The Procurement of Vague Anxiety

There comes a point in every organisation’s life where somebody says:

“We should probably get consultants in.”

This sentence usually appears after two years of strategic drift, several programme resets, and the slow institutional dawning that nobody can clearly explain why simple things now require governance boards.

Importantly, this is not because the organisation lacks intelligent people. Quite the opposite.

Modern organisations are full of highly capable professionals attending meetings about problems they can sense perfectly well but cannot describe in plain English.

A bridge collapsing is obvious. You can point at that and say “ooh, a bridge collapsed, a new one must be built!”

A customer system quietly degrading over eight years into a haunted administrative ecosystem held together by spreadsheets, temporary workarounds, and Keith, is much harder to diagnose and solve.

So eventually somebody senior says:

“We need external support.”

And thus begins the procurement of vague anxiety.

The fascinating thing is that clients often do not know what they are buying. My colleague asked me “if there is no brief, is there a difference between a consultant and an auditor?”. I think he might be on to something.

Leaders will say they need assurance. Or transformation. Or discovery. Or a Target Operating Model. Occasionally they say they need innovation, which normally means they are tired of driving and want to sit in the back.

What they actually want is for the discomfort to stop.

They do not know whether they need an auditor, a system architect, or an emotional support consultant who nods sympathetically while translating organisational dread into PowerPoint.

This uncertainty does not delay procurement in any way. If anything, it accelerates it. Because there is nothing more energising to an institution than the collective realisation that nobody understands why things take so long.

At this point the brief emerges.

The brief is always magnificent.

It will contain phrases like “future-ready operating model” or “customer-centred transformation”. Or the immortal “review the current state and identify opportunities.”

Which is corporate speak for:

“Something feels ouchy but we’d like you to discover it without upsetting anybody important.”

The truly remarkable part is that the client often does not know what success looks like either.

Only what irritation feels like.

Customers are unhappy.

Staff have developed strange survival behaviours.

Nobody trusts the data.

The same conversation keeps happening in slightly different meeting rooms. Year after year after…..

Entire teams now spend their lives producing assurance for other teams producing assurance.

Occasionally someone asks:

“Who actually owns this?”

This question is considered unhelpfully philosophical and they are ushered away quietly.

The market, meanwhile, is wonderfully adaptable.

Consultancies never arrive and say “You appear existentially confused!”.  Instead they say:

“We recommend a discovery phase.”

This is perfect because a discovery phase sounds active while postponing accountability for whether anything is actually discovered.

Soon a team arrives carrying laptops and expensive calmness. They conduct workshops. They map stakeholders. They ask:

“What problem are we trying to solve?”

This creates immediate tension because the honest answer is often “I thought that’s why we agreed to pay you???”

Over time, diagrams begin to appear. Then maturity assessments. Then delivery roadmaps.

Eventually a Target Operating Model materialises from the organisational mist like a medieval prophecy.

The Target Operating Model is a sacred artefact.

It usually contains circles, arrows, layered governance structures, and at least one triangle for reasons nobody can fully explain.

Nobody understands the Target Operating Model. But this is important. If the diagram were immediately understandable, somebody internally might have drawn it six years ago, which would make the procurement exercise politically awkward.

The original problem meanwhile remains stubbornly alive. Not because consultants are fraudulent. Not because auditors are cynical.

But because organisations frequently go shopping for answers before agreeing on the question.

What they purchase is not expertise alone.

They purchase organisational paracetamol.

Assurance that somebody external has entered the building, interviewed twenty-seven people, read all the documents, checked them for ‘compliance’ and finally said:

“Ah. Right. So these are actually six unrelated processes wearing a trench coat pretending to be a strategy.”

Is that worth the expense?