Consultant thinking: Sherlock Holmes – Consulting detective

Has there ever been such interest in Sherlock Holmes? Recently we’ve seen the release of two Hollywood blockbusters (with only a loose relationship to the character - in period, but more Indiana Jones than Sherlock Holmes) and two series of a BBC version set in the current day. The membership of the Sherlock Homes Society of London (yes, there is one – see http://www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk) is now at record levels with this surge of interest.

The TV series is a delight. Sherlock Holmes is the traditional consulting detective and James Moriarty, his arch enemy, is positioned as a consulting criminal – not an occupational classification we’ve come across before.

So, what are we to make of the consulting skills of Sherlock Holmes?

Useless! He exhibits all the gracelessness of the most arrogant technical specialist in dealing with his clients. Cases that are of little interest he immediately dismisses as “boring”; he regards everyone else as intellectually inferior (and the greatest insults that Moriarty threatens Holmes with are that he is boring, or not Moriarty’s intellectual equal); and his joy is the pursuit of the problem rather than the engagement with the people. But these are all the characteristics of the “natural child” in a consultant; and perhaps consultants all have a suppressed longing from time to time to be able to behave like this and get away with it!

Experienced consultants know that there are deep specialists in their practices who should be let out from their cages only under the supervision of a “keeper” when exposed to clients. Sherlock Holmes’s keeper is Dr John Watson, who attempts to compensate for the lack of Sherlock’s interpersonal skills.

But we still take pleasure in Sherlock; he is our hero. He resolves the problems that have defeated others; he collects evidence invisible to lesser mortals; he is adulated for his achievements, but this matters less to him than the fascination of the work. Wouldn’t we as consultants like to be heroes?

I have always liked this story that I was told early in my career. The client was a manufacturing company in the Midlands; the project was to improve business performance, which had been falling drastically. On the first day of their assignment the two consultants drove up to the head office and parked their car in the spot directly outside the front door, marked ‘Reserved for the Chairman’. They swept in to announce their arrival. ‘Tell the managing director,’ thundered one to the receptionist, ‘that the consultants have arrived!’

Consultant thinking: Sherlock Holmes – Consulting detective

Calvert Markham