Adoption
Why 42% of our recommendations went nowhere
Three causes, and 31% of them were scoping failures we should have caught. Here is what we changed.
Management Consulting · Carrollton, TX · Est. 2015
We publish how many of our recommendations were actually done.
ClearPeak Consulting works on operating performance for companies across North Texas. Twelve months after every engagement we go back and count how many of our recommendations were implemented. The rate is 58%, and the 42% that sat on a shelf is the more useful number.
- Years in North Texas
- 10
- Engagements completed
- 214
- Adoption at 12 months
- 58%
- Engagements we declined
- 23%
Founded 2015
Operating and commercial
Recommendations implemented
Of qualified enquiries
01 — The problem
A report nobody implements is a report that worked.
A consultancy delivers a hundred-page report with thirty-one recommendations. The client thanks them, the invoice is paid, and the engagement is recorded as a success. Eighteen months later four of those thirty-one have happened. Nobody counts, because the deliverable was the report and the report was delivered.
Consulting is the only professional service where the deliverable can be complete and the outcome zero, and the firm still books a win. The measurement stops at handover, precisely where it starts to matter.
Low adoption usually means the recommendation was wrong for the organisation rather than that the client lacked discipline. It needed people they do not have, a system they cannot fund, or political capital nobody was ever going to spend. Those are scoping failures, and they belong to the consultant.
So we return at twelve months and count. Our rate is 58% across 214 engagements. We publish what went unimplemented and why, and the reasons have changed how we scope more than any internal review ever did.
58% adoption at twelve months. The unimplemented 42% is where the scoping errors are.
Consulting is the only professional service where the deliverable can be complete and the outcome zero.
02 — The record
Why recommendations go unimplemented.
Adoption at twelve months — last three yearsRecommendations implemented, and the reasons the rest were not
Implemented as recommendedDone, substantially as written, within twelve months.1,104 recs
58%
Needed people they did not haveOur largest failure. We recommended work with no owner and no hire attached.247 recs
13%
Required unfunded system changeA recommendation dependent on software nobody had budgeted.190 recs
10%
Politically impossible from the startCorrect, and never going to survive contact with the org chart.152 recs
8%
Overtaken by eventsMarket shifts, acquisitions, leadership change. Genuinely nobody's fault.133 recs
7%
Client chose a different pathThey disagreed and acted otherwise. Sometimes they were right.76 recs
4%
Thirty-one percent of our recommendations failed for reasons we should have caught while scoping — no owner, no budget, or no political path. Those are ours. Every recommendation now ships with a named owner, a cost, and an honest read of whether the organisation can actually carry it, which is why adoption has moved from 41% to 58%.
03 — How we work
Ten years across the Metroplex.
04 — How we work
Every recommendation ships with a named owner.
01
A named owner, a cost, and a date
No recommendation leaves without a person accountable, a funding figure, and a realistic timeline. Unowned recommendations are the single largest cause of non-adoption.
02
We return at twelve months
Unbilled. We count what happened and publish the adoption rate including the failures.
03
We decline engagements we cannot land
About 23% of qualified enquiries, usually where the organisation has no capacity to implement whatever we would recommend.
04
No implementation arm to sell you
We do not staff implementation. That removes the incentive to recommend work only we can deliver.
05
Politically impossible ideas are labelled
Where a recommendation is correct and unlikely to survive the org chart, the report says so rather than pretending otherwise.
06 — What this costs us
The twelve-month return is unbilled.
Going back a year later costs us several hundred unbillable hours annually and frequently produces a number nobody enjoys presenting.
Declining 23% of qualified enquiries costs more. Most of those organisations hired somebody else and got a report.
Adoption has moved from 41% to 58% since we started measuring. Attaching an owner and a cost to every recommendation did most of that, and we would never have known without counting.
What happened to your last report?
Count the recommendations. Then count the ones that happened. Nobody else will do it for you.