Fortuitously, I have an insider’s view on business disruption as a member of the Change Agents Worldwide (CAWW) collective. It is a hivemind of the great and good of e2.0, social business mavens.

How does CAWW go about its own business? With transparency and trust at its heart, with collaboration and cooperation as its cogs and wheels. It disrupts traditional, staid consultancy – all big names with bigger theories, yet bigger prices.

Of course, consultants are the people articulating the changes in the enterprise and building out the solutions for the next iteration(s) of our organizations, so surely they are a step ahead of their own disruption, drinking their own champagne, no?

Seems not, according to this interesting HBR article from Clayton Christiensen on the future of consulting:

Early signs of this [disruption] pattern in the consulting industry include increasingly sophisticated competitors with nontraditional business models that are gaining acceptance…

However,

It’s incredibly difficult for clients to judge a consultancy’s performance in advance, because they are usually hiring the firm for specialized knowledge and capability that they themselves lack…As a result, a critical mechanism of disruption is disabled.

Consequently….

The consultants we spoke with who rejected the notion of disruption in their industry cited the difficulty of getting large partnerships to agree on revolutionary strategies. They pointed to the purported impermeability of their brands and reputations. They claimed that too many things could never be commoditized in consulting. Why try something new, they asked, when what they’ve been doing has worked so well for so long?

Yeah, good luck with that. I will raise a glass of CAWW champagne instead.

And, on that note, CAWW has its first webinar on December 12 @ 1100 EST, with great thought leaders Harold Jarche and Simon Terry. BOOM!

←This Much We Know.→