Most consulting engagements that go badly wrong do so in the first two weeks, not the last two. The problem is usually not the consultant's competence or the client's intentions. It is that neither party was specific enough about what the work was supposed to produce, by when, and for whom. Scoping is the part of the process that fixes that, and it is the part most clients are in a hurry to skip.
When an organization is not working well, the first explanation is usually a person. Someone is not performing, or two people do not get along, or a manager is not managing. Sometimes that is true. More often, the problem is structural: the organization is designed in a way that makes good performance difficult, regardless of who is in the role.
Strategic planning has a reputation for producing documents that are read once and filed. That reputation is earned, but it is not inevitable. The difference between a plan that gets used and one that does not is usually in the process, not the document. Specifically, it is in whether the people who will carry out the plan were involved in making the decisions that shaped it.
It is common to begin a strategic planning process with a stakeholder consultation. It is less common to begin with a genuine effort to surface and resolve the disagreements that exist among stakeholders before the planning work starts. The difference matters more than most organizations expect.
A project engagement has a defined start, a defined end, and a specific deliverable. An interim advisory retainer has none of those things. It is an ongoing relationship with a specific structure: regular calls, written summaries, and availability for questions between sessions. For some organizations, at some points in their development, that is exactly what is needed.
The most common communication mistake in organizational change is announcing the decision before the rationale is clear. People hear what is changing before they understand why, and in the absence of a clear explanation, they construct their own. The explanations people construct for themselves are almost always worse than the truth.
Processes are designed for the organization that existed when they were created. As organizations grow, change their programs, or take on new staff, the processes often stay the same. The result is a gap between how work is supposed to happen and how it actually happens, and that gap tends to widen quietly until something goes wrong.
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