The Expensive Echo: What Boards Are Really Buying When They Commission a Consultant

There is a quiet fiction at the heart of much UK consulting work: that the client hires the consultant to discover something they do not know. Spend enough time in British boardrooms and you will learn that this is frequently not the case. More often than not, the answer was reached months ago. What the board is purchasing is permission — a stamped, independent document that allows the decision to be announced as though it were still open for debate.

This is the advisory gap: the space between what buyers say they want from consultants and what they actually need them to do.

The Governance Logic Behind the Ritual

It would be easy to dismiss this as cynicism, but the practice has rational roots. UK corporate governance culture, shaped by the Corporate Governance Code and the habits of listed and PE-backed businesses alike, places a premium on demonstrable process. A non-executive director facing an uncomfortable restructuring does not merely want to believe the plan is sound; they want evidence that independent expertise has stress-tested it. In this sense, commissioning a review is not theatre — it is risk management.

The difficulty arises when the distinction blurs. Validation sought in good faith is one thing. Validation sought to pre-empt a challenge, to settle an internal faction, or to provide cover for a decision nobody wishes to own is another. The deliverable looks identical in both cases. The intent could not be more different.

When Validation Is Worth the Fee

Let us be fair to the practice. There are circumstances in which confirming a decision is genuinely valuable work:

• High-irreversibility choices. Where a decision cannot easily be unwound — a major acquisition, a site closure, a platform migration — the cost of an external check is trivial against the cost of being wrong.
• Contested internal evidence. When two camps within a business hold incompatible analyses, a third party can adjudicate on the facts rather than the personalities.
• Capability gaps in scrutiny, not judgement. Sometimes the board believes the answer but lacks the technical depth to interrogate the assumptions beneath it.

In each of these, the consultant's role is not to be clever. It is to be rigorous, and to be seen to be rigorous. Done honestly, that is worth paying for.

When It Becomes Expensive Theatre

The theatre begins when the conclusion is fixed before the fieldwork starts. The warning signs are familiar to anyone who has worked in the profession: the scope that curiously excludes the one area where the answer might change; the steering group that meets only to review the draft; the steer, delivered in a softly lit breakout room at a service station, that the board 'has a direction of travel' and the review should 'support it'.

The British corporate habit of preferring process over confrontation makes this especially fertile ground. Nobody wants to be the executive who says the emperor's strategy is unclothed. The consultant who does so may find the invoice disputed and the references withheld.

What Honest Consultants Should Do

If we accept that validation engagements are a permanent feature of the landscape, the professional obligation shifts. Consultants should be candid about what they are being asked to provide. Where the client genuinely wants scrutiny, that should be stated in the engagement letter. Where the client wants endorsement, the consultant should either decline or renegotiate the terms to preserve some genuine independence — a requirement that the review may conclude the plan should not proceed, for instance, and that this conclusion will be reported to the full board rather than the sponsor alone.

There is also a duty of candour in the other direction. Buyers of consulting services should ask themselves, before commissioning work, a single uncomfortable question: if the consultant disagrees with us, will that finding be allowed to see daylight? If the honest answer is no, the engagement is not a review. It is a press release with footnotes.

Closing the Gap

None of this argues against the profession. It argues for honesty about the transaction. The best consulting relationships I have observed in the UK market are those where both parties admitted early that the decision was largely made — and then used the engagement to make that decision genuinely defensible, testing it against the strongest available counter-arguments rather than the weakest.

That is not expensive theatre. That is due diligence with the lights on. The advisory gap closes not when boards stop hiring consultants for answers they have, but when everyone in the room is willing to say out loud what the work is actually for.