Where Consulting Adds Value
The install handles: analysis, option generation, drafting, benchmarking, first-pass OKR review, the methodology's answers.
The human keeps the subtraction and the enforcement. Anyone can say "fewer goals"; a consultant makes the SLT kill goal #7 in the room and absorbs the anger. The delegate/pause/eliminate audit takes work away from named people: authority work, not analysis work. So is uninstalling the incentive systems that quietly fight the strategy (The Barnacle Problem): barnacle removal needs someone with licence to scrape.
Push-back with standing: telling the CEO the strategy has no crux, that the aspiration fails The Opposite Test, that the portfolio is Playing to Play with better numbers, to the people who wrote it. Creativity: leading Possibility Portraits live, importing the analogy from an industry the team has never read about.
Why external specifically: fewer biases: no sunk cost in last year's plan, no functional identity in the room (the design-chair biases); forcing function: the assessment fortnight makes a decade of deferred decisions due ("a look, not a project" is a deadline wearing a friendly face); new perspectives: a pattern library from 100+ organisations that no insider can have.
Highest-value moments: the diagnosis (The Kernel), the portfolio cap negotiation (OKR Portfolio Governance), gate design, the capacity audit, and every conversation where something must stop.
From ZOKRI practice, 2026. The honest map of what we sell humans for, and what we refuse to.
The install handles the knowing. This is the part it can’t do.