A couple of years ago my team was building out a technology roadmap for a client. Forty-plus pages. Maturity model, risk assessment, phased plan, the whole thing.

We were on the internal review call before it went to the client. Everybody happy with the deck. Slides and report looked clean.

I stopped the meeting and asked one question.

"Is there anything in this report that isn't just confirming what he already suspected? Something new. Something that pushes back on his assumptions."

Silence.

Then somebody said it plain: "That's hard to say. He's a smart guy. He already knows where this needs to go. He's really just trying to validate his own assumptions."

That answer should bother every CIO who's ever hired a consultant.

Here's the business model most consulting engagements run on, whether anybody says it or not. The client already has a hunch about what's wrong. The consultant interviews the team, reads the docs, builds a deck, and hands back the client's own hunch with graphs and metrics. Forty pages that say "you were right."

That gets called an assessment. It's really just permission.

Nobody's incentivized to break that pattern. The consultant wants a happy client and a signed statement of work. The client wants validation. Everybody walks away satisfied and hopeful.

The real value of an outside set of eyes isn't confirmation. It's the thing you couldn't see because you're standing too close to it.

So before any report goes out my door, I ask my team the same question I asked on that call: what's in here that's antithetical to what he already believes. Not contrarian for the sake of it. Actually different. Actually earned.

If the answer is "nothing," we're not done. We haven't done the job yet. We've just done research.

To be fair - there may not be an insight. But, great consultants explain their thinking and provide perspectives that lead them to the best answer. We show our clients how we tried to break assumptions.

If you're the one hiring the consultant, ask for the same thing before you sign. Don't ask "what did you find." Ask "what did you find that I didn't already believe." If the answer is a shrug, you paid for validation.

A real assessment should make you a little uncomfortable.

This is exactly the muscle we build in a Cut to Clarity Session. Not a deck that agrees with you. A direct conversation where we tell you what we actually see, including the parts you didn't ask about.

Some of that turns into a clear plan you run with on your own. Some of it turns into a bigger engagement with Alliance when the fix is too large to handle informally. Either way, you leave with something you didn't already know walking in.

If you've had a $10,000 assessment sitting on a shelf because it told you what you already knew, reply to this email. I want to hear about it.

Until next week,

—Jared

Text Me: 314.806.3912

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