The reinvention of consulting
The consulting in its traditional meaning is being broken and we are witnessing a new model being born.
What we do is not fixing the old model of consulting, but reinventing it. We can speak about plurality of new models, rather than just about one. Nevertheless, when we want to speak about the model that is undoubtedly the future, we are speaking about CROWDCONSULTING — a type of consulting which is not one-person-based, but crowd-based.
Today, the information is a commodity thanks to the Internet. An average person has an access to as much information as the US President 15 years ago. Take the example of bloggers. Given the fact that the information is not available anymore just to the privileged group of journalists, everybody can right a good quality content. The bloggers are in the real sense of the word competing with traditional newspapers, which are struggling to survive.
Having said this, what the new model of consulting offers is not the information, but rather the brain time and advice from a diverse enough group of individuals, based on the available information. Our logic is that, having a big network of people, means more brains and more efficiency. When people pay for consulting services today, they do not pay for the information, but for the brain time.
The new consulting platforms, such as Brainsfeed.com, Innocentive and Agorize, among others, are following this logic. As a crowdconsulting platforms, they suppose having a diverse group of individuals, possessing decentralized and dispersed knowledge and willing to give the advice their clients need. The accent is not only on providing people with the information — which they could probably find themselves — but also on providing them with some brain time and brain effort from people of different backgrounds and experts in diverse fields, registered on these platforms. In this case, the brain time is context-specific, addressing the specific needs of a client, which is not the case with one-size-fit advice, characteristic for traditional consulting companies.
According to Friedrich Hayek’s theory, dispersed knowledge in economics is the notion according to which no single agent has information as to all of the factors which influence prices and production throughout the system. This brings me to my point — if every individual has some knowledge, but incomplete, reaching the biggest possible number of individuals can provide us with the most complete knowledge.
That is why we say the crowd-consulting is the future. Dispersed knowledge covering a wide range of fields is the answer. The picture we get is very broad, almost complete, covering each and every aspect of what we need. In order to succeed, the entrepreneur needs a good use and analysis of the information available, and the most complete feedback lies in dispersed knowledge.
On crowdconsulting platforms, people make their payments depending on the quality of the input provided. This type of consulting is safer, quicker and Online. Moreover, entrepreneurs get a real value from the money, as they have many people from different fields participating in order to help them, which also makes the process more competitive and, consequently, creates better quality inputs. Producing high-quality inputs for small price is yet another advantage, which makes it possible for entrepreneurs having no substantial financial means to get the necessary help and feedback on their project. These start-ups are all about diversified crowdsourcing and the registered users are deadline sensitive. Timing is another important advantage of those platforms, as in traditional consulting, the consultants would get paid anyway, and with these new consultancies, there is a deadline for providing feedback, which makes them more efficient. Even if certain people on the platform do not respect the deadline, there is still a large number of those who do, which makes the risk of postponing the delivery of advice equivalent to zero.
It is time to face the fact that the concept of consulting is being reshaped. The big consulting companies tried to avoid disruption for long time, but the raise of new technologies, big data and new business models made way for it. The consulting as we know it is on the cusp of disruption. Although we cannot forecast the exact progress of disruption in the consulting industry, we can state that, whatever its pace, it is inevitable. The pace of change will continue to accelerate and the best strategy is either to be a part of it or adapt to it. After almost a century of successful functioning of traditional concept of consulting, the time has come to embrace the new concept being created.
About: Brainsfeed is a Crowd-Consulting platform powered by AI that leverages cognitive diversity for better results. Register here
