There’s no point in talking to somebody about something they’re not capable of doing

The best consultants are people who have got a much better awareness of their own limits and the limits of others and don’t adopt the expert stance. This was the most insightful thing I took away from speaking to David Austin, principal of Bailey Austin Strategic Innovation Partners.

After a hugely successful career, David’s current focus is to dramatically improve innovation strategies and processes. A unique characteristic of David Austin’s approach was that he had no point of view; or more precisely what was best for the client was right. He says “my role is to help them to discover a way forwards and in any organisation. There is probably half a dozen perfectly feasible ways forward and in helping them to build a coalition of enthusiasm to move forward.”

He later commented, “it’s a matter of starting from their world. It’s not a matter of is it the right thing to do. I can’t possibly say what’s the right thing to do” … “the people we are dealing with are typically bright, analytical, and certainly given the right pieces of the jigsaw very capable of doing those sort of things. It may be that they’ve never had those particular pieces of reality laid in front of them before.”


Austin’s consultancy approach reflected his beliefs about the complexity of organisations and the fallibility of the expert stance. “Every organisation has its own culture, history and way of doing things. It’s the capacity of doing something and effect real change has to be different. You’ve got to start where they can do something, rather than come up with some sort of theoretical approach which they can’t actually do anything with” … “you start off at the client’s world, where are they at, and what are they capable of doing. There’s no point in talking to somebody about something they’re not capable of doing.”

In a related point Doblin Group consultant Jeff Tull commented, “we never claimed to have industry expertise. We urge people not to come to us if they’re looking for an industry expert. What we’re really good at is having these collective capabilities and supply towards innovation collectiveness. We also just culturally, or because we are specifically not aligned with any industry, watch lots of industries and we work with lots of industries. On the client side, if you work in financial services, you live day in day out in financial services, you know all the usual suspects, all the head-to-head competitors, you read all the journals, you go to all the same conferences and it’s all financial services. We’re able to help people broaden their viewpoint.”