Most strategy consultants only interview leadership.

Most strategy consultants only interview leadership. That's the workshop model. You get the leaders in a room for two days, you facilitate exercises, you produce a positioning statement everyone agrees with, and then you leave. It's clean, it's billable, and it's structurally broken.

Here is the structural problem. The people in the room where positioning gets decided are the ones who can't see the problem, because they're inside it. Leadership built the current story. They hired around it. They defend it in every meeting. Asking them to diagnose it is asking the author to proofread their own book. They will catch typos. They will not catch the plot hole.

The workshop model doesn't fail because the exercises are bad or the facilitator is lazy. It fails because it collects one view of the organization and treats it as the whole picture. Consensus in the room is not evidence. It is the absence of anyone positioned to disagree.

You can tell this has happened to an organization by what follows the engagement. The slide deck is good. Everyone agreed with it. It gets presented, circulated, and filed. A year later the numbers look the same and nobody can quite explain why, because the strategy was built from the only vantage point that couldn't see the obstruction.

The alternative is slower and less comfortable. You interview leadership, staff, and customers separately. Not together, and not in a workshop, because people in a room with their boss report the org chart, not the truth.

Leadership tells you the vision. Staff tell you the operational reality. Customers tell you the experience. Then you lay the three transcripts side by side, and the findings are not in any one of them. The findings are in the gaps between them.

When leadership says premium and customers say convenient, that gap is the strategy problem. When staff describe a workaround that leadership doesn't know exists, that gap is the strategy problem. No workshop surfaces these, because no single room contains them.

If you've hired a consultant who spent two days with your leadership team, produced a deck everyone agreed with, and left, and nothing has changed since, the workshop wasn't your problem. The room was.

This is the method behind Authority Architect, the diagnostic I run at OCIDM. Three sets of interviews, run separately, compared honestly. The organization usually already contains the answer. It has just never been in one document before.