The air in Conference Room B1 always smelled like cold glass and quiet panic. Slide 41 clicked into place, and the consultant, a man named Marcus who had a gift for making declarative statements sound like profound truths, pointed a green laser at a flowchart. The box at the center of the flowchart, glowing in sanctified beige, contained a phrase I had personally said to him 91 days prior. A phrase my colleague Sarah had also said. A phrase that was, for all intents and purposes, the foundational belief of our entire department for the last 11 months.
And we were paying him $200,001 for it.
It’s Not Discovery, It’s Absolution.
This is the silent, absurd theater of modern business. We hire expensive strangers to interview us, document our own thoughts, and then present those thoughts back to us in a deck with a much better font. It’s not about discovery; it’s about absolution. The consultant isn’t a guide; they’re a shield. They are the political cover purchased by a leadership team that either doesn’t trust its own people or doesn’t trust itself to champion its people’s ideas. It’s a profound act of organizational insecurity, a signal to every single employee that your insights are only valid once they’ve been laundered through an external firm with a six-figure invoice.
I used to be furious about this. I’d sit in those meetings, my jaw tight, feeling the collective morale of the room deflate like a sad balloon. We were the experts. We lived this work every single day. We knew the problems, the customers, the friction points. We knew the answer. But our knowing wasn’t enough. It had to be validated, rubber-stamped, and sanctified by an outsider who, just a few months before, probably couldn’t have picked our company’s logo out of a lineup of 11.
Hitting the Wall: A Lesson in Pride
Then I made a mistake. I was leading a small project team of 21 people, and we hit a wall. A technical, logistical, deeply unsexy wall. The pressure was immense, and my boss suggested bringing in a specialist. I resisted, puffing my chest out about the talent we had in-house. “We don’t need someone to tell us what we already know,” I argued, parroting my own righteous indignation. I forced my team to grind for another 31 days, fueled by pride and a stupid conviction that asking for help was a sign of failure. We burned out, we missed the deadline, and the solution, when we finally stumbled upon it, was embarrassingly simple. The right specialist probably would have seen it in an hour.
Astrid’s Wisdom: Honoring Every Broken Piece
It reminds me of a woman I met once, an archaeological illustrator named Astrid L. Her job was to sit in a dusty trench or a climate-controlled museum basement and draw, with painstaking precision, the artifacts people dug out of the ground. She wasn’t interpreting. She wasn’t strategizing. She was documenting reality, line by line, crack by crack. I asked her once if she ever got frustrated, if she ever wanted to just take a quick photo and be done with it. She looked at me, her hands covered in graphite dust, and said something that rewired my thinking.
Her expertise was earned through thousands of hours of focused, solitary work. She trusted her own eyes, her own hands. No one could hire a consultant to tell Astrid how to draw a 4th-century pot shard. Her value was inherent and undeniable.
The True Cost: Courage vs. Deflection
But that requires courage. It requires a leadership team willing to own their decisions, to stand behind their people and say, “We believe you. We trust you. Your expertise is enough.” Instead, many opt for the expensive insurance policy of a consulting firm. The massive report lands with a thud on the boardroom table, and if the plan fails, the blame is neatly deflected. “Well, we followed the expert recommendation from Firm X.” The consultant gets paid, the leadership team is safe, and the internal experts-the ones who knew the right answer all along-update their résumés.
The cost isn’t just the $200,001 fee; it’s the slow, corrosive decay of morale, innovation, and institutional knowledge.
You bring in an expert for a specific, defined problem that is truly outside your team’s core knowledge.
I’ve tried to change my own view. I have to. It’s too cynical to believe the entire industry is a sham. It’s not. But I now see them as a very specific tool, like a surgical instrument. You don’t use a scalpel to butter your toast. You bring in an expert for a specific, defined problem that is truly outside your team’s core knowledge. You don’t bring them in to discover your company’s soul and sell it back to you.
That Truth is Not For Sale.