Hope, luck, and fear: Not a good strategy

All of our research on the consulting industry at the moment points to a slowdown in the rate of growth in consulting. There’s still a lot of investment and activity among clients: 93% say they’re looking to increase productivity and efficiency; 92% are investing in digital transformation. But the proportion of people who say that their expenditure on consulting services will increase in the next year has fallen from 72% last year to 55%.

One of the truisms of consulting is that everyone benefits from a growing market—that a rising tide lifts all boats. But a market that’s growing at a lower rate than in previous years feels much less benign because the change in tempo is usually unevenly distributed—some boats stay still or sink, while others may do better than ever. Whether your consulting firm is a rising boat, or is becalmed, watching other boats around you rise more quickly, now is a good moment to make sure that your strategy is—well—water-tight.

Sadly, that’s not always the case…

When James Cameron started filming Avatar, he had T-shirts made for the film crew with the words “hope is not a strategy, luck is not a factor, and fear is not an option”. Yet, a lot of the business plans we see from consulting firms depend heavily on one of these, and sometimes all three:

• • The hope strategy comes naturally to consultants, who are inherently optimistic and subscribe to the belief that a number in a PowerPoint deck is just as good as a number in reality, and that you don’t really need more—any!—supporting information on how you’re going to deliver this. Seasoned strategy spotters will know that hope strategies come in many guises, but somewhere at their heart is a really big assumption that no one has actually tested.

• • The luck strategy is based on a different assumption: That poor performance one year—a boat that’s left behind—stems from factors outside your control (a more difficult market, a challenging client, a sudden change in direction or leadership in a client’s organisation). It’s an argument for helplessness: If bad luck is the reason why you didn’t do well last year, the best you can hope for is better luck next year. In other words, it’s not so much a strategy as a period of existential paralysis: You don’t know what to do, so you do nothing.

• • A strategy that’s born from fear leads to poor decision-making, and frenetic activity. It’s based on the assumption that something is better than nothing, but as at any point when we’re frightened, our brains close down, and we’re less capable of coming up with the creative ideas that might actually save the day.

We’ve been writing a lot in this blog about instinct recently. It’s instinct that makes us hope, encourages us to depend on luck, and makes us frightened. And it’s not the basis for a good strategy.