A consulting engagement concludes with a disappointing outcome, and the client attributes the disappointment to the consultant's specific methodology or general competence — a dispositional, character-based explanation — while the consultant attributes the identical disappointing outcome to the client's own organizational resistance, unclear internal decision-making, or resource constraints imposed during the engagement — a situational explanation. Both explanations are describing the same underlying outcome, filtered through the actor-observer asymmetry discussed elsewhere in the context of performance reviews, applied here directly to the client-consultant relationship specifically.
Why the client, as an outside observer, reaches for a dispositional explanation
The client, observing the engagement's outcome from outside the consultant's actual day-to-day work and the full range of situational constraints the consultant was navigating, has limited direct visibility into those specific situational factors, making a dispositional explanation — the consultant's approach or competence was simply inadequate — a more readily available and more intuitively satisfying explanation than a situational one the client has limited direct evidence for.
Why the consultant, as the actor directly experiencing the engagement, reaches for a situational explanation instead
The consultant, having directly experienced the engagement's actual day-to-day constraints and obstacles — unclear or shifting client priorities, organizational resistance to proposed changes, resource limitations imposed by the client's own internal decisions — has direct, vivid access to these situational factors, making a situational explanation for the disappointing outcome considerably more available and more intuitively compelling to the consultant than it is to the client observing from outside.
Why both sides can be sincerely convinced their own explanation is the accurate one
Neither side is necessarily acting in bad faith or deliberately shifting blame — each side's explanation reflects genuinely different, asymmetric access to information: the client genuinely doesn't have the same direct visibility into situational constraints the consultant experienced, and the consultant genuinely doesn't have the same outside vantage point the client has on the consultant's overall approach and competence, meaning both explanations can be sincerely held and neither is automatically the complete, accurate picture.
Why this asymmetry specifically damages the ability to learn genuine lessons from a disappointing engagement
If a disappointing engagement gets explained entirely through the client's dispositional lens, the consultant's genuine methodology or competence may get unfairly blamed for what were substantially situational factors, leading to overcorrection that doesn't actually address what went wrong. If it gets explained entirely through the consultant's situational lens, the consultant may fail to identify a genuine methodology or approach issue that did meaningfully contribute to the outcome, missing a real opportunity for improvement.
What actually produces a more balanced, more useful understanding
A structured post-engagement review explicitly incorporating both the client's and the consultant's independent perspectives on what happened, rather than relying on either side's own unprompted, naturally asymmetric attribution, surfaces both the genuine situational factors and any genuine methodology or approach issues that contributed to the outcome, producing a more complete and more actionable understanding than either side's own account alone would provide.
What this means for reviewing disappointing consulting engagement outcomes
- Recognize the actor-observer asymmetry as a predictable pattern shaping how clients and consultants each explain a disappointing outcome, not evidence either side is acting in bad faith
- Conduct structured post-engagement reviews explicitly incorporating both perspectives, rather than relying on either side's unprompted account alone
- Look specifically for genuine situational factors the client may have limited visibility into, and genuine methodology factors the consultant may be inclined to underweight
- Treat a disappointing outcome's post-mortem as requiring deliberate perspective-balancing, not a straightforward, single-narrative explanation
The actor-observer asymmetry means a disappointing consulting outcome rarely gets explained the same way by both sides of the relationship — and genuinely learning from it requires deliberately incorporating both perspectives, since neither side's own natural, unprompted account is likely to capture the complete picture on its own.