Unsustainable Sustainability Consulting

I have spent a substantial part of my professional life advising companies and governments on sustainability.

Sustainability consultants spend much of their time advising companies on how to behave responsibly. We speak of fair value chains, responsible procurement, stakeholder well-being, long-term resilience and treating suppliers as partners rather than disposable inputs.

Which makes it mildly awkward when these principles begin to disappear at the point where the sustainability consultant enters the value chain.

The signs are familiar: fees are cut before proposals are read, professional services are pushed through reverse auctions, scopes expand after contracts are signed, invoices develop remarkable survival skills, and preliminary discussions occasionally become consulting assignments delivered free of charge.

None of this is new to consulting. But there is a certain irony when it happens in the name of sustainability.

Hence the title:

Unsustainable Sustainability Consulting.

Its operating principle is simple: ask the consultant to help make your business sustainable while steadily making the consultant’s own business model less sustainable.

Five recurring situations illustrate the phenomenon.

1. The 50 Percent Solution

A proposal is submitted after discussions, review of background material and some thought about methodology, team and effort.

A few days later, the client calls.

The proposal has not really been read—except, apparently, the last page containing the commercials.

There is one immediate concern.

The fee is too high.

Would we reduce it by 50 percent?

I find the precision impressive. Nobody has evaluated the methodology, questioned the person-days or suggested reducing the scope. Yet the correct fee has somehow been scientifically determined to be exactly half.

Perhaps consultants overcomplicate matters by preparing detailed proposals. In future, we could simply submit:

Proposed fee: ₹40 lakh.
Client-reviewed fee: ₹20 lakh.

There is nothing wrong with negotiating fees. Consultants must justify what they charge, and seniority alone does not justify a premium.

But there is a difference between negotiating value and simply applying division by two.

I have occasionally considered trying the same method with airlines or doctors, where one often discovers the price only at the point of exit.

So far, I lack the courage.

2. The Reverse Auction Arena

Then comes the reverse auction.

The technical proposal has been evaluated. The consultant has qualified. One begins to believe that knowledge and methodology have mattered.

Then several firms are invited to an online auction.

At 3 p.m., numbers begin to fall.

₹48 lakh.

₹45 lakh.

₹41 lakh.

₹38 lakh.

Somewhere, one imagines a procurement manager watching with the satisfaction of a spectator at a gladiatorial contest.

Eventually, one bidder reaches a price at which the assignment can perhaps be delivered only by eliminating travel, analysis, senior oversight and possibly the consultant.

The system announces:

You are L1.

A second message might be useful:

Our condolences.

Reverse auctions make sense for standardised goods. But professional advice is not steel. A climate-risk assessment by a multidisciplinary senior team is not necessarily equivalent to one delivered by junior staff following a template.

Yet intellectual services are increasingly procured as though we were purchasing identical office chairs.

The irony is particularly satisfying when the assignment itself concerns responsible procurement.

3. The Scope That Practises Circular Economy

The third client is initially a delight.

There is little negotiation. The proposal is accepted. The contract arrives.

Then the assignment starts expanding.

Since we are already assessing ESG performance, could we also examine the supply chain?

Since we are speaking to suppliers, could we develop a questionnaire?

Since the data are available, could we prepare a dashboard?

And perhaps benchmark global peers, conduct two workshops and prepare a Board presentation?

Each request is modest on its own. Together they perform a remarkable act of multiplication.

One assignment becomes two while consuming no additional financial resources.

This is circular economy in its purest form.

Nothing is wasted.

Not even the consultant.

The technical expression is scope creep, although “creep” understates the athletic ability of some scopes. They do not creep. They gallop.

Experienced consultants learn to recognise certain phrases as ecological indicator species: “Could you just add…”, “While you are at it…”, and the especially dangerous, “It shouldn’t take much time.”

4. The Immortal Invoice

The fourth situation begins after the work is over.

The report has been accepted. The presentation delivered. Everyone has thanked everyone else. The invoice is submitted.

Thirty days later, nothing has happened.

A polite enquiry produces the response that the invoice was never received.

It is sent again.

Two weeks later, it has entered the mysterious condition known as under process—a financial state somewhere between existence and reincarnation.

Soon one learns that the invoice has gone to Finance.

Finance, in many organisations, appears to be a distant geographical region from which travellers return only occasionally.

Then comes a query, a clarification, an amended purchase order, another approval—and the approver is travelling.

Meanwhile, the same organisation may publish an elegant sustainability report explaining how it strengthens the resilience of value-chain partners.

Apparently, cash flow does not qualify as social sustainability.

5. The Free Diagnostic

The fifth situation is subtler.

The client invites you for a preliminary discussion because they would greatly value your thinking.

This phrase should activate the consultant’s internal smoke detector.

The organisation is considering, say, a decarbonisation strategy but is unsure how to structure it.

So the consultant explains the architecture: emissions baseline, material Scope 3 categories, abatement options, targets, renewable energy, supplier interventions, scenarios and governance.

There are intelligent questions about targets, data and phasing. Someone takes detailed notes.

Before leaving, the consultant is asked to send a short note summarising the suggested approach.

A few weeks later comes the courteous message.

Thank you. The discussion was extremely useful. The company has decided to undertake the work internally.

Of course it has.

The consultant has supplied the map.

The client will now drive the car.

Sometimes the company returns months later and asks the consultant to review what it has produced using the consultant’s original framework.

Intellectual property has completed its lifecycle and come home.

Then I Meet my Professor Friend

I was rather pleased with these five examples until I narrated them to my Professor Friend.

He listened patiently over coffee, then observed that I had made the clients sound rather terrible.

I defended myself by saying that all five situations were familiar to anyone in consulting.

He agreed, but asked whether I had looked recently at the behaviour of consultants.

This was less comfortable territory.

He pointed to proposals overflowing with familiar language: net zero, circularity, nature positive, resilience, regeneration and AI-enabled transformation. Sometimes, he said, you have to reach page thirty before discovering what the consultant actually proposes to do.

Then there is the team page. Senior experts dominate the proposal and presentation. Impressive biographies reassure the client. Once the contract is signed, some of those experts develop a remarkable ability to disappear.

His next criticism was worse.

Consultants complain about being commoditised, he said, but many have helped commoditise themselves.

A materiality assessment can become a questionnaire and matrix. A climate strategy can become baseline-target-roadmap. An ESG strategy can become interviews, benchmarking and a PowerPoint deck.

AI will sharpen this tension. If a client can generate a respectable first draft of an ESG policy, supplier questionnaire or reporting framework in minutes, consultants cannot continue charging mainly for producing documents.

Their value must increasingly come from what is harder to automate: judgement, context, interpretation, challenge, experience and recognising when the client’s original question may itself be wrong.

Professor Friend then found a larger hole in my argument.

“What,” he asked, “is uniquely sustainability-related about any of your five stories?”

I had no convincing answer.

Architects face the same problem. So do IT consultants, lawyers, engineers, advertising agencies, researchers and management consultants.

The 50 percent discount, reverse auction, expanding scope, wandering invoice and free diagnostic are all sector-agnostic.

Sustainability consulting merely adds a layer of irony because the same client may simultaneously be speaking about fairness, responsible value chains and stakeholder well-being.

The underlying problem is much older.

Clients want maximum value for minimum cost. Consultants want fair payment for expertise and effort. Clients worry that consultants oversell. Consultants worry that clients undervalue.

Both suspicions are sometimes justified.

Perhaps the real difficulty is that organisations are trying to procure something inherently difficult to specify: judgement.

It is easy to compare the prices of two laptops. It is much harder to compare the value of two consultants.

Procurement systems therefore gravitate towards what can be measured—price, person-days, deliverables and deadlines—while much of the real value lies elsewhere.

Did the consultant identify a risk others missed? Ask a question that changed the decision? Challenge management rather than simply validate it? Leave the organisation more capable than before?

Professor Friend finished his coffee.

“Don’t blame the clients too much,” he said. “And don’t defend the consultants too much either. Some deserve the fees they charge. Some probably deserve the 50 percent reduction.”

Then, as he got up to leave, Professor Friend smiled.

“You sustainability consultants keep telling companies that suppliers, partnerships and fair treatment matter.”

He paused.

“And consultants keep telling clients that they create value.”

The real test is on both sides.

Clients must respect professional value. Consultants must continue to earn that respect.

Sustainability becomes less convincing when either side forgets this.

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