Board game pieces and dice scattered across a game board, mid-play, accompanying a blog post titled "When the Game Is Already Over".
EngagementNon-profit sectorOrganizational designPolicy reviewPublic sectorStrategy

When the game is already over

Susan Underhill·2026-06-30

Part three: The craft of policy consulting

Here's the situation. A board approves a restructuring. Leadership is told to implement it. The people who'll live inside the new structure find out after the fact. By the time a consultant walks in, the engagement isn't about shaping the decision anymore. It's about building the plan that sits on top of it.

That's exactly when a consultant has to decide what kind of advisor they're going to be.

One option is to run the standard process: hold the sessions, ask the questions, draft the plan that matches what the board already had in mind. Nobody pushes back in the final presentation. The contract closes cleanly. Everyone moves on.

The other option is harder and less comfortable for everyone, including the consultant. It means actually listening to what comes out of those sessions, and saying so when it doesn't match the story the board has already settled on: here's what the board says it wants, here's what leadership says it wants, and here's where those two things don't line up. It means asking for the conversation that should have happened before the structure was finalized, even though it's late, even though nobody asked for that conversation, even though it might slow things down.

Most clients can't tell which kind of consultant they've hired until they're already inside the engagement. That's the real risk here, and it's the one nobody puts in the RFP.

The cost of the first option doesn't show up right away. It shows up later, in slower implementation, in disengaged staff, in a leadership team that nods in meetings and resists everywhere else. By then, the consultant who avoided the friction is usually gone.

What good looks like

If you want to know which kind of advisor you've hired before you're deep into a project, here's what to watch for.

  • Listen to how they describe the engagement at the outset. Do they talk about delivering the plan, or do they ask who else needs to be in the room before the plan gets written?
  • Notice what happens when they hear two conflicting stories from different parts of your organization. Do they quietly pick the version that matches what the most senior person in the room wants to hear, or do they say, out loud, that the stories don't match?
  • Pay attention to whether disagreement makes it into the documented findings, or only the parts everyone already agreed on.
  • And ask yourself, honestly, whether you want a consultant who tells you what's comfortable or one who tells you what's true. Most leaders say they want the second. Fewer actually reward it when it shows up.

The test of a good engagement isn't whether the final deck looks clean. It's whether your organization is in better shape to live with its own decision once the consultant is gone.

This is the third post in The Craft of Policy Consulting, a series on the judgment and dynamics that shape consulting work in the public and non-profit sectors.

Susan Underhill is the founder of Connor Claire Group, a policy and management consulting firm serving government and non-profit clients across Canada.