Why Your Team Beats McKinsey

Three months ago, a FTSE 100 company paid McKinsey £2.5 million for a digital transformation strategy. Last week, they shelved it. Not because it was wrong, but because their own engineers had been saying the same thing for years. They just hadn't been heard.

This isn't unusual. It's the norm.

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.

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?

It's not another layer of consultants, but an older, simpler discipline: the properly run workshop.

When everyone's in the room (or on the board), when ideas are anonymous before they're attributed, when the youngest voice counts as much as the loudest - that's when truth emerges. Not the polished truth of a consultant's deck, but the messy, actionable truth your team's been sitting on.

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.