Organizational learning and Business Consulting

I often get the question on how organizational learning is relevant to business consulting. Can a business consultant just be really good at their area of expertise and be effective at client organizations?

It makes sense for business consultants to be aware of organizational learning and how organizations adapt to change.

Org Learning challenges

One of the key skills for a consultant is observation.

Trying to observe the key organizational learning challenges for the client and adapting based on that is key to a successful consulting gig.

This will be a continuous process and the solutioning would also have to iterative to help the client and for the client to appreciate the solution better.

Tying transformation to business value

The key to any consulting assignment is backing by a business sponsor.

The only way we will be able to get continuous backing from a business sponsor is to be able to tie the transformation to business value.

This is very tricky and at times very convoluted. However, the benefits for the client organization outweigh the effort for achieving this.

Bring structure to change

Change is scary, especially for big and old organizations. It is a time of uncertainty where people are not sure if their roles would become obsolete.

As a consultant, it would help if we could bring structure to the change. This also ties back to my earlier point about tying them to business goals.

As we slowly progress along the consulting assignment, we can make it easier for people to understand their new role and how they can contribute.

One size does not fit all

This is one of the toughest things for the consultant to do.

This is one thing that our clients would want from us. The ability to be able to set a template and then follow them in multiple departments.

This never works. Every department is unique and what worked for one would not work for another.

This is the reason that when consultants complete an assignment and hand it over for the respective departments to take control, things fail. Having a better sense of what works where and patience. Consultants should abstain from coming up with such templates that might set up the clients for failure.