The diagnosis that matches the seller's catalogue
The systems integrator was asked whether the platform needs replacing, and after six weeks of paid assessment the answer is yes, with a proposal attached. The strategy consultancy was asked whether the operating model is the problem, and the diagnostic has found an operating-model problem of roughly the size their transformation practice handles. The bank retained to advise on whether to sell believes selling is attractive. Individually, each answer may be right. Collectively, the pattern is unmistakable: the recommendation keeps landing wherever the adviser's revenue lives.
Why the market is built this way
Deep expertise concentrates inside firms that sell its application, because that is where practising it pays. The buyer, by definition, cannot fully evaluate the advice without possessing the same expertise, which is the asymmetry that created the advisory market in the first place. Within that structure, fee models do their shaping below the level of conscious dishonesty. An honest expert with a stake still chooses which risks to emphasise, which comparators to include, how to weight the ambiguous evidence, and every one of those choices is made by someone whose next year looks different depending on your answer. No individual behaves badly. The recommendation drifts anyway.
How stake-shaped advice shows up in the outcome
- Scope inflates and the inflation is absorbed as expertise: "they found more than we knew about" is also what a fee-motivated diagnosis produces.
- The problem is defined in terms of the seller's delivery model, so alternatives that fit no one's catalogue (do less, fix in place, sequence differently) never reach the paper.
- Second opinions are sourced from the same fee pool, and the resulting agreement is read as validation when it is closer to correlation.
- The incumbent is asked to assess its own earlier work, which is grading its own homework, and the assessment finds that more of the same is needed.
Buying judgement instead of proposals
The countermeasures are contractual before they are analytical. Separate diagnosis from delivery: whoever recommends the work is barred, in writing and in advance, from executing it, and knows so before the assessment starts. Pay properly for the recommendation itself, so the advice does not have to be recouped through what it recommends; cheap diagnostics are the most expensive ones available. Put the alternative hypotheses into the brief explicitly, including "no action is needed", and require the adviser to argue each before concluding. Ask the adviser directly what they would recommend if they could not do the follow-on work, and treat the length of the pause as data. And source at least one perspective from someone with no possible economics in the outcome, as a control reading against everything else you have been told.
The perspective with nothing riding on your answer
That control reading is the specific gap Digital Advisory exists to fill. Selected senior operators from the Global Board have bought these platforms, hired these firms and sat through these diagnostics as the client, and their input arrives as a confidential report with no engagement to sell afterwards. The point is not that stake-holding advisers should be dismissed; their expertise is usually real and often necessary. The point is that their advice can only be weighed properly against a reading from someone whose income does not move with your decision.
