The Consultancy Trap for Enabling Teams
And how to avoid it.
I was just recently reading a fabulous book by renowned economists Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington called “The Big Con”. It describes the less than favourable impact the consulting industry had on economies, governments and also businesses.
One of the topics of the book was most striking to me - an aspect that Mazzucato and Collington call the “infantilization” of governments.
Governments, and in a similar way also businesses, have to solve complex problems. Solution to these problems in most cases require a lot of prior experience and skills but obviously also adaptability and the capabilities for organizational learning.
By outsourcing problem solutions to consultancies, organizations deprive themselves of opportunities to learn and to build up this kind of organizational memory which in turn leads to even more dependency on external problem solving capacity.
But externals rather tend to provide “cookie cutter” approaches - consultancies in most cases lack the organizational knowledge and context awareness that is required to find appropriate solutions to the complex problems that we have to deal with. Additionally, the simplistic solution proposals usually neglect the necessary “bottom up” input that is a key factor for emerging solutions that need to balance impact on many different stake holders
It has to be added here, and Mazzucato and Collington are not shy to point this out, that consultancies are for-profit organizations who benefit exactly from this kind of dependencies so they have zero incentives to change this relationship. The result ultimately is a lack of problems solving capabilities in governments and businesses and an overall decrease in the quality of policy solutions or, on the business side, in revenue and adaptability.
Why am I concerned with all of this?
I am leading a team of engineering coaches - shaped by the idea of an “Enabling Team” as introduced by Team Topologies. Many of the problems with consultancies as laid out above are - obviously on another level - also potential pitfalls in the work of enabling teams.
The main purpose of an enabling team is to enable flow of value by reducing the cognitive load of the stream aligned teams. The enabling team also should facilitate organizational learning, making sure that the problem solving muscle memory of the organization is strengthened and adaptability and resilience is improved.
Knowledge must be democratised not hoarded.
This leads to a couple of key points that seem to be of great importance when working as an enabling team:
Stream aligned teams must not outsource their problems to enabling teams. Collaboration with an enabling team must be considered as an opportunity to learn.
The goal is that knowledge is democratized and not hoarded. This means that the receiving stream aligned team needs to have capacity and willingness to learn. Only in this way organizational learning can be supported.
If the Enabling team hoards knowledge it becomes a dependency. This will inhibit flow and eventually will reduce the capabilities to innovate.
Cookie-cutter approaches are not appropriate. The enabling team needs strong capabilities to sense and understand context. Every problem is different. Social skills are very important.
A healthy rotation between people in enabling teams and stream aligned teams is important. This avoids the “consultant trap” of people being detached from real-world problems.
The members of the enabling team need to have enough free capacity to keep their knowledge up to date. This assures that they have a broad set of skills available, assuring a wide range of problem solving capabilities.
Enabling teams can and should play an important role - but we must avoid the “consultancy trap” that may ultimately lead to a weakening of our business, and as Mazzucato and Collington would say, to an infantilization of our stream aligned teams.
Reference: “The Big Con” - How the Consulting industry weakens our Businesses, infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economy, Mariana Mazzucato, Rosie Collington, Penguin Books 2023