The consultant who no longer exists

Posted on: 30 January 2026

There is a word that has lost its meaning through persistent misuse: consultant. Today it describes anyone selling something whilst wearing a smarter suit than the shop assistant. The financial consultant pushing his bank's products. The technology consultant installing the software he represents. The strategy consultant who, by remarkable coincidence, has precisely the solution to sell you.

This is not accidental degradation. It is the predictable result of an incentive structure that has corrupted the role from within, with the active complicity of those buying consultancy without understanding what they are purchasing.

It is worth returning to the origin to understand what has been lost.

The consultant, in its pure form, is a diagnostician. Someone who observes a situation, analyses it through expertise the client does not possess, and returns an informed point of view. The value lies entirely in the quality of judgement. Not in the action that follows, not in the specific solution proposed, not in implementation. Only in judgement.

A doctor who examines you and tells you what you have is a consultant. The moment he also sells you the medicine, his judgement is compromised by definition, even if he acts in perfect good faith. Not because he is dishonest, but because structure produces behaviour regardless of intention. If I earn more when I prescribe drug X instead of drug Y, my brain will find excellent reasons why X is the better choice. This is incentive mechanics, not bad faith.

The same dynamic applies to any form of consultancy. The moment the consultant's fee depends on what you choose, or worse on whether he then executes that choice, you are no longer buying judgement. You are buying a sale in disguise.

So far this sounds like a criticism of consultants. It is not. The problem is symmetrical, and perhaps the greater responsibility lies on the other side of the table.

When someone says "I need a consultant", in most cases they are looking for something that has nothing to do with consultancy. They are looking for one of four things, often without being aware of it.

The first is the transfer of responsibility. If I must take a difficult decision and I take it myself, the weight rests entirely on my shoulders. If "the consultant advised me to do this", I have distributed the weight. I have someone to share the blame with if it goes wrong. I am not buying expertise, I am buying psychological insurance. The consultant becomes an emotional lightning rod, and often both parties are perfectly aware of the game without ever making it explicit.

The second is the scapegoat proper, which is the more cynical version of the first. I do not need your judgement, I need someone to blame. In certain organisations, hiring an external consultant so you can later say "we followed expert advice" is a form of reputational risk management, not a search for the best solution. If it works, credit goes to whoever had the foresight to call in the experts. If it fails, blame falls on the experts who got their analysis wrong.

The third thing often sought is an executor, someone to do the work in your place. This is not consultancy, it is service provision. Nothing wrong with that, it is a legitimate need. But calling it consultancy muddies the waters and distorts expectations. If I need someone to implement a system for me, I need a supplier. If I need someone to help me understand which system I need, I need a consultant. These are two different figures with different skills and, crucially, different incentives. The supplier has an interest in selling you the solution he knows how to implement best. The consultant, if he is one, has an interest in giving you the most accurate judgement regardless of who will execute.

The fourth thing, the rarest, is someone to help you see more clearly. This is the only case where you actually need a consultant in the proper sense of the term. You have a complex situation, you lack specific expertise to analyse it correctly, and you want an informed point of view before deciding. You do not want him to decide, you do not want him to execute, you want to understand better so you can then decide yourself. This is consultancy.

The fact that this fourth category is the rarest explains why the market has evolved towards the other three. Demand shapes supply. If most clients seek responsibility transfer, scapegoats, or executors, the market will produce consultants offering precisely that. It is natural selection applied to business models.

There is also a component of cognitive laziness that must be honestly acknowledged. "Tell me what to buy" requires zero effort on my part. "Help me understand what I need" requires me to think, to participate actively in the analysis, to take responsibility for the final decision. Many people prefer to pay more to think less. Understandable, but it produces mediocre results.

The consultant transformed into salesman thrives on this laziness. He removes the weight of decision, gives you a turnkey solution, and you can return to other matters. It seems efficient. In reality it is a form of dependency dressed up as service. Every time you delegate a decision to someone with an interest in the outcome of that decision, you are trading power for convenience.

The central point is this: the true consultant makes you more capable of deciding, not more dependent on him. If after working with a consultant you know less than before about how to tackle that type of problem, you have not bought consultancy. You have bought something else.

There is a practical distinction that can help orient yourself. The authentic consultant defines requirements, not solutions. He tells you "you need something that does this, with these characteristics, for these reasons", not "you need product X from brand Y". The second statement is already a commercial choice, even if the person making it does not directly sell that product. He is doing your decisional work in your place, and this makes you dependent rather than more capable.

But defining requirements instead of solutions presupposes something that cannot be faked: knowing what you are talking about. And knowing it truly, not from reading or studying, but from living it.

The true consultant is built on his own skin. His competence does not come from years spent in the same position seeing the same scenarios. It comes from having crossed different situations, different sectors, different problems. Every scar is a lesson no manual can teach. Every digested failure is pattern recognition that activates automatically when the same mechanism reappears wearing different clothes.

This type of knowledge produces an inevitable consequence: the true consultant says what he thinks, not what the client wants to hear. Not because he is courageous in the abstract, but because he knows. And when you truly know something, you cannot pretend not to know it just to please whoever is paying you.

The domesticated consultant, the one who calibrates his opinions to what the client will find agreeable, betrays twice over. He betrays the client, who is paying for judgement and receives instead an echo of his own convictions. And he betrays himself, because he is selling something he does not have: certainties he does not possess, confirmations he cannot honestly give.

There is a paradox few recognise: the authentic consultant has more skin in the game than the client himself. The client risks money, time, perhaps reputation on that single decision. The consultant risks something harder to rebuild: his own credibility. If I tell you what you think you want to hear and it then goes wrong, I have lost a client. If I tell you what I actually think, even when it is uncomfortable, and over time it proves correct, I have built something no marketing campaign can buy.

The consultant with backbone is not the one who raises his voice or plays devil's advocate for sport. He is the one who tells you the thing it is not convenient to say, the thing everyone in the room knows but nobody utters, because he has nothing to lose by saying it. He sells nothing but his judgement, therefore his judgement must be honest or it is worth nothing.

This requires a particular form of freedom. The consultant who depends too much on a single client cannot afford to be honest all the way. The consultant who also sells implementation must be careful not to bite the hand that feeds him. Only someone with nothing to sell but his ability to see things as they are can afford the luxury of truth. And that luxury, paradoxically, is precisely what the client should be paying for.

The consultant can legitimately show you the available options, explain the criteria for evaluating them, help you weigh the pros and cons. But the final choice must remain yours, and he should have no economic interest in which option you choose. If he does, declared or hidden, it is not consultancy. It is sales with an extra step.

This does not mean the consultant must be an ethereal figure who dispenses wisdom and then vanishes. He can accompany you through the selection phase, help you negotiate with suppliers, verify that what is proposed matches what you need. But his fee cannot depend on your choice, otherwise judgement is contaminated at source.

The practical question for anyone who thinks they need a consultant becomes: what am I actually looking for?

If the honest answer is "someone to decide for me", the problem is not finding the right consultant. The problem is that you are trying to avoid a responsibility that is intrinsically yours. You can pay for it, but you cannot truly delegate it. If it goes wrong, you suffer the consequences, regardless of who took the decision.

If the answer is "someone to do the work", look for a competent supplier and call him by his name. There is nothing wrong with needing an executor. The error is confusing him with a consultant and expecting impartial judgement from someone with an interest in selling you his solution.

If the answer is "someone to help me understand", then yes, you need a consultant. And the test for recognising a real one is simple: he has nothing to sell you beyond his judgement. His interest is that you are satisfied with the analysis, not that you choose a specific solution. His aim is that you understand the situation better, not that you become dependent on him.

The final point is perhaps the most uncomfortable. Sometimes the honest answer is: I do not need anyone. I already have the information I need, I already have the skills to analyse it, what I lack is the courage to decide. In that case, no consultant in the world can help you. You are looking for an external crutch for a problem that is entirely internal.

The consultant who no longer exists, the one who sold only judgement without ulterior motives, did not disappear because the market turned bad. He disappeared because demand shifted. Most clients do not want impartial judgement, they want someone to remove the weight of decision. And the market responded rationally to that demand.

Bringing him back is not a matter of finding more ethical professionals. It is a matter of clients understanding what they are buying and what they are actually looking for. The day demand for authentic judgement exceeds demand for responsibility transfer, true consultants will return. Until then, we shall continue calling consultants people who do something else entirely. And we shall continue getting results that reflect that confusion.