Why Your Team Beats McKinsey

How often have you heard this? A big company maying McKinsey millions for some kind of "transformation" strategy. Big words. Big invoice. Three months later it’s in a drawer. Not because it was necessarily wrong. Because it was obvious. Their own people had been saying the same thing for years. They just hadn't been heard. So they'd paid someone in a designer gilet to say it louder.

And you know what? This isn't unusual at all.

Every day, companies pay fortunes for external validation of internal knowledge. They hire strangers to tell them what their own people have been screaming into the void. It's corporate theatre at its most expensive.

Now, it's easy to take a swing McKinsey (they did tell us all to back the Metaverse, remember?). They make a convenient villain. But the same thing happens with any big consultancy or marketing agency promising to crack your problem at great expense. The pattern is identical: throw the problem over the wall to an outsider, wait for the deck, then wonder why nothing changes.

Here's what nobody wants to say out loud. Outsourcing your thinking is a way of cheating on your team. The signal it sends is brutal. Either you don't trust the answers they've already given you, or worse, you don't believe they have answers worth hearing in the first place. Either way, you've just told your people that a stranger's opinion matters more than theirs.

The expertise problem

Here's what McKinsey won't tell you: your team already knows what needs to be done. They've been living with your problems, watching your customers, fighting your battles every single day. They don't need frameworks. They need permission.

According to our research across 200+ sprints, internal teams identify the right solution 85% of the time. The issue isn't knowledge. It's confidence. It's the political cover to say what everyone's thinking but no one's saying.

The real issue isn't intellectual. It's behavioural. As Peter Drucker wrote decades ago, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." And your culture is eating your team's best ideas before they even reach the boardroom.

The collaboration fix

So what's the fix?

The solution isn't another consultant. It's actual collaboration. Not "alignment." Not "buy-in." Actual work, together.

Most teams don't need someone to hand them the answer. But they do need help drawing it out of themselves. The knowledge is there, it's just stuck. Buried under hierarchy, habit and the fear of saying the obvious thing out loud.

That's what we do. We run proper collaboration sessions, on Miro, with real structure that brings everyone together and draw those answers out. No months of interviews. No waiting for a massive deck. Just the right people, the right questions and the right space for it all to come together.

Making space for truth

Workshops work because they bypass the hierarchy that kills honesty. They create what psychologists call "psychological safety" - the confidence to speak without career consequences.

Here, the intern can challenge the CEO's assumption. The engineer can question the marketing strategy. The quiet thinker gets the same airtime as the confident speaker.

It's not magic. It's method. And it's exactly what your team needs to beat any consultancy at their own game.

Why it beats McKinsey

It takes a fraction of the time. A fraction of the money. And when it's done, the team owns the outcome. They built it. They believe it. They have skin in the game.

Your people are better than your procurement habits suggest. Every consultancy contract is a vote of no confidence whether you mean it that way or not.

The brains are already on payroll. The experience is already in the building. What's missing isn't capability it's the conditions to use it.

So before you brief another agency, ask a harder question. When did you last give your team the space, the tools and the permission to solve this themselves?

You might find they've been ready for a while. They were just waiting to be asked.

Don't bring in outsiders. Bring people together.