The consultant class

Some years ago I came back from one of the larger progressive political conferences and could not shake a particular frustration. Panel after panel, training after training, hawking data, ads, and assorted transaction-tastic junk politics. Nobody there would have described it that way because it was simply what the work was now. And I was watching an entire professional field grow more confident about a direction it was heading in partly because of how much it had invested in getting there. Sophisticated. Data-rich. And, I came to believe, profoundly wrong about what democracy actually requires.

That was a while ago now, and on the ground it has got worse rather than better.

Then generative AI arrived. And the very first thing our sector did with the most significant new technology in a generation was buy it — and excuse my emdash —  all we use it for is to produce more of exactly what it was already producing, faster and at lower cost. More emails. More texts. More optimization, and less human insight and fewer ideas. Where an overworked campaign could once push out twenty annoying emails an hour, the number is now closer to five hundred. Just what democracy needed.

Meanwhile the argument we are actually having about AI is about deepfakes, and jobs, and environmental impact. Those are real. But almost nobody is asking the question that seems obvious to me: what happens when you pour a general-purpose accelerant into a system that is already pointed the wrong way?

There is one thing our sector now genuinely agrees on, and I want to give it credit, because agreement is rare. Everybody has worked out that the fundraising email bombardment is not helping. Not helping the cause, not helping democracy, not helping the people on the receiving end. People say it publicly now. Five years ago they did not. And the evidence is as well clear. (Though many still take it for a problem of a few bad players rather than a systemic problem of incentives.)

And it continues at volume. Every cycle worse than the last one.

That gap is the most diagnostic thing in our profession. It tells you the problem has been named and the thing causing it has not.

So let me have a go at naming it.

The expertise in our sector is real. It is just almost nowhere near the people who need it to make democracy functional.

Marshall Ganz has a line I always come back to: "Strategy is a verb: a creative, continuous stream of tactical adaptation. It is something we do, not a noun, something we have."

That is a claim about where strategy lives. Ganz argues that we don’t view strategy as a set thing - the document, but rather  as something people do continuously, adjusting as the situation moves. This means it has to happen close to the situation, with the people who can actually see what is going on.

What can be delivered from outside of a community is an artifact. A deck, a strategy memo, a messaging framework. Those can be crucial. Some of the best work I have been part of took that form, and one of the most valuable things an outside expert does is push back and tell a client the thing they are asking for is not the thing they said they wanted. That is real, and I would defend it.

But an artifact is a snapshot of a conversation that happened on a particular Tuesday, and the real strategy is what happens after that document is created. Who reads it? How is it used? And is it adapted as results tell us what worked and didn’t?

So let me be careful about what I am and am not claiming. I am not arguing against expertise, and I am certainly not arguing that organizations cannot think. Some of the sharpest strategic minds I know are on staff at organizations, doing three jobs each. The problem is narrower than that, and more stupid.

The specialist craft - the design, the writing, the fundraising strategy, the organizing methodology -is concentrated in firms and priced by the engagement. But the cost is not really the problem. The substitution is.

There are two quite different things we call expertise in this work, and we have been quietly swapping one for the other.

The first is craft. How to make a message travel. How to structure an ask, lay out a page, sequence a program. That is genuine skill, it can be taught, and it can be hired.

The second is knowing the lives of the people you claim to represent. What they are frightened of, what they will not trade away, what an issue actually costs them at home. That one cannot be hired, because it is not information. It is lived, and it is held by the people living it.

A consultant can tell you, quite accurately, the easiest route to moving a number given what the polling says. What a consultant almost never is, and I say this as one, is an expert on the lives of your constituents.

And polling is reading the wrong layer. Opinions are volatile; they move with the news cycle, which is exactly why they are so easy to measure and so satisfying to optimize against. People's opinions on a policy shift over time, but they shift from a value, and the value holds. Which means a leader who is genuinely connected to a community can stay ahead of where opinion is going, because they know what it will be moving from. A pollster can only tell you the opinion on the policy. And an opinion on a policy is only ever as good as yesterday's newspaper.

Which means the solutions rooted in what people actually value and have actually lived through were always inside the community. What the consultant class has done, mostly without intending to, is take over the place those solutions were supposed to come from.

Now put that next to what the alternative to the emails actually is.

The alternative is organizing. Real groups, real local leaders, real decisions taken by people who know their communities. It is slower. It is messier. And it carries a genuine risk that somebody says something on your behalf that you would never have said. Doing it well requires precisely the specialist support we have just established most organizations cannot reach: the methodology, the coaching, the quality control, the alignment.

So the organization that agrees the emails are bad sends the emails anyway. Not because it prefers them. Because they are the only thing on the menu it can afford, staff, and defend to a board on a Thursday.

Organizations are not stuck in the transactional model because they like it. They are stuck because, seen from inside it, the way out looks unaffordable, and the cost is not only money. It is risk. It is the exposure of letting somebody speak on your behalf. It is the psychological weight of running a team through a stretch of disorder when the team is already tired.

And as long as transactional solutions are the only solutions in view, we get the civic version of the small business problem: nobody can climb far enough above the thing they are doing to see the thing they could be doing.

I watched a digital-first organization respond to a steady decline in petition returns by spending progressively more on optimizing for signatures. Better forms. Better subject lines. Better targeting. Nobody in the building asked the other question, which is whether people had simply tired of petitions and were wanting something real.

And underneath that sits the tension this whole sector lives inside, which I will come back to properly next week: what organizations need most from their people is very close to what they are most afraid of. The expertise that would make it safe enough to try is the expertise they cannot buy.

So notice what our one hard-won agreement actually covers. The emails are a symptom. We have reached consensus on a symptom. On the thing producing them — and on what would have to change for them to stop — there is no consensus at all, and barely a proposal to have a consensus about.

Which is why the consensus changes nothing. Agreement without capacity is not a strategy. It is a mood.

I should say where I sit. Tectonica has been available for hire as experts on creative, strategy and technology for fourteen years. We have never run the mass fundraising programmes or the ad buys. Our work has been on the people side of this, which is why I have spent so long watching the other side up close. But I am not standing outside the arrangement and I have been a part of what I am critiquing. I have been paid to be an organization's strategy, with no way to know if my strategy hours were read or implemented by internal teams. The rapid turnover and internal chaos at many orgs has likely made me suspect that it wasn’t always. 

The arithmetic is what holds it in place, and it is not anybody's fault. A specialist can only be employed by an organization that needs them all the time. Most organizations need a designer for six hours a month, and a fundraising strategist for two days a quarter. So they either go without, or they rent. Either way the capability arrives in lumped strategy hours. At the running price you have to be reasonably large to buy.

This is the part that should be intolerable. Work for social and economic justice is under-resourced by definition. That is what it means to fight from the wrong end of a power imbalance. So strategic expertise, in the arrangement we have built, is available in almost exact inverse proportion to need. The organizations closest to the situation, with the best read on what is actually happening in a place, can afford the least of it. The volunteer running a group in Pennsylvania can afford none at all.

The election cycle then supplies permanent cover. There is always a vote close enough that examining your means feels like an indulgence.We say we will do the analysis after November And after elections we find ourselves prepping for the next one without ample reflection on tactics. A pattern we know too well, and a cost many feel in our current reality.

Even the tools carry the pattern. When we started showing early versions of the organizing platform, one organization asked us, reasonably enough, but what is it for? As if to say: what is the exact thing a supporter does, each time? They wanted the repeatable tactical approach laid out. Tell us the play and we will run it.

Most civic technology obliges. It arrives with the decision already made. Here is the ladder, here is the sequence, here is the template, now execute it. Which is the consultant's deck compiled into software and deployed as a one size fits all. Very few of these tools are built to let the person using them get creative, and almost none are built on the assumption that the user should be the one deciding.

That the person holding the tool might, god forbid, have a better read on the networks in their own town, on what matters there and to whom, than anybody selling them a plan does. That they might be capable of some of their own strategic thinking. No. No consultant is going to concede that a regular person could possibly understand their own home town better than we do.

I wanted to build the opposite of that.

Because the question underneath all of this is not whether consultants are good or bad. It is whether expensive expertise has to be rented at all. What would change if the strategic thinking were embedded in the work itself? Available at the moment somebody needs it, to the person actually doing it, in the place where the situation is legible, at no marginal cost per use?

What if the gated wisdom of the consultant class were available instead as a collaborative process, run alongside the people who hold the lived experience?

You may be starting to see where I am going with this. Generative AI opens up some possibilities here that, as far as I can tell, remarkably few people are even considering.

These are not rhetorical questions. It is the thing my team has spent the last stretch building, and on September 15th I finally get to show you.