Principle
An organisation that has engaged three consultancies in six years to address the same commercial problem does not have a consultancy selection problem. It has a problem it is structurally unwilling to solve, and each engagement has been, functionally, a decision not to solve it conducted at considerable expense.
Behaviour
A commercial dysfunction is identified. An external firm is engaged, conducts a competent diagnosis, and delivers a set of recommendations that are broadly correct and, in the important respects, uncomfortable. They require a manager to be replaced, a compensation structure to be rebuilt against internal resistance, or a product line to be deprioritised against the objections of the person who built it.
The recommendations are received warmly. A subset is implemented, and the subset selected is reliably the portion that requires no politically costly action: the new dashboard, the revised process documentation, the training programme. The recommendations with owners and consequences are absorbed into a workstream, then into a review, then into silence.
Two or three years later the same dysfunction produces the same symptoms and a different firm is engaged. Their diagnosis substantially replicates the previous one, which nobody circulates, and the cycle repeats. Each engagement is individually defensible. In aggregate they constitute an expensive mechanism for the organisation to demonstrate concern about a problem it has repeatedly declined to address.
Each engagement has been, functionally, a decision not to solve the problem, conducted at considerable expense.
Evidence
Request every external commercial advisory report produced in the last six years, including those from firms no longer engaged. Read them in chronological order. Where successive reports independently identify the same root causes, the organisation has known the answer for years.
For the earliest report, list the recommendations and establish which were implemented. Classify each implemented item by whether it required removing an individual, restructuring compensation against resistance, or discontinuing something a senior person championed. In most cases nothing in that category was implemented, and everything outside it was.
Ask who owned each unimplemented recommendation. Frequently no one did, and the transition from recommendation to workstream is the exact point at which ownership dissolved. That transition, rather than the recommendation itself, is where the organisation's actual decision was taken.
Psychology
Commissioning an external review is a genuine and visible act of concern. It costs money, it signals seriousness, and it produces a document. It also transfers the discomfort of diagnosis to an outside party while leaving the discomfort of action entirely inside, and the organisation reliably absorbs the first and declines the second.
The recommendations that survive implementation are the ones nobody has to be told about. Nobody loses a job over a new dashboard. The recommendations that die are the ones that create an identifiable loser, and the organisation's tolerance for creating identifiable losers is the actual variable determining whether any consultancy engagement produces change. That variable is unaffected by the choice of firm.
Commercial Risk
A target that has repeatedly engaged external advisors on the same commercial problem is advertising, unintentionally, that it has known its principal weakness for years and has been structurally unable to act on it. This is a considerably more serious finding than the weakness itself, because it predicts what will happen to the acquirer's own value creation plan.
A post-acquisition plan handed to an organisation with this history will meet the same mechanism. The palatable recommendations will be implemented promptly and reported as progress. The recommendations that create identifiable losers will be absorbed into governance, and at the end of the holding period the acquirer will discover that the principal thesis item was never executed and that nobody, at any point, refused to execute it.
The only reliable protection is to identify, before completion, the single recommendation the organisation has most consistently declined to implement, and to make its execution a condition with a named owner and a date. An organisation's history with its own advisors is the most accurate available forecast of its behaviour toward a new owner's plan, and it is contained entirely in documents the target already possesses.
Investment Committee Note