I fiddle around with market positioning of professional services firms a lot to gain understanding of what we are doing as one of a bazillion consulting firms. David Maister is THE Maister when it comes to professional service firms and their specialties.

There are lots of models for market positioning that all go like this:

On the left hand side you have the Procedure work, also cold Standardized, Applying the Body of Knowledge or Commodity. On the other extreme to the right we do have the Rocket Science guys with smartest brains around.
In the middle tier we see Customized services and more senior consultants can deliver Gray Hair stuff.

The biggest differentiator is the leverage that the firm can use as a profit driver, i.e. how many consultants can be utilized by one Partner in the firm.
In Commodity companies 45 consultants will work for 1 Partner in a project, for example a software development project. In contrast one Rocket Science Partner can only manage as less as one non-partner consultant. So you see the profoundly different dynamic in these business models.

As we are focussing more and more on the human side of IT projects we came across complex adaptive systems, also known as software developer teams I am confident that we do not need to tell you about agile, lean, SCRUM and so on to improve performance of these complex adaptive systems.

My colleague Daniel pointed me to the Cynefin model with the 4 common domains simple, complicated, complex and chaotic  plus 1 special domain Disorder.

(c) IBM Systems Journal Volume 42, Number 3, 2003

What struck me with this framework is that the 4 positions in the PSF market and the client problems dealt with in each slot match quite good to the Cynefin domains!

There are a lot of insights to be gained by consultants and their clients. For example one can see that in a complex or even chaotic system or situation there is no value in the standard process of sense – analyse – respond as there is no clear cause-and-effect relationship.

Any consulting firm that has THE exact best practice solution for your complex problems that is tried and tested did not really understand complex systems. Maybe they will solve your simple or complicated problems in a very efficient manner but NOT the real problems that partly lie in the interaction of humans.
What are your thoughts on this?