Almost forty years ago, Warren J. Wittreich wrote in the Harvard Business Review that “often a client who wishes to purchase a professional service senses that he has a problem, but is uncertain as to what the specific nature of his problem really is. The responsibility of the service firm is to identify that problem and define it in meaningful terms.”
Twenty years later in The Secrets of Consulting, Gerry Weinberg recalls the first law of consulting taught to him by a colleague, Roger House: “In spite of what the client may tell you, there’s always a problem.”
If the first law of consulting is that there’s always a problem, the second—which is trickier—is to be sure you’re solving the right problem. Otherwise, you’re just covering symptoms with a flimsy band-aid that will surely fail—more likely sooner than later. That’s the stuff that gives consultants a bad rep.
It’s easy to get sucked into “how we’ll deal with this problem” too quickly. With competition breathing down our necks, it’s tempting to conjure up a solution before the problem is truly understood by the client and the consultant.
The result is often a misguided and a potentially failed project. Most clients are facing issues of such complexity that off-the-shelf solutions can easily be a recipe for disaster. Now more than ever, we need to be guided by Wittreich’s wisdom and remember our responsibility to identify and define client problems in a meaningful way.
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