The Critical Client Competency for the Consultant of Today

Helping clients with navigating complexity.

Image by GeminiAI

Walking along a street of luxury shops on a street in central London, I stopped.

A 50-foot-long slab of readymade wall being craned into place on the third floor of a construction site.

It was too good a photo opportunity to pass up.

I had a conference talk coming up on the subject of simplifying technology by making it more modular, or “componentised”. The metaphor of simpler, more reliable, and easier-to-change technology as kids’ Lego blocks had been overused for years. This construction site could offer a fresh take.

I didn’t expect it to unfold as an equally powerful metaphor for the consultants’ dilemma: how to deliver financial benefits—more revenue, greater reach, lower costs—without losing sight of what makes organisations truly valuable.

That “growth at any cost” always comes at a price. When the commercials make sense, the price on humanity may be questionable.

The efficiency illusion

As the concrete block swung into position, the pre-fabricated outside wall came into view. It had been moulded to look like thousands of individual bricks. No doubt to blend in with the look and feel of the heritage streetscapes.

Designed to simulate craft and detail, while optimised for efficiency, with a nod to local planning regulations. Depressingly devoid of craft or character.

The street was blocked off. All traffic stopped whilst a single crane driver and their counterpart in a cherry picker worked to manoeuvre the massive slab into place. A group of hard-hatted site workers in fluorescent vests chatted in different languages, puffing on vapes, and watching from the sidelines.

I overheard a comment from someone standing next to me.

Grey hair, company logo’d jacket, jeans. He was watching the cherry picker, saying they’d never reach the taglines due to the wind. He spoke with authority—he clearly knew what he was talking about.

While I never learned his name, he turned out to be the site manager: an industry veteran with more than 30 years in the trade.

As I commented on the modular wall, he pointed out the art deco-influenced bay windows. They too were pre-made to order and shipped in from Germany, complete with window panes, trimmings, fittings, and tinting. Ready to slot in as self-contained units.

“It’s just about time and cost these days. Never quality and craft any more,” he said, his voice tired and cynical.

The global assembly line

Built in Germany. Installed in London. Overseen by a British main contractor employing a mosaic of different nationalities to build the head office for a European luxury goods conglomerate backed by a consortium of US-led investors.

They’d built three storeys in less than four months.

“Everything’s been outsourced now,” the site manager continued. “They did it to save money, but it just makes everything take longer. No one knows anything about the detail any more. If something’s delivered on site with a problem, it takes days or weeks to ripple down to the subcontractor of the subcontractor. Then they come back with another question. Long gone are the days when we could fix everything on site.”

Just like too many legacy software and integration management scenarios—with the distance between the code and the layers of conversation flowing up and down through teams and contracts and service levels to solve an incident, respond to unplanned regulation, or address security controls and requirements. Just two humans on the project’s critical path. A large group of site workers in safety vests and helmets, vaping and waiting.

A reminder of the bottlenecks in software delivery that stymie flow and value delivery.

The consultant’s dilemma

The building felt like a case study in how large organisations and their technology can end up over time. Modules of infrastructure delivered with supposed efficiency, but at what cost? I found myself thinking of the conversations that must have gone on to get the design approved—the boardroom presentations where the building concept was pitched to prestigious clients as a destination fit for high net worth customers and even higher net worth owners and investors.

But it was the realities of what was really going on from the site manager’s view that highlighted to me the kinds of dilemmas people are trying to balance at the coalface of commercialising technology and digitalisation.

The classic consulting dilemma was brought back into sharp focus: make a recommendation to save money, speed up, or grow at any cost, and you’re undoubtedly going to directly or indirectly impact someone’s role. Potentially their loss of that role. The associated loss of income, status, purpose.

For every freed-up person walking off with a fat redundancy package and a newfound energy to start a side hustle or travel the world, there are likely dozens more reassessing their financial situation, coping with strained relationships, worrying for their futures.

Growth at any cost

The site manager was a seasoned veteran who’d started more than 30 years ago in an industry that has changed so much, his job would be unrecognisable from its equivalent a generation ago. He’d witnessed the transformation firsthand—from a craft-based profession where problems could be solved on-site by skilled tradespeople, to a globally distributed supply chain where decision-making authority is fragmented across continents and contract clauses.

As a career consultant and technology leader who’s live and worked across four continents, I have observed and been part of many such conversations and decision-making processes.

The drive for efficiency. The push for scalability. The relentless focus on reducing costs and accelerating delivery. The championing of modularisation, outsourcing, automation, and consolidation. Business cases that look brilliant on spreadsheets, show impressive returns on investment, and collapse payback periods.

Yet how often have we fallen short or—or at best glossed over—accounting for the true human cost? The loss of institutional knowledge? The erosion of craft and pride in workmanship? The alienation that comes when people become interchangeable components in a global assembly line?

The paradox is real: we’ve achieved unprecedented efficiency and scale, yet somehow made things slower, more fragmented, and less fulfilling.

Navigating paradoxes

Modern consulting, at its best, is about helping leaders navigate precisely these kinds of complexities and paradoxes. It’s about holding competing truths in healthy tension rather than pretending they don’t exist. It’s about seeking out people who are different to avoid the safety and speed of “groupthink”—the comfort of reinforcing one’s own opinion.

Yes, organisations need to be efficient and competitive. Yes, they need to grow and adapt to changing markets. Yes, technology and modularisation can unlock tremendous value. But they also need to preserve institutional knowledge, maintain quality and craft, and treat people as humans rather than resources to be optimised.

The real work of consulting isn’t just about delivering the next cost reduction programme or the next digital transformation. It’s about helping leaders see the full picture—the trade-offs, the unintended consequences, the long-term implications of short-term decisions. It’s about asking difficult questions: What are we really optimising for? Who benefits and who pays the price? What are we losing in pursuit of growth?

The price of progress

I’ve been reading Goliath’s Curse” by Luke Kemp. It describes how, today, we are part of the first truly global Goliath, built around technology domination and rapidly accelerating inequality. The book is packed with intriguing facts, figures, and insights anchored to decades-long analysis of the collapse of more than 500 civilisations throughout history.

Standing on that London street, watching that concrete slab swing in the wind whilst a group of workers waited idly, I couldn’t help but think about what we’re building. Not just the physical structures, but the organisational and societal structures we’re constructing through our consulting recommendations, our technology choices, our growth strategies.

We’re creating systems that look impressively efficient on paper but feel increasingly soulless in practice. Retail experiences that are depressingly similar whether you’re in London, Sydney, Bangalore, or New York. Same shops, same products, same décor. Technology platforms that offer frictionless experiences but strip away local character and human connection.

And yet, there are also exciting and positive pockets of creativity popping up in the most unlikely places.

Independent retail, music and dining venues. Young families escaping city rat races to bring up children in simpler, more wholesome environments where nature comes for free. A post-pandemic focus on recycling, digital detoxing, or just being kinder. New ideas coming to life through online creative writing, podcasting, music-making. Rapid advances in AI-assisted everything.

A different kind of value

The challenge for modern consultants is to help organisations pursue growth and efficiency without sacrificing their humanity. To build systems that are both scalable and sustainable. To create value that shows up not just in quarterly earnings reports, but in the lived experiences of employees, customers, and communities.

To do so while keeping pace.

This means being willing to have uncomfortable conversations. To challenge the assumption that growth at any cost is always the right answer. To point out when the pursuit of efficiency is actually creating fragility and dependence. To advocate for investments in people and craft that might not have an obvious return on investment but create resilience and meaning.

To slow down and to reflect, in order to be able to then speed up.

It means helping leaders navigate paradox rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. Acknowledging that sometimes the right answer isn’t either-or, but both-and. That we need efficiency and craft. Scale and local character. Technology and human connection.

Conclusion

That concrete block eventually made it into place. The cherry picker operator finally caught the tagline. The waiting workers returned to their tasks. The building will be completed, the luxury goods will be sold, the investors will see their returns.

But the site manager’s words stayed with me: “It’s just about time and cost these days. Never quality and craft any more.”

As consultants, we have a choice. We can continue to optimise purely for time and cost, delivering recommendations that look good in presentation decks but contribute to a world that feels increasingly hollow. Or we can help our clients navigate the complexity—to pursue growth and efficiency in ways that preserve what makes organisations, and societies, truly valuable.

The paradox isn’t going away. The tension between efficiency and humanity, between scale and craft, between short-term gains and long-term sustainability—these are the defining challenges of our era. Modern consulting is about helping leaders navigate these paradoxes with wisdom, courage, and a clear-eyed understanding of what growth really costs.

Because in the end, the question isn’t just whether we can build bigger, faster, cheaper. It’s whether we can build in ways that honour both our balance sheets and our humanity.

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If you, your colleagues, or your clients are looking for ways to understand and positively navigate today’s complex challenges facing people and teams, then contact me for consulting, coaching and workshop planning and facilitation.