Seven Cs of Consulting, The

Timing

The measured success of a project is often linked more to the timing of the assessment than to the delivered benefit. Some change processes will kick in overnight; others might take weeks or months and some large-scale processes might take years to realize a payback for the company. As Senge et al. (1999) stress, don't judge the ultimate success or failure of your efforts based solely on early results. Managers often want to pull up the radishes to see how they are growing and pushing the measuring process can disrupt the delivery of the desired outcome. As such we constantly disregard the importance of time delays in the engagement and assume that we live in a mechanistic society where an input leads to an immediate output. The possibility ...