about an organisation are also the people most likely to have strong prior beliefs about what the answer should be. An outside consultant who does not share those prior beliefs can ask the naive question, the one that everyone stopped asking two years ago because the answer seemed obvious, and sometimes the answer turns out to be less obvious than it seemed.
When It Does Not Make Sense ¶
It does not make sense to hire a strategy consultant when the problem is primarily operational, when the organisation does not have the capacity to act on the findings, or when the real purpose of the engagement is to provide political cover for a decision that has already been made. We have been asked to do all three of these things. We decline, because the work will not be useful and the fee will not be earned.
How to Evaluate a Consultant Before Hiring Them ¶
Ask them what they will not do. Ask them what a bad engagement looks like from their side. Ask them for an example of a time they told a client something the client did not want to hear. The answers to these questions are more informative than a credentials deck. A consultant who cannot answer them clearly is a consultant who has not thought carefully about the limits of their own usefulness.
If you are trying to decide whether an outside perspective would be useful for a specific problem, the best first step is a short note describing the situation. We will give you an honest view.