The Craft of Policy Consulting: Before We Begin …
Early in my consulting career, I learned something that no methodology framework ever taught me.
A client hired our team to conduct a feasibility assessment. The scope looked straightforward. The contract was signed. We were ready to work.
Then we asked for the research questions.
They didn't have them. They thought we should develop them. So we did. We drafted them carefully, grounded in the literature, aligned with the project scope. Then we tried to get them approved.
That's where things got strange.
The questions were neither endorsed nor rejected. Meetings were scheduled and rescheduled. We were up against a timeline, do we start the work? Are we on the right track?
We started doing research, trying to be responsive, trying to move the project forward. We were spinning our wheels and burning through budget on work that wasn't hitting the mark, because we still didn't know what the mark actually was.
Eventually a policy analyst pulled us aside and just told us what the real questions were. Not through an official channel. Just a quiet conversation that unlocked the whole project.
We got there. But it cost everyone time and money that didn't need to be spent.
Looking back, there was internal disagreement about the project's direction that nobody was willing to surface formally. We were brought in to do research, but what the client actually needed first was internal alignment. Nobody had named that, including us.
This is more common than anyone likes to admit. Clients don't always know exactly what they need when they hire a consultant. That's not a criticism. Policy problems are genuinely complex, and figuring out the right question is often part of the work. The trouble comes when that uncertainty stays unspoken. When the real decision about what a project is supposed to accomplish hasn't been made yet, and nobody says so out loud.
The presenting problem was "we need a feasibility assessment." The real problem was "we haven't agreed internally on what we're trying to achieve." No amount of good research methodology fixes that second problem.
A good consultant can help with alignment
Before you bring in outside help, it's worth asking whether your own house is in order. Not because consultants can't work with ambiguity, but because unacknowledged ambiguity is what drives projects off the rails and over budget.
If internal alignment is missing, name it. A good consulting team can help you get there. But it needs to be part of the scope, not an assumption buried underneath it.
The most useful question you can ask before a project begins is a simple one: do the people who need to agree on what success looks like actually agree? If the answer is uncertain, that's where the work starts.
This is the first post in a new series, The Craft of Policy Consulting. Over the coming weeks I'll be writing about what good policy consulting actually looks like from the inside: the dynamics that don't show up in a scope of work, the judgment calls that experience teaches you, and the conversations that make or break a project.
Susan Underhill is the founder of Connor Claire Group, a policy and management consulting firm serving government and non-profit clients across Canada. She has over two decades of experience working at municipal, provincial, federal, and First Nations levels of government.