Do Consultants Actually Help?

Part 5 of the Messy Monday Workplace Culture Series

This one might sound weird coming from me, a former healthcare executive now launching into the consulting world, pitching to companies my ability to help them turn their tangles situations into something more fine tuned that they will be able to work with long term and continue to improve upon.

But I’ve also been on the other side of the table. In an office where half the positions remain unfilled because of red tape restrictions but the contracting budget sits there with money to burn so, in order to actually get the work done, you contract with a variety of companies, all intertwined if you were to look behind the scenes enough to see who engages with who. You spend a huge chunk of time onboarding the junior consultants and project managers to have the slightest inkling of how your organization currently functions and then they often take their proprietary, fancy bound, glossy frameworks and attempt to shove them into the spaces that are lacking in your organization. Six months later, twelve if your lucky, and they vanish, unless, that is, they’ve managed to convince your leadership to extend their engagement. In that case, it serves them to not actually fix the issues at hand right away.

Consultants have been stigmatized for a long time. Sometimes it’s valid criticism, but that is not because some consultants are opportunistic or unqualified, but because the organizations that hire them don’t know how to actually leverage them and work with them.

This becomes even more evident when we look at consultation for things like culture and change management efforts, where the measures of success can be so much more vague and people dependent or take years to materialize. This one might be a little anxiety inducing, not just for me, but for anyone on either side of this conversation. It’s also why it’s critical to include in the discussion.

Parts 1 through 4 of this series established what culture actually is, who has been in the room making decisions about it, what the global and historical context looks like, and what toxicity costs in documented dollars and human terms. Part 5 is about what happens when an organization decides to hire its way out of a culture problem, whether that works, when it does not, and what the conditions are that determine the difference.

An Unregulated Industry

Culture associated consulting is a large, lucrative, and almost entirely unregulated industry. It’s woven into a lot of the more tangible contracting elements through the line items that note change management support or communications plans. There is no licensure requirement to practice organizational culture consulting. There is no standardized definition of what a culture focused engagement must include. There is no peer review process for the proprietary frameworks that most firms sell. There is a high chance that a global management consulting firm with thousands of employees and a boutique practice run by a single practitioner with a certification and a wix.com website are operating in the same market and could deliver similar outcomes depending on how the client choses to go about addressing their needs.

The landscape includes the major global management consulting firms, the Deloittes, E&Y and KPMG. It also includes organizational development companies that focus on regional businesses and even executive coaches operating at the senior leadership level. Coaches may be more likely to bring credentials to their work and large firms will bring onboard staff with initials after their names, but it’s how their utilized and practiced that matters. A company may even reach out to specific HR consults or industrial-organizational psychologists with legitimate research credentials. There are also those that focus on selling a product that an organization self-implements. “Come to this class”, “Get these tools”, “Hit the ground running”. These are not equivalent categories. Their methodological rigor, evidentiary basis, and depth of expertise vary enormously. The client organization is generally not equipped to evaluate those differences before signing the contract.

It could come down to who knows who and how pretty the pitch deck was.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development published an evidence review in 2022 on organizational culture and performance, drawing on peer-reviewed academic research. It found a large number of strong culture profiles available from practitioners and consulting firms, often accompanied by a specific assessment tool claiming to measure the underlying traits, actually had unclear or unverified scientific outcomes to support those claims (CIPD, 2022). The tools are sold with confidence. The evidence base is frequently thin. And the organization buying the engagement has very little basis for distinguishing between a framework built on thirty years of validated research and one built on a consultant’s proprietary model that has never been peer reviewed.

70% Failure Rate… Maybe

In researching this segment of the series, I came across the claim that 70% of change initiatives fail. It appears in nearly every change management book, article, and consulting proposal written in the last twenty-five years. It is cited as established fact. But heres the thing, I can’t actually find much about it beyond just being an accepted number. Mark Hughes of the University of Brighton published a peer-reviewed examination of the statistic in the Journal of Change Management in 2011 and found no credible empirical basis for the specific figure. The number appears to originate primarily from two sources: a 2000 Harvard Business Review article by Beer and Nohria titled “Cracking the Code of Change,” where it appeared almost as an aside without citation, and a 2008 estimate by John Kotter in A Sense of Urgency, which Kotter himself described as an estimate from years of study rather than a finding from published research (Hughes, Journal of Change Management, 2011; Beer & Nohria, Harvard Business Review, 2000).

I wrote my Masters thesis on Kotter’s principles and I appreciate his work and it makes sense that the failure rate would be high given how many variables come into play, but let’s accept it for what it is… a guess.

The figure took on a life of its own. It has been repeated by McKinsey, by Harvard Business Review, by virtually every change management practitioner who has ever tried to justify the need for their services. And in a specific way, it has served the consulting industry well, because a 70% failure rate is an argument for hiring more consultants, not fewer. What we don’t know is if that 70% applies to the consultants failure rate too.

It’s clear change initiatives fail at high rates, even if the specific percentage is not verified by peer-reviewed research. Kotter’s framework, developed over decades of observation and published in the Harvard Business Review in 1995, identified eight specific failure points in organizational change, most of them rooted in leadership behavior rather than methodology. Beer et al., in studies of change programs across 12 companies published in the Harvard Business Review in 1990, found that most change programs do not work unless everyone is involved and genuinely on board. The reasons for failure are consistent across the literature and the consulting industry that cites it most confidently has a financial interest in the number being high enough to be alarming.

Not Everything is Bad

There is a legitimate case for external consultation as a stop gap, as supplemental subject matter expertise, and as an overall compliment to the work an organization is doing.

Edgar Schein, whose foundational work on organizational culture has shaped the field since the 1980s and whose framework remains the most widely cited in peer-reviewed academic research, was explicit that culture change requires someone who can ‘see the water that the fish cannot see’, meaning the assumptions so embedded in daily organizational life that no one inside recognizes them as assumptions anymore (Schein & Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th ed., 2016).

We don’t notice the air until we have none to breathe or it is blowing aggressively in our face, the same thing that fish must experience in water. It’s why internal culture change efforts so often fail to identify the actual problem.

An external consultant, when operating with genuine independence and appropriate scope, can call attention to things that other can’t or don’t feel comfortable doing. They can surface patterns that people inside the organization have learned to quietly accept as normal and they can provide a frame of reference not shaped by the organization’s own history, its political relationships, or the accumulated weight of what has always been done. They bring bandwidth that most organizations do not have internally, and when the methodology is sound, it does matter.

Prosci, one of the major framework developers in the world of change management, did benchmarking research, drawn from over 9,000 data points across global organizations, and found that companies with excellent change management programs are six times more likely to meet their objectives than those with poor change management (Prosci, 2023). That is a meaningful finding even accounting for the fact that Prosci is, itself, a consulting firm with a financial interest in the finding being favorable. The underlying point, that structured, methodologically grounded approaches to organizational change outperform improvised ones, is consistent with the broader peer-reviewed literature.

The situations where external consultation tends to produce genuine value share a few characteristics. The organization is navigating a merger or acquisition and needs structured culture integration support that it does not have the bandwidth or expertise to build internally. A regulatory finding or legal consent decree has created a documented requirement for independent culture assessment, and the independence of the assessor is verified and protected contractually. The leadership that produced the culture problem is genuinely no longer present and the incoming leadership lacks the institutional context to understand what they have inherited. Or the problem is authentically one of skill and methodology rather than one of will and accountability, meaning the organization wants to change and does not know how.

As a risk professional, I will always say the need to bring in emergent help in these scenarios is usually avoidable, but what I do advocate for is actually planning to inject external insight into some of these efforts. Example - we want to explore mergers and joint ventures, we’ll budget for six months of exploratory consultation support; we are aware that we have a huge round of retirements coming up, let’s bring in short term support to assist with expediting the hiring process so when we need to backfill we can; we know the OIG is looking hard at a specific code, to be prepared, let’s bring in a consulting firm to run a review of our process and validate our controls. Same support, different perspective and much different feel.

Where the Breakdown Happens

The research on why culture interventions fail, points to the same gaps over and over again. Most of them are gaps that the consulting engagement may never be able to close, because, in the end, they’re just consulting. They are not necessarily executing any operational or management changes.

So the engagement ends and the culture reverts. The most consistent finding in the organizational change literature is that change not embedded in an organization’s systems, incentive structures, hiring practices, and daily management behaviors does not persist after the consultant leaves. MIT Sloan Management Review’s research on culture change, published in 2021, identified the failure to anchor new behaviors in the organization’s operating rhythm as one of the three most common reasons culture change efforts fail (Kotter, Akhtar & Gupta, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2021). A consultant whose job was to deliver and train on a framework does just that, and then leaves. Whether anything changes depends entirely on what the organization does after the invoice is paid and the task order is marked complete.

The asymmetry matters. The consultant does not have to live with the consequences of the engagement. The people inside the organization do.

A recommendation that is not implemented, technically does not cost the consulting firm anything. The organization who hired them may be left now with not only the broken things but having to additionally explain why they paid someone and it’s still broken.

A documented pattern in large consulting engagements is that senior partners sell the work and junior consultants execute it or they farm their engagement out to subcontractors who weren’t a part of the original negotiations and scope development. The organizational dynamics that produce toxic cultures are complex, politically loaded, and resistant to formulaic intervention. The analyst two years out of business school with a survey instrument and a proprietary framework is not equipped to navigate them, regardless of the firm’s reputation. This is not a criticism of young consultants, however it is a criticism of a staffing model that hire those who have never done the hands on work in type of organization their supporting much less assign them work that requires coordinating complex processes layered with trust issues and emotions. Meanwhile the senior partners who sold the engagement are wining and dining the next client on the list.

The CIPD evidence review found that the relationship between the culture dimensions measured by the most commonly used consulting assessment tools and actual organizational outcomes is frequently unclear, and that the tools most widely used in practice have limited evidence of predictive validity (CIPD, 2022). An organization with a deeply toxic culture is also an organization where the data collection process, the survey, the focus group, the interview, is compromised by the same dynamics producing the problem. Getting to the root cause may take longer than anticipated and require short burst process and culture improvement efforts, something many organizations claim not to have time for, and consultants aren’t structured to support. So the organization finds itself trying to address the most visible issue, often addressing a symptom and not a root cause. So the consultant whose diagnostic depends on self-reported data from a workforce that has been trained not to say what they actually think is measuring a managed version of the problem rather than the real one.

What are We Event Talking About

Most culture consulting engagements begin with a scoping conversation in which the organization describes the problem as it understands it, or more precisely, as the leadership is willing to name it. The framing of the problem determines the framing of the solution and many consultants find themselves having to accept what the client tells them at face value.

The consultant who is told “we have a communication problem between departments” then designs a communication-focused engagement. The consultant who is not told that two senior leaders have been the subject of repeated internal complaints that were never investigated, or that the compliance hotline data from the last two years shows a pattern nobody has acted on, will not go looking for those things. They were not asked to. The scope did not include it. The contract did not fund it. The communication focused engagement fails to account for the root problems. The consultant will probably sense something is off but has no power or authority to challenge at the later stages.

Peer-reviewed research on client-consultant dynamics found that the power relationship between client and consultant shapes what questions get asked, what data gets surfaced, and what findings are considered within scope (Svensson, Lund Institute of Economic Research, 2010). The client defines the territory. The consultant works within it.

When the territory has been drawn to exclude the most inconvenient part of the landscape, the resulting assessment reflects a managed version of the problem rather than the real one.

This matters especially in organizations with active culture problems, because the organization that most needs an honest external assessment is also the one most likely to have a leadership culture that shapes the scoping conversation to protect itself. The consultant who pushes back on the scope, who says the evidence suggests the problem is not where you have described it and asks to look somewhere else, is the consultant most likely to lose the engagement. That is the logical consequence of a business model in which the client controls the contract.

The second failure point is what happens with the findings. Organizations have every legal and operational right to receive a consulting report and decide not to act on its recommendations. It’s not different than a compliance or risk officer recommending corrective or mitigating actions. The management is under no obligation to take action. The recommendations that would require leaders to change their own behavior, restructure accountability, or investigate something they would prefer not to investigate get noted and deferred perhaps with an excuse about cost, level of effort or other things. The recommendations that are easier, a new communication platform, a values refresh, a leadership development series, move forward. The engagement closes and the bills are paid. Consultant washes their hands and moves the next… as long as the client was happy in the end, that’s what matters. The organization commissioned an assessment and received one. The consultant delivered what the contract specified. And the underlying problem, the one that was not called out in the scoping conversation and whose most consequential recommendations were quietly shelved, continues to operate exactly as it did before.

This is not incompetence or malicious behavior, but it is the predictable outcome of a process in which the organization retains full control over what gets examined and what gets done with the results. The check the box appearance of an external intervention can satisfy a board inquiry, a regulatory question, or an employee population that has been told leadership is taking the culture seriously. Whether it satisfies the actual problem depends entirely on whether anyone with the power to act on the findings chose to do so.

Who Should Fix It?

When a consulting firm is hired by and reports exclusively to the leadership that produced the culture problem, the consultants financial relationship is with the source of the problem. The most consequential findings in a culture assessment are almost never the ones that make the person who wrote the check look good. Perhaps it’s new leadership and there’s no reflection on them, but it may apply pressure to immediately show themselves as different than the predecessor, or to deflect any negativity around those who remain. Research on the client-consultant relationship identifies the power asymmetry between client and consultant as a fundamental constraint on the objectivity of the output, particularly when the consultant’s access to information, to people, and to continued engagement depends on maintaining the relationship with leadership (Svensson, 2010).

The McKinsey case is the most documented example of what happens when consulting relationships drift entirely from the client’s actual interest and from the public interest simultaneously.

McKinsey settled with 47 states, five US territories, and the District of Columbia for $573 million in 2021, after documents released through the UCSF and Johns Hopkins Opioid Industry Documents Archive revealed that the firm had advised opioid manufacturers including Purdue Pharma on strategies to increase OxyContin sales while simultaneously holding contracts with the FDA to improve drug safety oversight.

A House Oversight Committee investigation found that McKinsey staffed at least 22 consultants simultaneously at both the FDA and opioid manufacturers on related topics, never disclosed the conflict of interest over a period of more than ten years, and that senior partners discussed deleting documents when litigation began (House Committee on Oversight and Reform, The Firm and the FDA, April 2022). In December 2024, the Department of Justice announced a resolution of criminal and civil investigations into McKinsey’s work with Purdue, including charging a former senior McKinsey partner with obstruction of justice (DOJ, December 2024).

McKinsey is not the only firm to have faced documented conflicts of interest and this doesn’t just happen in the US. Bain & Company and Boston Consulting Group were both banned from bidding on South African government contracts following their roles in a state capture scandal, and BCG agreed to forfeit $14 million in profits in Angola after admitting to a bribery scandal (The Conversation, June 2025). The French government’s over-reliance on McKinsey during the COVID-19 pandemic led to what became known as McKinsey Gate, a Senate investigation and public scandal over undisclosed relationships between the firm and the Macron administration.

These are extreme cases but they are worth noting not because they represent the typical culture consulting engagement, but because they show what the structural conflicts of interest in the industry look like when they are allowed to compound without accountability. Leadership comes in and says I need XYZ, the consulting firm says ok great and sets off to accomplish the task, blinders on, distractions pushed aside with the goal to be produce what has been asked.

It Can Actually Work

Part 5 is not an argument against consultants. It is an argument for being honest about what you are buying, why, and what conditions need to be present for the purchase to produce anything other than a report nobody opens six months later.

The organizations that use consulting engagements most effectively tend to share characteristics that have nothing to do with the firm they hire. The leadership team that commissioned the engagement is genuinely open to findings that implicate their own behavior. More than once, I stopped discussions with consultants to fill them in on what was really happening and that if they aimed to be successful, we could not ignore certain elements of the discussion. They’d often be a bit rattled, but in the end, it was about coming together to define how our efforts would still ultimately satisfy the task. Worst case, we went back and asked to rescope. But it took me, as a leader, to say if you don’t rescope this is waste of funds and I can’t sign off on that. That’s not something many are willing to do.

Success comes when the scope is negotiated to include the actual problem rather than the version we tell to keep from alarming people. It comes when there is a documented accountability mechanism for acting on recommendations that is not controlled entirely by the people the recommendations are about. We see success when the engagement is designed to build internal capability rather than create ongoing external dependency and when the people closest to the problem, not just the senior leaders with the conference room and the budget, had genuine input into what was examined.

When those conditions are present, an external consultant can add real value. When they are not present, the engagement is more likely to serve as a pressure valve, allowing leadership to point to action without producing it, instead of creating actual change.

The single most predictive factor in whether a culture engagement produces lasting change is whether the people who have the most power in the organization are genuinely committed to changing their own behavior. A consultant cannot manufacture that commitment. They can create conditions that support it, surface data that makes it harder to deny, and provide a framework for what it looks like in practice. But the commitment has to be real before the consultant arrives, not performed for the engagement’s duration and abandoned when the final report is delivered.

Where Does this Leave Us?

Five posts into this series, here is where we have arrived. Culture is not the poster. It is the behavior the organization actually rewards. The room has looked the same for a long time and the data shows what that costs. The American workplace is built on structural choices that shape every culture problem inside it. Toxicity is a pattern with a documented invoice. And external consultation, when not structured carefully and when the conditions for genuine change are not present, is more likely to produce a professionally designed artifact of effort than actual change.

We’re clearly honing in on the issue of structure and how when the cornerstone is cracked, everything else starts to crumble, yet we rarely take the time and effort to fix the foundation, we just keep building and slapping extra concrete on the visible parts to hide what people can see.

Part 6 will take us to building an infrastructure that does not depend on anyone coming in from the outside to name what people inside already know. That means trained investigators, documented processes, and maybe a complaint mechanism that actually works in the environment the organization operates in now, not the one it operated in twenty years ago. It requires a leadership culture where the person closest to the problem can say what they see without calculating the cost of saying it.

That is harder to build than anyone realizes and it takes longer. It requires the people at the top to genuinely want it and to behave accordingly when nobody is watching. But it is also the key thing that actually changes a culture. And that is exactly where we are going next week.

Next week: Building the Infrastructure, Not Just the Intention. What it actually takes to build an organization capable of hearing and acting on concerns, from the investigation function to the trained people to the processes that work in the environment organizations actually operate in today.

Sources:

• Hughes, M., “Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?,” Journal of Change Management (2011);

• Beer, M. & Nohria, N., “Cracking the Code of Change,” Harvard Business Review (2000);

• Beer, M., Eisenstat, R. & Spector, B., “Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change,” Harvard Business Review (1990);

• Kotter, J.P., “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail,” Harvard Business Review (1995);

• Kotter, J.P., Akhtar, V. & Gupta, G., “Overcoming Obstacles to Successful Culture Change,” MIT Sloan Management Review (2021);

• Schein, E.H. & Schein, P., Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th ed. (Wiley, 2016);

• CIPD, Organisational Culture and Performance: Scientific Summary (July 2022);

• Prosci, Best Practices in Change Management, 12th ed. (2023); McKinsey & Company, “The Inconvenient Truth about Change Management” (2009);

• Svensson, P., “Doing Value: Exclusion and Inclusion in Management Consultant-Client Interactions,”

• Lund Institute of Economic Research Working Paper Series (2010);

• House Committee on Oversight and Reform, The Firm and the FDA: McKinsey & Company’s Conflicts of Interest at the Heart of the Opioid Epidemic (April 2022);

• UCSF / Johns Hopkins University, Opioid Industry Documents Archive (2022);

• U.S. Department of Justice, Resolution of Criminal and Civil Investigations into McKinsey’s Work with Purdue Pharma (December 2024);

• Bogdanich, W. & Forsythe, M., When McKinsey Comes to Town (Penguin Random House, 2022);

• The Conversation, “What France’s McKinsey Gate Scandal Revealed About the Four Major Types of Consulting’s Conflicts of Interest” (June 2025)