You are a purchaser of consultancy services. And naturally you expect your required goal to be achieved. It is not important what specifically caused you to employ consultants – you want them to bring about a change.
In other words: your overall organisation, a team or their processes are currently in Condition A. And you wish to transform them to Condition B. If we indeed achieve this, one could initially say that the consultancy was successful.
However, it could well be that the factor that triggered the activity, and hence the goal associated with it, is at the symptomatic level. For example, the R&D department in a particular company has been identified as the “scapegoat” and blamed for the company’s poor overall performance, since the development specialists rarely finalise their projects on time, thus jeopardising the time-to-market.
However, on taking a closer look, it might be that other functions involved in the overall process play an equal part in causing the poor performance, since they are trying to optimise the position of their own departments, and are de facto impeding the R&D department through their lack of co-operation. In order to identify precisely this kind of issue, it is also our duty even to ask you unpleasant questions and before the start of the project to clarify together with you the nature of the underlying problem, and how we should define the goal of the consultancy.
However, this is not all. LÜDERSPARTNER GMBH defines the effectiveness of consultancy in line with a much broader philosophy: We only regard consultancy as being effective if we can place your company or parts of it into a situation in which it is both of capable of surviving external shocks, and also is able to exploit even undesirable environmental influences, so that the overall system (or parts of it) can profit from such negative conditions. The conceptual term for this is “ANTIFRAGILITY”. Antifragile companies love chaos, uncertainty and risk, and become increasingly successful – they grow under stress. On the other hand, fragile companies will, sooner or later, be forced into serious difficulty by such conditions/parameters or may even fail.
Current negative examples are Nokia, Deutsche Bank or Volkswagen, while positive examples are Apple, PayPal or Tesla.
We can support you in configuring your business model to be antifragile, or at least in developing substantial parts of your company so that it possesses antifragile DNA. For this purpose, the fundamental components are the implementation of agile teams, the issue of future-proofing through vision and strategy, and the empowerment of your management team to exercise leadership.