How this lands in practice
It began as a six-week diagnostic, priced attractively. In hindsight, priced as marketing. The readout is genuinely impressive: sharper than anything produced internally, with benchmarks the executive team has never seen and a burning-platform narrative that makes standing still feel reckless. The final section proposes a two-to-three-year programme, a blended team, and a commercial model with a discount that expires at the end of the quarter. The partner presents to the executive committee personally. Heads nod. The CFO asks who, exactly, verified the baseline the savings are measured against.
Why both yes and no carry real risk
Decline, and the organisation may genuinely be walking away from a needed change, and the sponsoring executive who commissioned the diagnostic looks as though they wasted the fee. Accept, and the organisation commits eight figures on analysis produced by the party that profits from the answer, scoped in weeks, by consultants who interviewed the organisation about itself. The sponsor's career becomes tied to the programme; the consultancy's risk, by contrast, is largely reputational and fully priced into its rates. The asymmetry of consequence is the heart of this scenario, and it is rarely said out loud in the room.
- The diagnostic team that impressed everyone is the A-team; delivery staffing is a separate, later conversation.
- The business case baseline was assembled by the bidder, from data the bidder selected.
- The expiring discount converts an investment decision into a purchasing deadline.
- Internal capability to challenge the programme shrinks the moment the programme absorbs the best internal people.
The failure modes that show up around month nine
The pattern is well known to anyone who has lived a large programme. The named partners rotate to the next sale; the A-team rotates off after month three. Benefits tracking slides from hard baseline movement to activity milestones (workshops held, modules deployed) which the steering committee gradually accepts as progress. Scope grows at the edges because change requests are the delivery firm's margin engine. And by the time anyone considers stopping, sunk cost and shared ownership of the original decision make honest review politically expensive. None of this requires bad faith. It is what the incentive structure produces when no one prices it at signing.
What to ask the consultancy directly
- Which parts of the recommendation could be delivered without you, and would you say so if that were most of it?
- Name the engagements like this one that underperformed. What did you change afterwards?
- Will the individuals in the diagnostic be contractually named in delivery, with substitution rights on our side?
- Will you tie a meaningful share of fees to the baseline movement in your own business case?
- What happens to the price and the plan if we phase this and reassess after the first tranche?
Pressure-test before signature, not after mobilisation
Rebuild the business case with internal owners for every number. A case the CFO's team cannot reproduce is not a case, it is a brochure. Split the decision: the "do we need this change" question and the "who delivers it" question deserve separate answers, and bundling them is precisely what the proposal is designed to achieve. Take the delivery scope to at least one competing firm, not as a formality but for genuine price and approach discovery. And define, now, the evidence that would justify stopping at each phase gate, while stopping is still cheap and nobody's reputation is invested in continuing.
Where outside perspective actually helps here
Internal review has a ceiling in this scenario: the people best placed to challenge the programme are often the people the programme would fund, absorb or reorganise. A second consultancy will mostly reposition the work towards its own strengths. The scarce input is from executives who have sat in the client chair for a comparable transformation, who approved one, governed one or shut one down, and who can say what the proposal's silences mean. That is the specific gap the Global Board fills: selected senior operators giving confidential, decision-specific challenge with no delivery revenue at stake.
