Most advice arrives slightly too loud. By volume I do not mean the literal sound. I mean the way it occupies the room. A piece of advice, like a dinner guest, can be the right thing said at the wrong volume, and a great deal of useful advice has been wasted by being delivered as if it were urgent when it was, in fact, only true.
There is a temptation, in this profession, to arrive loud. The client is paying. The clock is ticking. The deck has to demonstrate insight, which we have somehow agreed should look like underlines and bold and exclamatory subheadings. Strategy, performed at high volume, signals confidence. Confidence signals competence. Competence signals invoiceable.
The trouble is that high-volume advice is almost always heard once, agreed with quickly, and not acted upon. The room nods because the room is not in a position to disagree with shouting. Then the room goes back to its desk, and within three weeks the advice has been quietly archived, and the company is doing approximately what it was always going to do.
Quiet advice has the opposite arc. Quiet advice is, at first, harder to remember. The room has to lean in. There is a small risk that no-one is impressed. The slide does not look like a slide. The memo does not look like a memo. But quiet advice has the property of being repeatable. The CEO can say it on Monday in the lift, in their own voice, without quoting anyone. By Friday, two people on the executive team are saying it back to them. By the next quarter, no-one quite remembers it came from outside. This is the highest compliment the work can receive, and it requires that the original advice arrive at exactly the right volume.
The right volume, for almost any piece of strategic advice, is roughly the volume at which one would tell a friend a piece of news in a kitchen on a Tuesday evening. Not whispered. Not announced. The volume of I think the thing is X, and I'm fairly sure, but you'd know better. There is a kind of sentence one can say at that volume that one cannot say in a deck, and it tends to be the sentence that matters.
The reason this is hard is that it requires the consultant to have an opinion and to hold it lightly at the same time. The consultant who has no opinion is useless; the consultant who holds the opinion too tightly cannot be argued with, and arguing is the only way the opinion ever becomes the company's. Holding an opinion lightly does not mean holding it weakly. It means knowing where the opinion came from, what it is and is not based on, and being willing to say I might be wrong about this without losing the thread.
Doing this in a room takes practice. The most common failure is to pre-emptively soften, which reads as nervousness. The second most common is to over-confide, which reads as flattery. The advice should arrive as if you have been thinking about the company on the train, which is true, and have noticed something on the way in, which is also true, and would like to mention it before the meeting moves on.
The medium matters too. Some advice is correctly given in a memo, some on a wall, some in an email at six on a Sunday, some in a phone call from a station platform. A great deal of bad advice is bad not in content but in delivery. A two-line text, sent at the right moment, can do work that a forty-page deck cannot. A forty-page deck can do work that the two-line text cannot. The skill is not in producing more deliverables; it is in choosing the smallest one that will be heard.
My rule, after some years, is to ask: where will this be remembered, and by whom? If the answer is "at the next board meeting," it can be a slide. If the answer is "in the kitchen, after work, when the CEO is alone," it must be a sentence. The two have nothing in common except the truth they contain.
Most companies, in my experience, are not under-advised. They are over-advised, and at the wrong volume. The job, often, is not to add another voice. It is to lower one of the voices already in the room until it is finally hearable. Once it is hearable, the company tends to take it from there.
On a Tuesday. In the kitchen. Without a deck.