Do consultants take your watch and tell you the time? Yes - and it helps.
One of my favourite anti-consultant jokes is that “consultants take your watch and tell you the time.”
Firstly, because the visual it conjures makes me chuckle.
Secondly, somewhere within the subtext of the statement is a very real reason consultants exist in the first place.
If you’re thinking “huh?”, then consider this:
If this person already has a watch, why on earth did they call this consultant in the first place?
To answer this question let’s drop-in on Illustratia, where the Illustrations are about to hire a consultant to solve this exact problem!
In the bustling metropolis of Illustratia, everybody is busy. They’ve got meetings to make, places to go, and people to see.
The problem is nothing runs on time. Planes take-off early, trains arrive late, and the entire city just feels out of sync.
This made it hard to conduct business as meetings and deadlines are constantly missed.
Eventually, the problem became so bad that the entire city was up-in-arms and they realized they needed help.
So they hired a consultant to figure out what was going on, and help them work better together.
The consultant spoke to the train conductors…
They spoke to pilots…
…and they came to a very simple conclusion:
Because everybody had their own watch, they all live their lives according to a different time.
When they worked independently, everything was fine. But once they tried to work together, those small differences in time created a lot of problems.
The answer to Illustratia’s problem was a very simple solution: they needed to create a simple and effective way for everybody to agree upon what time it was.
Let’s come back to the initial question posed at the start of the post:
If this person already has a watch, why on earth did they call this consultant in the first place?
As illustrated by the story, the reason is as simple as the solution to fix it: because everybody else also has a watch, and they don’t all have the same time.
How does this apply to the real world?
The business world is just like Illustratia; a bustling metropolis where people have meetings to make, places to go, and people to see.
And just like the Illustrations, functions and teams tend to run according to their own time, not fully appreciating what makes the other teams tick.
It may seem like the time on your watch is indisputable, but what you don’t realize is that there are 100s of other watches across the organization saying 100s of different times. And that tends to be the root of the problem.
So the role of the consultant is simple: take your watch, and tell you the time.
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