In 25 years of consulting, some collaborations never quite happened. Some for good reasons — budget, timing, wrong fit. But others left a different taste. Not bitter. Puzzled.
Looking more closely, I found three patterns. And what struck me is that every time, responsibility was shared. On both sides of the table, someone hadn’t done their part.
Take the thinking, leave the consultant.
A CEO approaches me to rethink his brand. We have long, rich conversations. I send a detailed proposal — too detailed, probably. He says he wants to move forward with me, asks for a few clarifications. Then nothing.
A few months later, the new communications are live. The ideas are there. The signature isn’t.
What he didn’t do: have the basic courtesy of giving me an answer, even a negative one. What I didn’t do: draw a clear line between my way of thinking — which I show — and what I deliver — which I charge for.
Send a sloppy brief, expect a perfect answer.
A director contacts me for an ambitious engagement: strategic consulting, team training, brand overhaul. All in a three-line brief. The scope is fuzzy, the expectations implied.
I respond. Not off the mark, but not quite bullseye either. She never comes back.
What she didn’t do: invest the time needed to articulate what she actually wanted. You can’t ask for strategic precision on the basis of a vague intention. What I didn’t do: reframe her brief before responding. Tell her: “what you’re describing combines three distinct workstreams — let’s clarify the frame before I propose anything.” That’s precisely where strategic work begins.
Approve a budget without securing the decision chain.
A family holding company engages me to support the transformation of one of its subsidiaries. The project is approved, the budget signed off. We start.
Except the subsidiary’s CEO was never part of the decision. He discovers the project. He pushes back. Everything stalls.
What the holding didn’t do: make sure the person who would live through the transformation was involved in the decision to launch it. What I didn’t do: verify the alignment between the sponsor and the final decision-maker before committing. I had a gut feeling. I didn’t follow it.
The result: I got a project, but not the one that mattered. He lost the chance to turn a stalled initiative into a strategic lever — at a time when he needed one. The collaboration that could have had the most impact is precisely the one that never happened.
The mirror.
This isn’t an indictment of clients. It’s thinking out loud about what makes a strategic collaboration work — or fall apart.
On the client side: a good consultant isn’t an interchangeable supplier. The way you initiate the relationship — the quality of your brief, the respect for intellectual work, the clarity of your decision chain — shapes the quality of what you’ll receive.
On the consultant side: strategic rigour doesn’t stop at the deliverable. It starts with framing the relationship itself. Every brief left unquestioned, every boundary left unset, every instinct left unfollowed is a missed opportunity to do what we’re supposed to be good at: structuring.
The best collaborations I’ve experienced had one thing in common. Both parties had decided the work deserved to be properly framed. Not out of distrust. Out of respect.