I've been in the room. Conference room, whiteboards, sticky notes, a facilitator with a timer. The energy is real. The frameworks are elegant. Everyone leaves feeling like they cracked something.
Then Monday comes and nothing changes.
I watched this happen at a Fortune 100 company. The strategic direction was correct: centralize fragmented capabilities, capture economies of scale across digital product design and supply chain ops. The analysis was rigorous. The reorg plan was clean.
It failed. The consulting firm had mapped the organization from the top down. Job codes on a spreadsheet. They never understood why things had diverged in the first place, because they never sat with the people doing the work. Sixteen months later the company did it again. Many of the same mistakes repeated.
This isn't a story about one bad engagement. It's a structural problem with how strategy consulting works.
The methodology was never the moat
Thirty years ago McKinsey's value was access to frameworks and data that companies couldn't generate themselves. The methodology was genuinely proprietary.
That's over. Design Thinking is in every MBA program. You can read about zero-based workflow redesign in a Medium post. The canvas is a free download. The frameworks were never the hard part. Knowing what to actually do with them, in your specific context, with your specific constraints, was always the hard part. And that's the part that walks out the door when the consultants leave.
What I think comes next
The next generation of strategic tools doesn't sell workshops. It sells execution capability that stays with you.
The distinction matters. A workshop teaches you how to think about your business. An execution system does the analytical work alongside you. It pressure-tests conclusions, produces deliverables you can act on today. The methodology is built into the process. You don't need a certification to use it.
And when you're done, you don't lose the capability. Your next project is better than your first because you're building on what you learned, not starting over with a new firm and a blank whiteboard.
Strategy isn't an event
The workshop model treats change as something that happens in a sprint. Four weeks. Ninety days. A “final state.”
Markets don't wait for your transformation roadmap. The company that treated strategy as a quarterly event is already behind by the time the PowerPoint is delivered. What matters is continuous strategic capability, available when you need it, at a cost that doesn't require a procurement cycle every time you have a question worth answering properly.
The workshop was a bridge. We're on the other side now.