The Consulting Operations Paradox

Why does the consulting model incentivize addition over subtraction?

The consulting model incentivizes addition because billable hours correlate with activity, and building is more visibly active than removing, even when removing produces superior outcomes.

In 2016, I was engaged by a 200-person financial services firm to “improve operational efficiency.” The engagement was scoped at 16 weeks with a fee to match. My assessment, completed in week 3, revealed that the highest-impact intervention was eliminating the bulk of the approval workflows in their loan processing pipeline. These workflows had been added incrementally over 6 years in response to individual compliance incidents, but nearly all of them addressed risks that no longer existed due to system changes made in 2014. The fourth addressed a real risk that could be mitigated with a single automated check that cost little to implement.

The removal would shorten loan processing substantially, and every loan that closed sooner brought its revenue forward. The work required 3 weeks of analysis, 2 weeks of stakeholder alignment, and 1 week of implementation. Total: 6 weeks. Total cost at my billing rate was a fraction of the original budget.

The problem was that my contract was for 16 weeks. My firm expected 16 weeks of billings. The client expected 16 weeks of deliverables. The correct answer (subtraction completed in 6 weeks) was economically irrational for the consulting firm and psychologically unsatisfying for the client, who expected a proportional relationship between money spent and visible output received.

What happens when consultants fill time instead of solving problems?

When consultants fill contracted time beyond the point of value creation, they produce deliverables that create new complexity for the client to maintain, partially or fully offsetting the value of the original intervention.

I have watched this pattern play out in engagements I led and in engagements I only observed. The consultant identifies the core issue in weeks 2-4. The core issue is resolved by weeks 6-8. The remaining weeks are filled with “additional recommendations,” “capability building,” “documentation,” and “roadmap development.” These deliverables are not useless. But they are additive. They create new processes, new documents, and new expectations that the client must now maintain.

At one organization, I observed a consulting team spend 8 weeks building a comprehensive “operating model” after the core process improvement was complete. The operating model was a 94-page document with 12 process maps, 6 RACI matrices, and a 3-year transformation roadmap. The client’s operations team spent 4 months trying to implement the operating model. They eventually abandoned it because the maintenance overhead exceeded their capacity. The original process improvement (which took 4 weeks to implement) remained in place and continued to generate value. The operating model (which took 8 weeks to build and 4 months to attempt) generated negative value by consuming attention that could have been spent on operations.

How do you align consulting incentives with client outcomes?

Align incentives by pricing on outcomes rather than hours, defining success metrics before engagement start, and building contracts that reward speed rather than duration.

• Outcome-based pricing: Instead of a weekly rate for a fixed run of weeks, price the engagement against a defined outcome (e.g., loan processing time cut to an agreed target and sustained for 90 days after the engagement ends). This aligns the consultant’s incentive with the client’s: the faster the outcome is achieved, the higher the consultant’s effective hourly rate.
• Defined completion criteria: Before the engagement begins, agree on 3-5 measurable success criteria. When the criteria are met, the engagement ends, regardless of elapsed time. This eliminates the time-filling problem.
• Subtraction-first assessment: The first phase of every engagement (2-3 weeks maximum) should answer one question: “What can we remove?” The additive phase (building new capabilities) should begin only after the subtractive phase has been exhausted. In my experience, subtraction alone resolves the client’s presenting problem more often than not.
• Maintenance budgeting: For every deliverable created, estimate the annual maintenance cost and present it alongside the creation cost. A deliverable that carries a heavy annual maintenance cost takes well over a year to pay for itself, which changes the client’s calculus about whether they want it.

Why is selling subtraction so difficult?

Selling subtraction is difficult because clients equate value with visible output, and removal is invisible by nature: you cannot point to what is no longer there.

There is a deep psychological asymmetry between addition and subtraction. Leidy Klotz’s research at the University of Virginia demonstrated that when people are asked to improve a system, they default to adding elements rather than removing them, even when removal is the more effective solution. This additive bias operates in consulting relationships with particular force because the client is paying for visible work. A new dashboard is visible. A removed workflow is invisible. A 94-page operating model feels proportional to the fee. A 3-page memo recommending the elimination of 4 workflows does not.

I tested this directly. In 2021, I presented two proposals to a client for the same problem. Proposal A was a 12-week engagement to build a new project management system. Proposal B was a 4-week engagement to eliminate 5 redundant processes and configure 2 existing tools, at a far lower price. Both proposals projected the same outcome: a meaningful reduction in project cycle time. The client chose Proposal A. When I asked why, the VP of Operations said, “For that money I expect to see something built.” The preference was not about outcomes. It was about the relationship between spending and seeing.

Seneca observed that it is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more. Organizations that hank after more process, more tools, more frameworks are operationally poor regardless of their budgets. The consultant who helps them see what they already have, and what they can release, provides the most valuable service. It is also the hardest service to sell.

What model resolves the paradox?

The resolution is a diagnostic-first model where the first deliverable is always an assessment that quantifies the value of subtraction before any additive work is proposed.

I restructured my practice around a 3-phase model. Phase 1 is a short fixed-fee diagnostic (2-3 weeks) that produces a prioritized list of subtractions and additions with projected ROI for each. Phase 2 is the implementation of subtractions (duration varies, outcome-priced). Phase 3 is the implementation of additions, only if the diagnostic indicates that subtraction alone is insufficient. In the typical engagement, Phase 3 is unnecessary. In the rest, Phase 3 is smaller and more targeted because the subtractions completed in Phase 2 have simplified the problem space.

The model generates less revenue per engagement than a traditional time-and-materials approach. It generates more value per dollar for the client, which produces referrals, repeat engagements, and a reputation that compounds. The economics work, but they work on a longer time horizon. This requires patience, which is perhaps the most Stoic virtue a consulting practice can cultivate.

The paradox does not resolve cleanly. There will always be tension between what is most profitable for the consultant and what is most valuable for the client. The goal is not to eliminate the tension but to acknowledge it, design around it, and build business models that make doing the right thing economically sustainable. The alternative is an industry that sells complexity to organizations drowning in it, which is where much of consulting stands today.