For teams
Consultants need a contest the client can inspect
Advisory work is usually delivered as an answer: one recommended option, a slide of reasons, and an appendix nobody opens. Clients increasingly ask how the answer was tested, and the honest reply is often that the losing options were never argued at full strength.
The sponsor's favorite
Most engagements begin with a sponsor who already prefers an outcome. Answer-first methods, where the team states a hypothesis early and works to prove it, are efficient. They also make it easy to collect support for the hypothesis and stop looking.
Keep the hypothesis, and name it. Then give the strongest alternative an advocate with the same time and the same access to evidence.
Show why the alternatives lost
A recommendation persuades more when the client can see the second-best option argued well and still lose. That record also protects the firm: when conditions change, the client can see which assumption moved, instead of concluding the advice was wrong.
Write down, before the readout, the evidence that would reopen each losing option. Clients remember the consultant who told them what to watch for.
Adoption is the weakest number
The shakiest figure in most operating recommendations is adoption: how much of the new process people will actually use. A redesign that saves $420,000 a year at full use saves far less at partial use, and partial use is the normal first year.
Treat adoption as an assumption until a pilot measures it. A cheap measurement is often the best advice in the deck.
Client work in a Decision Room
Each option, including the one the sponsor did not write, gets its own Champion. The Challenger presses on the savings case and the adoption rate behind it. Craftsman tests whether the client's team can carry the change with the people and systems they have. Diplomat maps who can approve it, who can stall it, and who loses something if it goes ahead.
The Decision Passport can be handed over with the readout. The client keeps the question, the evidence, the Verdict, and later their own Human Decision and Outcome.
A redesign, a pilot, or two fixes
A client's order-to-cash process loses days between sales and billing. Option one is a full redesign at $900,000, with savings estimated at $420,000 a year, a payback of just over two years. Option two is a pilot in one region for $160,000 over four months. Option three keeps the current process with two targeted fixes for $90,000. The Challenger asks what adoption the savings assume. At 60 percent use, savings fall to $252,000 and payback stretches to about three and a half years. The Verdict favors the pilot, because it buys the one fact the redesign rests on for less than a fifth of its cost, and it names the adoption rate that would make the full redesign the right next step.
Questions
- Does the client see the whole argument?
- If you share it, yes. The record shows each option's case, the claims and how Inspector marked them, the scores, and the Verdict, so the client reads the contest rather than only its conclusion.
- Who is accountable for the advice?
- The consultant of record remains accountable for the advice, and the client makes the Human Decision. The room structures an analysis both sides can inspect.
Further reading
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