"You think you have all the answers," the prospective client scoffed early in the meeting. My good man, you have completely and thoroughly misread the room. I have joined this call with absolutely no answers. Zero.
What? Why? Aren't I supposed to be some sort of expert?
Sure. I'm an expert in overall concepts. But I am not an expert in the quirks of your business.
For many companies, there is a disconnect between expectation and reality. I have seen it time and time again: the expectation that the relationship with an outside consultant is simple. The company pays for quick answers which were presumably sitting in a jeweled box on the shelf, awaiting distribution.
And look, let's face it: that's how sales works. Someone rolls in and confidently says "We have the answers to your problem." Companies want that sort of clear-cut black-and-white answer. They're not paying for nuance.
This creates the conditions that go something like this.
- Company gives the consultant money.
- Consultant gets limited access to the company's inner workings.
- Employees, wanting to protect their jobs, present themselves, their departments, and their workflows in the best possible light while shoving other departments under the bus.
- Consultants, working with an incomplete picture of what actually happens, develop a strategy that doesn't actually reflect the situation on the ground.
- Consultant delivers a report that most people don't read.
- Company follows the one bullet point of the report that costs the least money to implement. The remainder of the report is ignored. Consultant is blamed.
- Repeat with new consultant.
Not gonna lie, I've gotten a lot of business over the years to pick up the pieces after "failed" consultant engagements.
But there are some very simple truths to any company/consultant relationship.
Solutions are a combination of perspective and experience. I have seen a lot of companies with a lot of problems. While there are common threads, I'm going to defer to the Anna Karenina principle and say that every unhappy company is unhappy in its own way. No consultant can know those unique quirks and details until they get inside.
There is no single answer. There isn't a canned, commoditized answer to every content problem. Sometimes its processes. Sometimes it's planning, or the lack thereof. Oftentimes it's people. I don't say that maliciously! But when it comes time to implement plans and processes, you're at the whim of people and their understanding of what's needed, why, and by whom. And even the best-laid plans fall apart when different departments are led by different people who have set out different goals without sight of the big picture.
Don't trust anyone who claims to have the answers before evaluating the problem. Seriously.
If it was simple, you would have done it already. Content strategy, content design, content governance, even business itself... none of this is rocket science. But it often benefits from an outsider's perspective, someone who can step back and see the big picture as well as understanding the details of individual roles. And the problem is usually an interconnected series of small, interdisciplinary problems that converge into cascading failure.
Any solution is only as good as the implementation. It doesn't matter how good or bad the consultant is if the organization cherry picks one or two items and ignores the rest.
So no, I don't think I have all of the answers. Nor should I. But if we work together, we can make things better.
Side note: I am still processing my thoughts on the U.S. midterm elections. I'll have some commentary in the next issue.