Reframing consulting for the next decade

Consulting's core activities are being outmoded by the rise of digital and the demand for digital transformation.

An hypothesis: Clients need consulting to be reconfigured to prioritise and master:

• Handling ambiguity
• Enabling sustainability

To illustrate why I believe these are the fundamentals of successful consulting in the next 20 years, I am going to (first) reference Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework - a conceptual framework to support decision making. The following illustration is from Dave's Cognitive Edge site. 

DIGITAL HAS DRIVEN THE NEED TO MASTER COMPLEXITY

Consulting has, for the most part, operated in the ‘good practice’ area of the ‘Complicated’ upper right quadrant shown above. This is the realm of: Sense - Analyse - Respond  (in order to decide/act). The connections between cause and effect are complicated but knowable. Experience and expertise help discern those connections. And that has been the role of the consultant - the subject matter expert.

In many 'Systems Integrators', some of what also gets called consulting has has even fallen into the ‘bring the best practice’ area of the Obvious (see above). Here connections between cause and effect are well known and clearly visible. You just need to Sense-Categorize-Respond (see typical Business Analysis and vendor assessment work). The latter is commoditised, the former is outmoded by today’s digital requirements. 

Now the need is to handle the ambiguity of cause and effect experienced in Complex environments.

In complexity the connections between cause and effect are unknown. This is the realm of experiment, trying, new ways, understanding the connections by finding them. That's not analysis. No expert has a head start. The expertise required is in reading emergence (ie making sense) and in responding (ie getting on and doing as the best way of validating the emerging value. We can and should become expert in that.

Today's problem statements are far less of the 'How can I best respond to what I know?' variety and more of the 'How can I better understand what it is?' The latter can help us get to the former, but leaping straight to the former is an error in complex environments.

So consulting has to change what it does and how it does it, to:

1. Deal with the ambiguous, complex requirements of the digital world.

And that's not all...

Customer Experience has driven digital transformation to date - now there is a new dimension to CX to consider - Planet Experience (PX).

A NEW DIMENSION OF EXPERIENCE

Customer Experience drove the last 20 years of business success. Digital Transformation consulting has recognised this with the culture-change, processes and platforms to serve great CX.

Sustainable success in the next 20 years demands we add a new dimension to Experience. To great CX, (and the accompanying Employee Experience and Workplace Experience longevity demands) we must add PX - the elevation of the relationship with the planet to the level of the relationship with the customer.

I have written at length on #px in recent posts and shared initial frameworks for value generation and org maturity assessment. Core to this is the understanding that customers, employees and the culture of successful orgs over the next 20 years will demand we understand and create value for the planet just as much as we have the customer in the previous 20 years.

And just as those organisations that were built to partner the customer from the word-go ended up out-competing incumbents when they reached the scale of their older rivals, so, my hypothesis suggests, those organisations that are built to partner the planet will do so to the benefit of people and profit, too.

Example frameworks include the following:

And:

Given the PX imperative, consulting has to change what it does and how it does it, to:

Deal with the ambiguous, complex requirements of the digital world.

&

Handle the rising prioritisation of concerns for the planet.

Situational analysis (with the aid of Wardley Maps) shows us there is an increasing need to make sense at scale - revealing the task of the 21st Century consultant is to create confidence (on the certainty axis below) in complexity.

There is high demand for, but low understanding of digital transformation. This is evidenced by the high use of the term and the wide variety of meanings applied. We are far from 'Defined' (see above) yet demand is close to Common (on the Ubiquity axis). This suggests an urgent need to shift from hand-made solutions (Genesis) to take our clients toward greater certainty.

To do this we Productise as many of the capabilities that deliver emerging best practice as we can - ie we have to become expert in discovering emerging practices in complexity through repeatable and scalable ways of Probing, Sensing and Responding with end-user facing artefacts as rapidly as possible.

These ambiguity-handling activities respond to the need to move clients to greater certainty, enabling them to take advantage quickly as each practice emerges; productising the output at speed and achieving confidence (greater certainty) as each is defined.

As each new understanding of part of the complex emerges, this will drive value-building activities, creating higher-order outputs - just as productised nuts and bolts enable the building of higher order products when they replaced hand-made objects at the start of the industrial revolution.

 

The above slide illustrates some principles of action - mapping the amount of productisation vs customisation required in consulting activities across the project lifecycle.  Ambiguity is at its highest in the early steps.

Of course, how you act on the strategic imperatives I have outlined above will vary depending on your organisation's cultural, quality and profit goals. 

What is consistent is that different kinds of skills and ways of working will be a basic requirement of Consulting 2020 and beyond. For example:

PEOPLE

• Divergent thinkers who seek to work at the speed of digital.
• Those who have comfort with ambiguity- learned through experimentation.
• Natural and continuous disruptors.
• Less focused on analysis and more focused on evidence-through-testing to answer clear business questions
• Those skilled in start-ups, experienced entrepreneurs.

WAYS OF WORKING

Processes and products focused on delivering emerging practice. eg:

• Hypothesis generation/ideation.
• Rapid, insight and value-led iterative prototyping of strategies as well as of products and services.
• Tools and capabilities to prioritise and roadmap with an eye on the horizon for disruption.
• Frameworks for PX in sustainable businesses.
• Processes for the rapid productising (and scaling) of emergent practices.

Taken in total, this understanding and the action it requires of us, provides both the ambition and vision for Consulting for the next decade; its mission:

Create confidence in complexity for people, planet and profit by handling ambiguity and enabling sustainability.

How to make the extraordinary, normal

Digital strategy consulting has a simple task to carry out.  A little situational analysis reveals that the job of digital strategy consulting is to turn the extraordinary into the everyday.

When we fail to do this we force customers into a chasm of uncertainty which they resort to filling with often inappropriate products. They look for magic.

A look at this Wardley map of evolution, (below) applicable to most products or services, gives us a way of exploring the digital strategy landscape.

Digital is maturing from novel toward common along the Ubiquity axis.  We will return to how far it has actually moved along that axis to help explain the tensions we may otherwise miss. But what we can be certain of is that demand is increasing and that means the movement is toward Common.

On the Certainty axis it is harder to see movement away from the Genesis zone. Companies are testing the water, feeling their way with agile here, lean there, new tools but same ways of working almost everywhere... There is no certain way of doing or being digital yet. Not by some distance.

Strategy is on the whole built from experiment. And while productisation is a mantra within most consulting houses, the reality is customisation built upon rapid-iteration experiments. Making those rapid iteration cycles more effective is state of the art in digital strategy right now. And that's because certainty remains low.

To summarise to this point: There is a greater demand for ubiquity than there is market capability to productise its response. Referring to the map below, it feels to me like we are high enough up the Ubiquity axes for products to be the norm, but on the Certainty axis, we have hardly got out of Genesis.

From Simon Wardley: via https://blog.gardeviance.org

Understanding this situation helps us better plan our response. My (badly drawn) map below illustrates both where it feels to me we are (X), and offers a response to what the evolutionary drivers suggest is the direction our customers will want us to take. Note, the product and custom boxes have contorted offering a much larger overlap than ordinarily expected (compared to the original, above). This is my take on responding to the distortion of current high demand vs current low supply.

X marks where we are now - market trend indicates the direction of evolution we must respond to 

It suggests that we have to respond with products which help take our customers further along the Certainty axis. 
To do this we should offer and embrace

• A clear role for digital consulting - Responding to the need of moving the customer to greater certainty, enabling them to take advantage of genuine productisation as it emerges (essential to the value-building activities of creating higher-order outputs - just as custom nuts and bolts enabled the building of higher order products customers could actually use and value).
• Hybrids of custom build and productisation (applicable to each nut and bolt - eg managed innovation, human insight-centred design, customer experience design, product lifecycle, eco-system build etc)
• Greatest customisation where the customer has least certainty.
• Active strategy teams combining diverse cultures; disruptive creatives (Wardley's Pioneers who will create the new) alongside those who will grow the market (Wardley's Settlers). 

That's just a start list. But it is at least one against which we can start a sensible discussion about what we supply versus what the customer needs, and, as always, I welcome your builds.

For more on Warldey Mapping start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map

Consulting faces a digital reset

Disruption creates opportunity. In the challenges to our cherished business models and organisational norms there is the requirement to act.
The burning bridge beneath our feet prompts us to make significant and often rapid movement. Just such a moment has arrived for the consulting world.
Platforms enhanced by AI are making application development, business process engineering and customer management all things a business can now do for itself - shifting the role of technology consulting. (in large part out of the door).
New ways of working are giving everyone in the business (and from IT) access to human insight, ideation and rapid innovation - blurring roles and delivering organisational adaptability to align with the needs of the digital world.
And these two drivers alone would be significant enough to force a change in perspective.
But add to the plans in the UK to overhaul regulations in respect of the big four accountancy firms and business as normal faces an existential threat.
KPMG has already announced is will no longer offer consultancy to businesses it audits. It, like the others, has been down this road before.
The Enron scandal in the US prompted a break-up and realignment that resulted in Atos, BearingPoint, Cap Gemini. and a merry go round of acquisitions, rebrands and bankruptcy. Accenture while moving first, was born out of the same climate of concern over  operating models.
So we can expect to see great change in the market.
And with this comes the opportunity to reconfigure consulting for the digital world.
In many ways the industry is late to the party. Digital has wrought its disruption to media, retail, travel, utilities, even government.  Now the consulting business has the opportunity to press its reset.
I believe that means becoming genuinely digital. Digital first. Because all business is becoming digital.  Business is changing/has changed the way it thinks about value, about customer, about experience, about responsiveness (to market mastery).
That means consulting must identify its own a clear value proposition that makes sense in a digital world - understanding its place in what are no longer supply chains or value chains, but eco-systems.

• It means setting a strategic position as a value hypothesis to be tested through rapid iteration with customer insight at the heart.
• It means embracing new ways of working and making them the way to work from pitch to delivery - emphasising customer-led design, agility and market responsiveness
• It means changing KPIs to deliver the open, collaborative, trust-building behaviours required of organisational vs individual performance.
• It means addressing digital capabiltity and capacity short-falls in creative and scalable ways (see also blurry people)
• It means establishing the legal and commercial frameworks to support rapid partnership models and value-led billing models
• It means organising around product/service design, development and life-cycle management
• It means tackling ambiguity head on - with minimum viable organisations from which to scale out fast, enabled by blurry people and responsive products and services

Make no mistake - when disruption comes knocking at this scale, incremental change will only delay the inevitable. The start-up mentality IS the digital mentality.

Stowe Boyd joins the 90:10 Group

We announced it on the 90:10 site, and he's blogged it himself, but I couldn't let the arrival of Stowe Boyd, as part of 90:10's community of consultants, pass without comment on my own blog.

You see, Stowe has been an inspiration to me for quite some time.

I love his mantra:

"I am made greater by the sum of my connections - and so are my connections".

It's such a powerful expression of the power of the network; of the value of nodes connecting and the subsequent interaction; of none-of-us-is-cleverer-than-all-of-us. I quote it liberally, in presentations, online and in my book (The Power of the Network).

We met for a curry in London, a good few years ago - while I was still at emap/Bauer. We built on that in New York when we both spoke at Widget Web Expo there in 2008. I started writing the occasional post for his /Message blog.

We hit it off. We believe in the same stuff. He's wise. And good fun.

We've kept the connection live.

So it's fantastic to know a man of Stowe's global standing (he coined the term social tools in 1999, for example) believes enough in what we are doing with 90:10 that he wants to join us.

Every one of our consultants is someone I know and personally trust. And by implication those who join up trust me (and by association 90:10).

They also happen to form a constellation of stars with unparalleled knowledge and expertise.

We get to call on wonderful minds and they get to call on us - and we tell the world we trust each other.

If you don't know Stowe, find out more about him, and the rest of the 90:10 crew, here.

Alan Moore on engagement, his journey to the networked world and his next book

Alan Moore - one of the most influential people on my own journey to the networked world - tells us about his journey.



Blown away to be able to say Alan has joined me in a network of the very best consultants - people who all have a deep understanding of the power of the network - which I'm putting together at BrandoSocial.

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David Cushman scores highly for his visionary presentations at conferences throughout the globe; in London, New York, Berlin, Cannes, Cork, Amsterdam in the last year.

His subjects have included:

• What next for marketing and advertising?
• Why traditional ad models don’t work in social networks (and what will)
• The Power of the Network – and why we must do more than witness it
• We’re all Publishers Now (and advertisers, too)
• The User is the Destination: The emerging Eighth Mass Media
• Multiple digital identities and the economics of the long tail

His expertise and insights drawn from 20+ years in media both traditional and digital make him an inspiring combination of realist and visionary

Conferences
FasterFutureConsulting has advised on conferences in London and New York. Now, together with 6Consulting, we will be offering residential two-day conferences in the historic University city of Cambridge, UK.

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FasterFutureConsulting can organise workshops for you; and/or contribute external expertise for your own internal exercises. We’ll work to come up with the best fit for your needs and experience.

Strategic advice
I have a proven track record as a digital visionary which can be applied to your business today for a brighter tomorrow.

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David was one of our top experts in a co-creation session in Amsterdam for a high profile international client on the future of content interaction. David was invited, because of his strong future vision on the developments in new digital media.
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Our company and our client were very much impressed by David’s expertise and contribution. I would recommend David to everyone who is looking for a true digital visionary.
Ivo De Mas A u b e r o n - Growth Strategy Consultants, Amsterdam.

"David is one of the most perceptive observers of the social web today, and his insights are especially relevant for companies trying to discern a path through the seeming chaos to a solid footing."

Stowe Boyd, global authority on social applications and their impact on business, media, and society.

“Your presentation on Social networks provided great clarity on the cultural-socio-economic changes that will impact on my business.
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“I am optimistic that I can achieve a rapid and effective organisational change from today's starting point.”
John Chillcott Chief Executive, Anglia Co-operative Society Limited, UK

"David and I collaborated on putting a panel together for Widget Web Expo in NYC and generally connect almost daily over the internet. David has a fantastic grasp over the evolution of the internet and is a pleasure to collaborate with. I highly recommend working with him."
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"I first came across David via his blog, FasterFuture.blogspot.com . Several of his posts really struck a chord with what I felt was happening in the publishing and wider media world. However, David was clearly far better at explaining them than I ever could.
I started following David's thoughts and Twitter posts and, when Incisive launched our e-publishing innovation forum, David was the first person we asked to speak. His presentation rocked and was one of the highest rated of the conference.
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Rory Brown, Managing Director, Incisive Media, UK

"I have known David Cushman for several years in the digital media convergence space. David and I have collaborated on conferences, blogs, the Forum Oxford expert community, various writing and speaking opportunities etc. I have also delivered consulting work for David at his company. David is very warmly trusted in the industry as a forward thinker in the innovation space. He is also a hard worker, extremely productive, totally reliable and beyond all that, also a sheer delight to work with, always maintaining a positive outlook and great sense of humour. We are now collaborating on a course for Oxford University around the 7th Mass Media concept. I can most warmly recommend David for anything in the digital convergence media space."
Tomi T Ahonen, Best-selling Hi-Tech Author and consultant, Hong Kong

"David is one of the rare breed who continue to promote digital futures.
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In my opinion he is one of the most valuable people at his company and I believe that every company needs a David Cushman.
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Jonathan Macdonald, Senior Consultant, OgilvyOne, UK

"Every company involved in digital development should have a 'Dave'. Passionate, inquisitive, knowledgeable and fearless in all aspects of how digital technology are changing life and business, but particularly their cultural impact. Dave is a fully paid-up member of the digerati and mixes with those whose focus is further ahead than the next quarter's results. The result is great knowledge, insight, some provocative opinions and a strategic perspective particularly on digital media."
Gus Swan, Head of Technology, Bauer Media, UK

"Few people I have met, have [1] a deep understanding of their existing business and [2] also possess a clear and detailed vision of where that business can go in the light of the significant challenges of the digital world.

"Also a first class communicator. I would unhesitatingly recommend David."

Alan Moore, CEO SMLXL, author Communities Dominate Brands

“Just a quick note to say thank you so much for speaking at the Digital Identity Forum.
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David Birch, Director, Consult Hyperion UK


“At WidgetWebExpo, David Cushman rocked the room... He seems to have something insightful and unique to say about almost every medium.”
Michael Leis VP Strategic Services Emerge Digital, US


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Comments after Mobinar
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“High calibre and sufficiently 'different' to make attendance a real pleasure.
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Comments after Never Mind the Bloggers seminar and workshop with Alan Moore and Euan Semple

“Many thanks for yesterday's blogging summit - your speakers, and yourself, have opened my mind again to the possibilities of a good blog.”
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