Large consulting teams are very good at making work look serious.
There are decks, workstreams, steering meetings, status colors, and enough people on the call that nobody feels alone with the decision. For some problems, scale is necessary. For many, it becomes a way to add distance between the people describing the strategy and the people discovering whether it works.
That distance is expensive.
Lean consulting is not a smaller invoice with nicer language. It is a different operating model. Keep the team senior. Keep it persistent. Put it close to the stakeholder and the work. Let strategy and execution inform each other daily instead of passing through layers of translation.
We saw a mobile app ship in five weeks because the team broke some of the usual rules. They did not remove discipline. They removed waste. Direct access replaced status theater. Fast decisions replaced waiting for the next governance checkpoint. The team could pivot because the people seeing the problem had enough authority to respond.
The old assumption was that big problems require big machinery. Sometimes they require fewer people, closer to the work, with less room to hide behind process.
Cutting waste is not the same thing as cutting corners. One produces speed. The other produces rework with a better calendar invite.
Related episode: Feeling Bloated? Time for Some Lean Consulting.
