Consultancy Technology Outlook - #7

While the workshops are online, they will be brought into the offline world as well. A team is discussing the outcomes and next steps; by sitting in a meeting room or at a video conference. In both cases, the workshop might need some tangibles to spice them up.

Enter merchandising.

When consultants offer a webshop to sell online assessments, they have the channel to sell accessories that managers can use to spice up their workshops, team meetings, and their talks with employees. Think of awards, personalized certificates, and diplomas or ribbons. There is merchandising to playfully split the group up in smaller chunks for a group game. Consider demonstration material to underline an item in the step-by-step improvement overview. Anything offline that supports the online consulting process.

The possibilities are endless and, with a large part of the online fulfillment process automated, an excellent additional source of income.

Current BI2A’s (Business Issue Interpretation Algorithms) aim to be as agnostic as possible to country-, industry- or issue-specific influences to assure they can be applied everywhere. A new breed does the opposite: it focuses specifically on specific business issues or market segments.  

For example, despite that every team is usually considered unique, we found that team effectiveness comes in just six flavors. Such issue-specific interpretation will only flourish when consultants sufficiently scale. There is much data required (depending on the issue, 100 to 500 client projects minimum) to train these interpretation algorithms but – in case of team effectiveness – they turn out to be a perfect bellwether for levels of organizational alignment and resistance-to-change.

Consultancy firms that are the first movers with content-specific interpretation algorithms will reign their segment.