Back in 1994 when I first started describing myself as an ‘innovation consultant’, no-one seemed to recognise the term, never mind know what I did. Today, it feels like there are a million and one innovation consultants. I think there are many reasons for this, not least of which is that the world is in the midst of an innovation wave and a lot of frustrated corporate ‘innovators’ have found that it is easier to set up by themselves than it is to try and innovate in a big-company environment. The big-companies, it seems, still don’t really get it when it comes to innovation. As evidenced by the fact that 75% of innovation comes from small companies.

All that said, whenever an organisation – big or small – is thinking about innovating, and deciding they might benefit from some external assistance, the new problem they face is an apparently overwhelming amount of choice. A million and one innovation consultants with ten million and ten different messages. I just conducted one of our periodic reviews of the state of the art and I’d have to say the main feeling I was left with was one of deep sadness. So much choice and so little understanding of what innovation is about. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

I thought it might be time to start putting together a sort of user guide to help the bewildered become a little less bewildered.

Before we get to the guts of a prototype ‘how to choose the right innovation consultant’ process, there are a couple of questions prospective innovators might want to ask before they start actually talking to prospective consultants.

Question Zero: Do We REALLY Want To Innovate?

In my experience a fairly large proportion of ‘prospective innovators’ find themselves in such a position with a high degree of reluctance. They’ve been handed the challenge by a boss who, I think most believe in their heart of hearts, isn’t really interested in actually changing anything: there is a need to look busy, but, heaven help us if it ever comes to anything requiring a serious decision. Innovation tokenism.

If the real – heart of hearts – answer to this question is ‘no, we really don’t want to innovate’, your best bet is to choose your ‘innovation consultant’ on the basis of either a) they are the coolest and most fun, or, b) being able to say I worked with this one will be good for my CV.

Right now, if answer a) is the one you favour, you’re probably going to go for one of the swarm of under-employed, under-talented Hollywood sci-fi scriptwriters that seem to be doing the rounds at the moment. You’ll have fun (I can speak from experience), but you’ll learn absolutely nothing of any value at all, innovation-wise.

If b) is your answer, you need to go to the consultant with the highest daily rate and/or public cachet. Presence of words like ‘Stanford’ or ‘Silicon Valley’ are helpful indicators. Again, as with option a), don’t’ expect to actually learn anything of relevance to either innovation in general or your organisation in particular.

Question Zero-Point-Five: Is An Excuse For Failure More Important Than Success?

This is the plausible deniability question. 98% of innovation attempts end in failure, and in a lot of organisations, finding yourself in charge of one of the 98% failures can be very career limiting. If that’s your situation, the answer to the ‘which innovation consultant?’ question is very simple: you’re going to choose one of the Big Five consulting companies. Your project will still have a 98% likelihood of failure, but at least when things do go wrong, you won’t be blamed for the failure. Or the enormous consulting bill.

Okay, so now to the proper model. The one for people that have a genuine desire for their project to end up in the 2% success category. Here’s a hierarchy of questions you need to ask of your prospective innovation consultant candidates. The basic idea of the hierarchy is, if they fail one question, there’s no point advancing to the next question because their failure already dooms you to the 98% failure bucket.

Question One: Does The Consultant Understand ‘Good’ & ‘Real’ Customer Outcomes?

Given the fact that there are only two ways to innovate and that one of them is offering customers a new outcome (or ‘function’ or ‘job’ – different words, same meaning), a really good early question to a prospective consultant is how they set about identifying such ‘new outcome’ needs. Given the widespread use of words like function, job and outcome, and the presence of multiple types of ‘function database’, it’s fairly likely unless you’re particularly unlucky with your list of candidates, that they will be able to talk to you about tangible outcomes. The real decider, therefore, here is how they respond to probing questions about how they propose to bring the intangible customer outcome needs into their support of your project. This is the point where you might start to get the blank looks. As a test if/when this look appears, you can test whether they are properly out of their depth by asking to explain the relevance of the JP Morgan aphorism, ‘people make decisions for two reasons, the good reason and the real reason’. If they manage to bluff their way towards an answer that hints they’ll use any kind of customer interview to answer the question, they fail. Got to jail. Do not pass Go.

Question Two: Does The Consultant Understand Contradictions?

If new-outcomes is innovation strategy number one, the other is ‘solve a contradiction’. About 85% of innovations succeed by using this strategy. This also happens to be the test that will allow you to quickly eliminate the large majority of so-called ‘innovation consultants’ from your selection process. Whether you use the words ‘contradiction’, ‘conflict’, ‘trade-off’, ‘condundrum’, ‘paradox’, or any number of other synonyms, unless they can point you towards how they will help you to identify and eliminate contradictions, they’re not going to help you to innovate. Most respondents will answer with a blank stare, others will try and deflect the discussion onto a subject they are more comfortable with. Either way, they fail.

Question Three: Does The Consultant Understand Complex Adaptive Systems?

By the time you reach Question Three, something like 90% of your candidate consultants will have fallen by the wayside. Here’s where you get to eliminate over half of those that remain. Innovation fundamentally means embracing and working under the governing ‘rules’ of complex adaptive systems. You need to know that they understand what a complex adaptive system is. And, more importantly, how that knowledge impacts on the innovation project they’re going to support you through. The early stages of any innovation project are about exploration. Which in turn means identifying and answering ‘the unknowns’. Asking them about the process they propose to navigate you through the ‘fuzzy-front-end’ stages of your precious project, the moment they try and draw a Gantt chart or start talking about pipelines or Stage-Gate, you know they’re not going to be able to help you. Key words and phrases to listen out for in terms of the consultants that do actually understand the connections between complexity and innovation include: ‘emergent’, ‘first principles’, ‘minimum viable demonstration’. Plus, of course, they need to be able to convince you they know how to connect these key words to how they’ll affect how they’re going to spend the minimum amount of (your!) money to make the maximum amount of progress in answering the unknowns.

Question Four: Does The Consultant Understand Analytics?

By Question Four, you’re already somewhere near sifting the genuine cream from the curdled milk. The fourth Question is all about what sorts of analytical measurements and measurement tools are they going to bring to bear to help you get through the exploration and execution stages of your project. The key here is listening out for the sorts of thing they propose measuring. If their list includes all the ‘usual suspect’ measurements (any of the ’75 essential KPIs – see SI ezine worst of 2015 Awards), they’re wasting your time. You need to be listening out for unusual suspect measurements. Things that you know are going to be important (meaningful), but that are traditionally thought to be impossible to measure (‘team morale’, ‘answered unknowns’, ‘frustration’, ‘engagement’, ‘Hero’s Journey stage’, ‘sense of progress’, etc) are the things you need to know. Your consultant needs to be able to demonstrate that a) they know why such measures are important, and, b) how they’re going to make those measurements.

Question Five: Does The Consultant Understand Methods?

At a superficial level, this last Question is about whether your candidate consultant is trying to sell you their method, or the right method for you particular context. If they don’t ask you about the Innovation Capability Level of your organisation, the tools and methods your organisation/team currently uses, or the psychometric profiles of the project team members, the chances are they’re there to sell you ‘their’ method. Easy to catch them out on this question. If they’re trying to push ‘method X’ onto you, ask them for evidence that this is the right thing to bring to bear in your context. Ask them to describe an equivalent situation on a previous project that Method X has worked (if they can, ask them to explain the expression, ‘you can never step in the same river twice’). If they get through that question, the next one is to show you how they’ve done back to back analyses of Method X,Y and Z in order to establish that Method X was indeed the most appropriate one. Don’t worry too much about whether you’ve ever been through this kind of comparison exercise in your own organisation before, at the end of the day, 90%+ of consultants are well versed in just one or two methods, so you shouldn’t have too much difficulty getting them to the point where they are using the word ‘err’ twice per sentence and looking like the they’d rather be somewhere else. Which, as far as your selection process is concerned is precisely where they need to be.

Taken together, those five questions should enable you to swiftly get down to a Top Two or Three. To help make the questions easy to remember, just think about OCCAM:

Beyond that point, your choice is basically going to boil down to your own intangible outcome needs: who’s best going to make you into a hero? Who’s going to stick by you when the going gets – inevitably – rough? Who, to cut through to the simplest answer, is the one that is going to be your innovation Razor?