The consultant and the chimney sweeper

The chimney sweeper visited my house this morning; apparently I had a dead jackdaw in my chimney. The power distribution in the room when discussing my tile stove was pretty obvious; he could have been the worst chimney sweeper ever, lying through his teeth, I would still nod, say yes, and do as he said. Craftsmen often have this edge when meeting their customers; we hire them because they are awesome at something we quite frankly suck at.

Obviously (otherwise I wouldn’t write it here) this fired a process in my brain during the daily bike ride down to the office. Often when consultants are discussed they are placed in two different pigeon holes, “the resource” and “the expert”.

The resource is the consultant that “we” always claim is someone else, somehow resource has become a bit negative… even though the opposite of resource seems worse (and believe me, there are “consultants” that are anti-resources and consume more than they produce… if you ever worked with e.g. network communication you might have experienced this).

The expert is always portrayed as the correct model. The customer has a problem but, as I with my chimney, suck and need an awesome craftsman. Ok maybe a bit blunt choice of words but you get the point.

I fail to agree with this. Ok some readers will think that this is not at all how they see it, ok good for you, but I would quickly bet that plenty of people have this view of the market.

You see, the difference compared to the craftsmen is the power distribution. Our customers don’t suck; on the contrary they are often more or less experts themselves. So we must be the consultant that is able to guide the expert when necessary and execute when the customer lack time to do it on their own.

Often the customer knows a great deal with regards to the subject matter and of course their product, what we can add is:

• a new perspective
• experience from other competitors but also other domains
• a lack of political baggage in the organization and a blank “agenda”
• an energy burst and additional resource
• an ability to connect issues with different kinds of expertise

… Or sometimes we simply are better at the subject at hand.

What do you think?