Working with a strategist: how to tell whether it is working

In the video, in Italian, I describe the moment I realize a collaboration is working: when the company stops calling me to ask what to do and starts telling me what it has done. Here I bring in Edgar H. Schein, who built an idea of consulting around that moment, and the signs that announce it.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

There is a precise moment when you realize the collaboration is working. It is not a figure. It is not a report. It is something subtler.

It is when the company stops calling you to ask what to do and starts calling you to tell you what it has done. It is when the language changes. When words appear in internal meetings that were not there before. When a manager spontaneously uses strategic reasoning without knowing it.

It is the moment when strategy stops being an external document and becomes a natural reflex of the way the company thinks.

It is never a sudden moment. It is the result of months of shared work, of discussions, of adjustments, of trust that has settled day after day.

When this happens, the strategist is no longer needed as a guide. They become someone to talk things through with. And the company no longer follows a plan. It inhabits a direction.

That direction is the sign that the path has worked.

The day Schein stopped being right

In 1965 Edgar H. Schein, an organizational psychologist at MIT, was called in to help the management team of a young technology company communicate better. In meetings the executives constantly interrupted each other and often raised their voices. Schein pointed it out precisely. They thanked him for the observation, and went on doing what they had always done.

The sign that work with a strategist is working is a change of question: the company stops asking what to do and reports what it has done.

Years later Schein told what he had understood in that room: he had been assuming he knew better than the group how a group should work. He changed course. He stopped commenting and started picking up the ideas that were being cut off, writing them on a large sheet of paper in front of everyone. The group’s response was that now, at last, he was really helping them.

I like the story because it tells of a good consultant who gets it wrong, and he is the one who tells it. He was right about everything, and being right was of no use at all.

Helping the company help itself

From experiences like this Schein drew a way of understanding consulting that he called process consultation. The consultant does not arrive with the solution: they build with the client a relationship that lets the client see, understand and act on what is happening inside and around the organization, to improve the situation as the client defines it.

The principle everything rests on is a single one: the problem and the solution belong to the client. Schein puts it with an image: the consultant must not take the monkey off the client’s back. The client remains the owner of the problem and the solution; consultant and client share the work of inquiry.

Successful consulting makes the strategist less necessary as a guide and more useful as someone to talk things through with.

There is an uncomfortable truth in this principle, and I prefer to say it myself. A consultant’s commercial interest pushes in the opposite direction, because a client who depends on you is a client who stays. Process consultation measures success the other way around, by how much the client has learned to do on their own. It is the criterion by which I judge my work, and the reason I leave a company written criteria for choosing, to use even when I am not there.

The signs that do not show up in a report

The moment in the video is not found in an indicator. The phone call that changes tone, a new word that appears in a meeting without anyone quoting it, a department head who reasons by priorities without knowing it: these are signs no contract provides for and no dashboard sums up. They resemble learning a language more than reaching a target.

They come after months, never suddenly, and that is one reason a strategy engagement usually lasts a year. First come the discussions, the adjustments, the trust that settles slowly. Then, one day, the company calls to describe a decision it has already made, and asks for an opinion instead of an answer.

Whoever runs the company can notice them before the strategist, if they know where to look. In meetings there is less discussion about who should decide and more about what to decide; managers bring proposals already checked against the criteria, instead of problems to solve; difficult choices arrive with less delay. These are small changes, and that is exactly why they can only be seen up close.

The strategist, for their part, can do a lot to bring them about. Write the criteria together with the company instead of handing them over; let the managers present decisions to the owners; gradually reduce their own presence in the meetings where the company decides well on its own. These are gestures that go against the instinct of someone paid to have the answers, and they are what makes the difference between consulting that leaves a document and consulting that leaves a company able to decide.

The proof is the decision made without the strategist

The signs in language have a limit, though, and it has to be taken into account. Words are learned faster than reasoning: a company can adopt the vocabulary of strategy without having taken in its logic, like someone who learns the phrases of a language without its grammar.

The most serious proof is not the new words in meetings but the decisions made without the strategist, using the criteria written together.

When the company decides on its own, using those criteria, and calls me afterward to tell me, the strategist has stopped being necessary as a guide. They stay useful as someone to talk things through with, which is another job, and to my mind the best one. For those who wonder what working with a business strategist costs, this is also the most honest way to measure its value: by what the company can do when the engagement is over. It is the work on direction and priorities seen from its end.

What to do and what not to do

• Ask the strategist, from the start, how the company will learn to decide without them.
• Watch internal meetings: which words appear, who uses them, to decide what.
• Count the decisions the company makes using the criteria written together.
• Do not measure work with a strategist only by the documents it produces.
• Do not grow attached to a consultant who becomes more indispensable every month.

Sources

• Edgar H. Schein, Process Consultation Revisited: Building the Helping Relationship, Addison-Wesley, 1999.
• Edgar H. Schein, “Process Consultation as a General Philosophy of Helping,” MIT Sloan School of Management, Working Paper 3069-89-BPS, 1989. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/2269
• Edgar H. Schein, “The Concept of ‘Client’ from a Process Consultation Perspective,” MIT Sloan School of Management, Working Paper 3946, 1997. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/2647