A management consultant is someone who is consulted on difficult business issues. In other words, senior managers come to consultants for information and advice.
Whilst not untrue, this is a fairly unremarkable description of what a consultant does. It is a description that, actually, doesn’t describe all that much at all. For instance, how, or in what manner, does a consultant give advice? How does a consultant formulate their insights? How does a present information in a way that makes sense to clients? Why is it that an external consultant is needed to solve the problems inside another person’s business? Surely the people working in a business are the ones best placed to devise solutions since they know the business, what works and what doesn’t, better than any external professional ever can – right?
I’d like to propose a new perspective on consultancy – one which utilises a scientific experiment from the 1600s to explain the consulting industry of the present day. It works surprisingly well.
In 1666, Newton held a prism up to a beam of sunlight, causing the incoming white light to separate into a rainbow of its component colours. You will almost certainly be familiar with this type of image.
As well as forming a pivotal moment in the scientific debate over whether light was a wave or a particle, this experiment neatly exemplifies the role of a consultant. By this analogy, the incoming beam of light represents the client’s undissected problem, the prism which refracts the light into its component parts is the consultant, and the resultant spectrum is the clarity provided to the client after the consultant’s separation of the initial problem into its component parts, thereby enabling the most appropriate solution to be seen more vividly.
Using this analogy, which I have termed ‘consultancy as a prism of change’ – referring to the changing state of a client’s problem from one of obscurity to utmost vivacity and clarity – let’s revisit the questions at the beginning of this post.
1. How does a consultant give advice?
The consultant is the refracting prism. They take in a problem, then, using their various ‘refracting properties’ (i.e. frameworks, past experience and so on), they dissect the problem into sections, and analyse these to devise the most effective advice for the client.
2. How does a consultant present their information in a way that makes sense to clients?
They break it down. They take the client’s problem, hold it up to the light, dissect it into its individual elements, and then present these back to the client, along with the solution that becomes most clear as being needed after this initial ‘problem refraction’ stage.
3. Why is it that an external consultant is needed to solve the problems inside another person’s business?
Sometimes external objects, by virtue of their difference in ‘property’ and perspective, are able to bring to light things that could not be seen by someone composed of the same fabric as the organisation.
Without the addition of an ‘external’ prism, the colour spectrum would not be shown. It is the same in consultancy. Since the consultant doesn’t suffer from the same preconceptions, biases and loyalties inherent in those belonging to the company, they are able to think and depict the problem with more clarity.
Consultancy can be deceptively tricky practice to define. Indeed, the very noun is an incredibly unhelpful one as far as being a self-explanatory one goes. I hope this new analogised perspective, consultancy as a prism of change, helps make the practice of consulting clearer. There are, of course, levels to the analogy. It is possible to further unpick the prism experiment to provide further insight on consultants and the way they operate in practice. However, for this first post introducing the perspective, I thought it best to keep it simple. Perhaps a follow up post can expand on this at a later date, for I really do believe in the value of this analogy in the consulting context and beyond. It is possibly no coincidence that a number of consulting firms have referred to it, most recently in 2001, when a consulting firm called ‘Newton’ entered the market.
Sukhi R. is a graduate from Warwick Law School currently studying an MSc in Business with Consulting at Warwick Business School. She has a keen interest in the business psychology of consulting and plans to enter the industry in the near future.
Image: Pexels