Ep. 141 – 70% Task Automation to 2 Thirds Advisory: How ABP Rebuilt a Commoditized Core - with Mark Robbins

0:03 We work with a specialty insurer who essentially had 27 automations, task automations live, and they were saving 190k a year in hours. But the advisory team were, we had a landed team there, you know, delivering maybe 500K's worth of consultancy a year. And so that that equation doesn't stack up because actually the value that's being delivered is at the end of the chain.

0:32 Welcome to the Leaders in Consulting Podcast. I'm Sarah Edwards, your host and president of the London chapter of our community. In this show, I speak to CEOs, partners, and MDs of consulting firms about their best practices and hard-won insights. If you're keen to join the conversation, visit leadersinconsulting.com to find out how you can connect with peers at our monthly confidential forums in London, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt.

1:00 And now let's get started with the show. Welcome everyone. I'm happy to welcome Mark Robbins, Chief Revenue Officer at ABP Consultancy. Mark, welcome to the show. Before we dive into our discussion today, tell us a little bit about you and ABP Consultancy.

1:20 Of course, Sarah, and a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invite. So, Mark Robbins, CRO of ABP Consultancy. ABP stands for Agile Business Process. ABP has been around for 13 years. And we were practitioners of the original business process management methodology, continuous improvement, aligned to business outcomes, using increasingly using technology to deliver those sustainable outcomes for clients.

1:55 So our background is very much rooted in business transformation. But as all consulting organizations have to, right, we've seen that core evolve during our 13 years. And I think we're at an incredibly exciting time in the market. You could also say incredibly scary. It depends what your outlook is. For me, it's it's exciting, right?

2:22 There's we're working it out every day. Again, I think we'll we'll get into that. That's the I think if we're honest, right? Nobody has this lockdown, right? We're we're doing a tremendous amount of test and learn. Um, but it's but it's exciting. And we believe we have a differentiated proposition, and you know, we're really stretching our legs and and testing that right now.

2:45 Fantastic. Well, I'm looking forward to the discussion today, because I think, Mark, what you've just said, I think not only has ABP gone on a journey to reinvent itself, and I think we're all having to do that, we're all going on a journey, as you say, that's probably continuously evolving daily. But I also think it's great to have your perspective from someone who really is focused on growth.

3:03 I mean, I think a lot of our podcasts or a lot of discussions we often have is around, you know, AI and how it's disrupting things, but looking at it from an efficiency and cost perspective. But your angle is really looking at how do we drive you know revenue growth as a business. So maybe we start from the beginning.

3:19 I mean, you joined, you said the business is 13 years old. You joined, I think, three years ago. Yes. Like when you joined the business, you know, what was the business that you encountered? Where was the revenue coming from? And what did that model look like?

3:32 Yeah, 100%. So quick history lesson. So, George, our CEO, um I've known for many years, before he even started the company 13 years ago. Um, the DNA of our organization is all of our Suite C-suite have delivered client-side transformation at scale using technology of varying levels of maturity depending on when we were doing those roles.

3:56 So, really, you know, our focus is we've walked in our clients' shoes, we understand the realities of delivering transformation outcomes inside of organizations, and we we view our partnerships with our clients through that lens. That's first and foremost the first piece. When I joined ABP, um, you know, we were, I think we were already in transition.

4:17 So what we'd seen in the market was um you know robotic process automation, task automation was becoming very prevalent. It was being driven very strongly by um outsourcing, and these large outsourcing contracts were just embedding task automation into them. With the time, we viewed task automation as very tactical because it doesn't get you to the business outcomes that you know automating an end-to-end journey or automating a business an end-to-end business process does.

4:45 But it also requires significantly less structural change inside the organization to be able to deliver those outcomes. And customers were increasingly focusing there, right? So what what we the ABP that I joined was an ABP where probably, you know, over half of our business, probably approaching 70%, depending on which market you're in, was task automation, right?

5:11 It was like help us tactically eliminate duplication and manual work from the the workflows inside our organization, right? Which obviously takes you away from those value messages and the real outcomes that the business leaders want to deliver. There are always pockets of um you know clients that are taking different approaches.

5:33 So, you know, for clients where that task automation was so prevalent that it was actually having a measurable impact on outcomes. Um, in iSports Gaming and Betting, we work with Flutter. Um, Flutter have implemented task automation as part of a wider transformation program for over four years, and in those four years, they've moved Net Promoter score by 56 points, which by most proxies in the market gives them about 8% revenue growth on their top line, which is significant, right?

6:02 So even in the task automation context, what we're always striving to do is understand, okay, with the with the capacity that you've released by avoiding this manual work, what are the value-added tasks that are being done and what's the value of those tasks rather than it just being hours saved? But I would definitely say that you know the entire management team would probably agree that at that point in the market there was a strong pull to much more tactical digitalization and much less strategic digitalization.

6:32 Yeah. And as someone, I guess, um, as you said, what 70% of the business was around sort of task automation. What made you realize that there was an urgency to change? I mean, you're the executive, you know, responsible for growth in the business. What were some of the things that you were seeing that, you know, were real indicators that we need to adapt and change and we need to do that quickly?

6:52 The first thing I would say is we're a very, very close and tight executive team. We have a lot of skills overlap between the CEO, the CTO, the chief strategy officer. So we we we always think tank, we always put our heads together and we we make decisions together, right? So whether it's a revenue decision or uh uh a go-to-market decision or a technology shift decision, it's always as a collective.

7:16 Um, and what we were seeing was what everyone was seeing, right? Was increasingly, in order to get to value, we were starting to do things like embed machine learning into task automation flows. So an example would be we did a project with Jabra around return of goods where they simply wanted to honor a customer promise.

7:34 The draw, the business driver was essentially we're disenfranchised from our customers. If we make it easy for them to return a headset, which is our warranty, then you know we get to engage with our customers in a moment that matters. So it was a simple proposition. You know, send a request for a refund, a photograph of the headset, and then we'll adjudicate and honor it.

7:53 The challenge was they produced so many special editions of headphones and earplugs, they had pink ones, green ones, yellow ones, that matching product numbers to the image was really, really hard until one of our solution architects identified that you know putting object detection and colour recognition into that flow enabled us to get the matching over 95%, which made the business case.

8:17 So even in the task automation space, we're always striving to identify pockets of value where we can apply technology in context. And we just saw that that pattern just increasing and increasing. We saw more opportunity to apply machine learning capabilities as those capabilities became more cost-effective to deploy and scale, and organizations had the capability to do that.

8:41 You know, we were doing that more and more. And so, you know, what we what we recognized quite quickly was the differentiating um use cases and where the value was coming from increasingly was around integrating pattern recognition, machine learning models into tasks, tasks and task automation. And so we we were just increasingly shifting our focus from the task piece, which was commoditized, to the data assimilation context and understanding piece.

9:13 So I think in said another way, right? As an ad as a firm that has advisory roots, we found that the market was coming back to us in terms of being able to have much more flexibility to assemble capabilities to solve problems, and for those capabilities to to give us much more choice in how we went about solving those problems.

9:34 So we we it was it was definitely to start with organic. We saw the we saw it organically.

9:40 So I guess you've making the shift from, as you say, maybe 70% of the business was task automation. Where we where do you want to get to? Where's the business now? And how much of it is going to be more advisory and sort of value-led services?

9:51 Yeah, I think um, you know, even today we probably do more um automation, uh, end-to-end automation and advisory work than we do RPA. That's already shifted. We have uh, you know, we've spent a lot of time putting what we believe to be a differentiated point of view together around how business um, you know, how line of business owners can move their technology needle forward, but through use cases rather than taking a technology-focused approach.

10:23 Um, where we want to get to is probably we believe, you know, focusing two-thirds of our business on the advisory um and then having small, agile, high-value pods that can deliver first-of-a-kind use cases. And the model that we're increasingly seeing is customers don't want to to, they don't want their business partners to deliver for them.

10:48 They want their business partners to enable them to continuously deliver, right? So we definitely we saw that shift very early on. Uh, we have a sister company, School of Automation, that was was built, you know, to help customers advance that mission. Um, and so very much the future model for us is our core is advisory.

11:09 Uh delivery teams are very specialist around specific areas integrated at the advisory level through methods and missions like design thinking. Um, and then you know, we will deliver those first of a kinds, we'll enable organizations, and uh then we're supporting them. So that's the that's the model we're pursuing, and we're testing.

11:32 We're not taking anything for granted. I don't think you can today, right?

11:35 Yeah, well, absolutely. And I think there's some people that are challenging whether, you know, I guess it's a brave move in a sense. As some people would say, you know, is is the advisory space the the part that you want to move to? I mean, what convinced you and the leadership team that actually advisory was the right move for the business?

11:50 And is there anyone pushing against that or was you know that what did everyone sort of see the value on that?

11:56 Actually, I I I don't think so because um because of the BPM background, right? So we we we identified, you know, like most organizations, we we have our operational executive team meetings, but every quarter we we'll sit together, we'll we'll think more long term, and you know, we'll think tank around what's happening in the market, what's our hypothesis, what do we need to change.

12:17 Um, and and I think that we we saw the potential in a number of clients that we were working with where actually pure advisory firms you know can understand you know uh gaps in operating models, they can build you know value frameworks, they can you know build prioritized deployment roadmaps, but then typically what they do is say, right now you just need to go execute that, right?

12:43 Uh delivery partners execute that plan, but they didn't invent that plan. And product providers provide capability. What we wanted to do is integrate all of those things, right? We wanted to be able to go from uh business strategy and value framework to use cases and prioritize business deployment roadmap using maturity assessments and you know, identifying technology gaps as a result of delivering a use case, right?

13:10 And then being able to deliver those first of a kinds to be able to transfer those methodologies to clients so that they have a sustainable chain framework, and to do that in a way that we recognize, you know, with some clients, we are very much driving because they're low maturity in those spaces. With other clients, it's like, look, you know, we're we are very capable of doing all those things, but we still want a design partner.

13:34 So at the end of the day, most organizations will own their value framework, but they'll benefit from someone who can work with them to validate that value framework with outside in thinking based on industry understanding. And so, you know, it I think it depends on the maturity of the client, whether it's drive me or partner with me or just act as a point of QA.

13:56 But we definitely we believe that with the amount of uncertainty that's going on around, you know, particularly AI, large language models, we need to get back to business and focus on, you know, how how can we drive outcomes without endlessly saying our data isn't in the right place to do that, right?

14:15 I mean, the the the non-advisory way of saying that is AI is everywhere, but most organizations are struggling to scale it, right?

14:23 Yeah.

14:23 Um, the the the business lens on that is you know, we don't have an effective framework to prioritize our use cases and to align change in our organization. You know, one of the things that we hear all the time, sure you hear it as well, right? Change fatigue.

14:39 Yeah.

14:39 You know, you go into a business and you know they're delivering so much change that they don't want another change program, right? So how do you work with the organizations to build a value framework that all of the lines of business believe in and align to so that the change that you are delivering is meaningful and connected?

14:59 That's essentially part of our central hypothesis.

15:02 Yeah. And how do you apply that to yourself? Because you know, you're going through change as a business. You've set out a new part of the process.

15:08 Absolutely. Yeah.

15:09 Like, so how do you apply that to how you're changing how you operate as a business? Because the change you're going through, I guess, means that you've probably got to stop investing in some areas, start investing in others, change the way that you're structured the skills that you need in your business.

15:23 100%. Yeah.

15:24 How did you go about that? What have you seen change and what lessons have you learned along the way?

15:28 Yeah, yeah. So we're um, I think we're very lucky. Uh, you know, I think one of the advantages of having a uh an organization that's around the hundred mark, right, is that you you have enough to be impactful, but you can pivot, you can be agile. So, George, our CEO, has always believed from day one in drinking our own champagne, right?

15:49 Which is making sure that we are practicing what we preach, that we're using automation inside our organization. So we use business process management for you know a lot of our time recording and our project management. We use uh robotic process automation to do all of our intercompany transfers of monies between the different uh operating companies in the different markets where resources are being used out out of country.

16:15 So all of that happens through through task automation. We extensively use um you know Power BI in our in our case and and Microsoft Office Copilot for personal productivity. So we we've we've always um applied what we what we're thinking. We we're now taking that to the next next level, and we're using our own change to you know help our consultants cut their teeth on you know our new change approach, our new model.

16:45 So, you know, our our our moniker for um the the future state that we're shooting for and that that that we talk to clients about is the adaptive enterprise, right? So so again, borrowing from nature, you know, the concept of uh an enterprise that you know sits above AI and and agents or whatever the the annual buzzword is for what we should be doing and thinks about the true properties that an enterprise needs to sustain, right?

17:13 So they need to be able to sense, they need to be able to filter for relevance, they need to be able to respond to events that matter for them and for their customers, and they need to be able to adapt, right? And all of those things need to happen in parallel. So we're essentially testing our organization by integrating that philosophy and fabric into our own organization.

17:34 And that essentially means taking uh conversational capabilities end-to-end across our internal journeys and across our customer journeys. So already when you go to our website, we no longer have a traditional website, abpconsulty.com is a conversational window, and that's because we want to force the conversation, right?

17:53 We want to understand if you want to come to our website and you're looking for guidance, not go find it yourself, and you know, we understand you've been there for two and a half minutes and visited seven pages. We want to understand your intent and we want to be able to infer the personas, right? So it's it's helping us build a better knowledge base for our clients to interrogate.

18:16 So it's a it's a journey, um, of course, as always. We're we're very far down that journey. Um, and and like all organizations, we have to balance things, right? Because our go-to-market is changing, we're rebalancing our execution engine, but we still have to deliver change. We have to find time to understand new requirements, uh, work through design thinking processes, you know, sign off, test.

18:41 You know, we're all, even the executive team, we're hands-on, right? We do testing, right? We have to test our own solutions because it keeps it real and it keeps us engaged.

18:50 Yeah, yeah. And I love that concept of the adaptive enterprise. I mean, I think it's all what we we're really aiming for. You know, I think now more than ever, we've really got to be adaptive. What lessons have you learned? Like, you know, I guess we've got you know an audience here of consulting leaders that I think all probably think, thinking that we need to drive change in our businesses and we need to, you know, be adaptive.

19:10 I guess there may be organizations where they've got a particular service line that's under pressure and maybe they need to, you know, think about actually, you know, where are we going to drive our revenue growth moving forwards, you know, services are becoming you know commoditized. What should they consider or what you know lessons learned, advice would you sort of give to those firms?

19:28 Yeah, 100%. I mean, we're we're so we're applying our method, right? And our method essentially is start with a value framework, um, understand how you measure what good looks like, right? And you know, most organizations will have a framework, right? The question is, is it being applied? Are you getting the juice out of the juicer, right?

19:48 And when was the last time you revisited it? Are your are your measures current today, right? The value framework for us underpins everything because when we start then looking at use cases and what we call adaptive MVPs, which is what what a minimum set of meaningful events that we can run from events signals that we've filtered for in our organization that we want to respond to, how do we take that all the way to a measurable customer outcome?

20:14 How do we do that? And as we go through that end-to-end MVP process, we do our capability maturity assessment, but we do it embedded into the MVP rather than making it a separate exercise. Because if you do it as a separate exercise, it can become an academic exercise, it can become a uh, you know, a noun.

20:33 So, you know, one of our mantras is, you know, whatever we do, we're not searching for nouns, we're searching for verbs. We're not building a value framework so we can put it on the shelf. We're building a value framework so that we can assess outcomes. You know, we're not building MVPs because you know, we want to be able to show clients how we engage with building MVPs and the adaptive MVP process so that we can get to the outcome in the shortest time frame possible.

20:58 And as we go through that process, do what we would traditionally do as advisory exercises, like, you know, what is your capability maturity in these in these areas? Where are your data gaps? You know, do you have capability gaps? How do your business requirements, your business capabilities map onto your technical capabilities?

21:15 That should come out of the exercise of doing and delivering outcomes rather than being a separate exercise. And that's born out of us having a, like I think every organization in the market today, uh a burning desire to align the organization to a very rapidly changing landscape, right? So we all need to think about building operating models.

21:40 And the adaptive enterprise concept is essentially just taking the technology out of the thinking we're all doing, right? Is there are more events that happen within our markets, within our ecosystems, then as an organization we can assimilate. So, how do we filter for the events that matter? How do we respond and react to those events?

22:00 And demonstrate that we're getting to outcomes that matter for our organizations and for our for our clients. And that's that's the fundamental of an organization, right? We we see it in nature all the time. You know, humans are adaptive organisms, right? We're adaptive, we sense, we filter, we react, right?

22:19 And so we should take what what evolution and nature has has perfected and apply all of those concepts to our organizations, and it doesn't need to be technology focused. And the answer is not AI, it's not agents, it's all of the things that sit behind that, right? They're just vehicles to make the fundamentals happen.

22:38 Yeah. How do you get to that though? Because I think everyone acknowledges that it is ultimately about value and outcomes. I think the challenge is how do you get to that? So when you're having your conversation, take us on a journey, you might go for an example with a customer because they think the business problem is or the answer is isn't the answer or the business problem.

22:56 And how do you actually define what that value is? Maybe you could share an example uh with the audience.

23:02 Oh of course, no problem. I mean, obviously there are there are many contexts, right? And what differentiates a consulting organization is being able to spot the patterns in many ways, right? Definitely what we saw was when we moved away from business process management and being able to deliver end-to-end processes like loan applications, claims, underwriting processes.

23:24 When you do end-to-end processes, being able to instrument for value and evidence return back to the business is much easier. When you do things much more tactically, where you're embedding capabilities into existing processes, you're delivering outcomes that are not wholly uh attributable to the change that you're delivering because other things are happening at the same time.

23:46 But you have to find that proxy. So I'll give you two examples, right? So one old world example, which you know I think will be familiar to many, which is you know, when you do task automation, everybody focuses on hours saved, right? Uh we work with a specialty um insurer who essentially you know had 27 automations, task automation is live, and they were saving 190k a year in in hours.

24:12 But the advisory team were we had a landed team there, you know, delivering maybe 500k's worth of consultancy a year. Um, and so that that the equation doesn't stack up because actually the value that's being delivered is at the end of the chain. And in this case, that was capacity release from the marine underwriting team, 1.2 FTE, and additional premium written by having an additional 1.2 FTE of capacity within that marine division, right?

24:44 So that that value was always there, it just wasn't connected to in the story. So I think the most important thing is you have to have the discipline to make sure that everybody is is believing in the value framework that's that's defined. And then when you define the scope of your adaptive MVP, you need to assess in a very pragmatic way which of those value levers you're actually going to positively impact.

25:09 And you have to instrument that solution, whatever it is you're delivering, for benefits realization, right? And it's having the discipline to do that. And the reality is if you look at the project management institute stats, even today, right, probably 80 or 90 percent of all projects have business cases because it's how funding models work, right?

25:28 But still, less than 40% of projects have benefits realization embedded into them, right? And that's you know, it's not a new science, uh, it's not um anything related to technology, right? It's it's having the discipline to do things properly, and that's I think that's always the case. So when we built the adaptive MVP, where you know essentially we work from a minimum set of events that we can filter for in the organization that we can positively impact, as soon as we det identify the events, the set of events that are most relevant, we then go straight to outcomes, which is aligned to the value framework.

26:08 And then we go through sense, contextualize, understand, respond, learn, which are the phases in the MVP. So it's it's putting outcome at the center. You have to do it, bro. It's um and it's it's not an exact science that doesn't matter. It's you you need to measure and tune.

26:24 Yeah, absolutely. And I think everyone's talking about, like, as you say, I guess, particularly with AI, there's this concept of it just becomes a race to the bottom. You know, we're just proving efficiency. And I guess what do our commercial models need to look like around that? And I think actually, if I'm right, Mark, you're even reframing your role from being chief revenue officer to, you know, chief, I think, outcome or value officer.

26:46 So you're even changing the role. Like, tell us about that. What made you drive that change?

26:51 Yeah, so so we again, you know, as part of our management reviews, um, you know, we have a mantra in our organization. I think it's it's a good mantra to keep yourself honest, which is testing all of your messaging to make sure it's O-focused, not I-focused, right? So when we deliver a proposal to a client, are we actually talking about their problems?

27:12 Uh or uh is it too internally focused how we're going to deliver change, right? It's it should it should always be as O-focused as possible. And the CRO role is is has existed for many years, it's very clear. Um, it's very clear what your accountabilities are. It gives you a very clear focus inside the organization, but it is an internally focused label, right?

27:35 Revenue is an internally focused label. It's like, oh, we could, of course, we can be honest with ourselves about the fact that every organization needs revenue to exist. But the label, actually, the right label, if you if you look at it from an outcome-focused perspective, is chief outcome officer, because actually what you're delivering to your clients is the outcome.

27:53 And if you deliver the outcome to your clients, then you will get revenue, right? So it's like revenue is a function of delivering for your clients, which is what consulting organizations do. The other thing we looked at was, which wouldn't change the acronym, is chief relevance officer, right? And that the the idea there is um it's very well tied to the adaptive enterprise thesis, right?

28:19 Because actually the most important thing I think for every organization, the sustainable competitive advantage comes from relevance.

28:26 Yeah.

28:27 How do we maintain relevance in our market? And how do we continue to increase our relevance to our customers? That's essentially what we do. You can take you can take the industry, you can take the function out, you can take the scale out.

28:39 Yeah.

28:40 That's ultimately what we do. And and you know, we believe relevance is going to be the new competitive advantage. Um that's that's essentially what what um technologies like AI enable you to very clear accurately filter for. And so CRO, chief relevance officer, the idea there is that it makes people think, right?

29:01 I think the downside of that is a little bit abstract, right? So it's like if someone sees it on a I don't know, a LinkedIn profile or you know, it's like, well, what does that mean? Yeah, right. But I think it's I think it's it's good. In today's market, it's good to challenge thinking.

29:15 Yeah.

29:16 Um, I I don't understand that. Let me think about that, right? And you know, I I I I recently had the privilege of spending some time with some of the booking.com team. Um, and you know, it's incredible the journey they've been on. It's incredible how they're living the adaptive enterprise model, right?

29:34 Um, I think their business results speak for themselves. And if you actually look at what they've done in the last three or four years, they've completely rebuilt their journey their entire organization around journeys, right? So they're a they're a journey, they have a journey-aligned operating model.

29:48 Yeah.

29:49 And I think this is going to become more prevalent, right? So the the vertical silo um uh approach is going to, I think it's slowly going to dissolve over time and functions will align to how we best serve change to book to maintain relevance for our for our for our customers, for the customers in the markets we serve.

30:10 Yeah. And I think relevance is really topical to our businesses. I mean, this is an audience of consulting leaders who are running consulting firms, and I think there is a lot of um noise in the industry at the moment. What is going to be the future relevance of a you know a services firm and a consulting firm?

30:27unknown Yeah.

30:28 So I'd like to drill in a bit more in terms of how do you define you say it's a bit abstract, but how do you define relevance? And then what behaviors do you drive internally to make sure that you are um being relevant to the customer and maintaining your relevance in a pretty rapidly changing world?

30:45 Yeah, yeah. I mean, first and foremost, I think the the not just the podcast, but your your whole um initiative around building the ecosystem, allowing peers to to engage in in open dialogues around what's happening in the market is brilliant. I always um, you know, every time I speak to someone within our industry doing similar things to us, bigger or smaller, you know, it's always a learning experience.

31:10 And you know, what um what I'm really comforted by is I find, I particularly found in the last 12 months where there's more and more change and more and more change is everybody's more open about the challenges, you know, how they're finding their voice given the change that's happening. And this is, you know, peer consulting firms and customers, right?

31:32 It's driving the debate because we are definitely in an era of transformation, right? We're moving beyond the information age to whatever we want to call it. We will call it the adaptive era, the era of relevance. But you know, whatever that shift is, it's it's very much underway. And it's changing the fabric of work, it's changing the fabric of what we do.

31:49 We like everyone, we simply don't know. We have some ideas. Um, and so our principles are be outcome-focused, uh, be bold, test and learn. Don't assume you've got the right thing, and you know, think about design partnerships. So, you know, a good example would be we recently connected with the with the the the vice chancellor of a university that we've been partnering with, um, and you know, essentially they their opening statement on strategy was you know, the the the world of education is changing, how education is consumed, um, how we monetize knowledge, you know, who is our customer?

32:28 Is it is it the is it the market of employment or is it the students that are coming through the system? How does that funding model work? So, you know, they're wrestling with all of those change levers as well. So our our hypothesis to them was you know, what we should do is we should take advantage of the fact that you have curricula around you know, AI, design thinking, business management, business studies, and actually build a transformation capacity inside your own university to deliver your own change.

32:57 And we will enable you and we'll partner with you. And actually, what that does is it gives all of the students that occupy you know areas of study that that intersect with with those disciplines, it gives them relevance and it gives them experience, which is their catch 22, right? Because it's you know, I can't get a job because I don't have experience.

33:17 I'm not gonna get experience if I can't get a job, how do I break the cycle, right? And what we're finding is that the you know, even the vocational degrees where you have a sandwich ear, it's not enough, right? It's not enough to give you that experience. So if you're able to put on your CV, I participated in the transformation of our university, these are the outcomes that we delivered together.

33:39 And even extending that further to working with technology partners, delivery partners, and working with other clients and taking that skill. So I think it's it's those kind of it's that kind of disruptive thinking that we should demand of ourselves, right? And that the lens, the the lens in the vehicle that we use to do that is the O-focus lens and the value lens, right?

34:01 So what what does it mean for our clients if we partner in this area? How do we measure what good and great look like? And if we work back from that to, you know, the the outcomes that we want to deliver, then that's essentially a filter for how we think about adaptive MVPs. Take a small piece, deliver an outcome, but do it in a way that it can be extended.

34:26 Yeah. The other language we use all the time, I think because it's everybody experiences it, is you know, we we believe very much that you know the adaptive concept, the application of what we would call leading edge technology, it's a it's a it's a participating sport, right? Whatever your favorite sport is, you don't learn that sport by observing it.

34:50 You learn it by you have to be on the pitch, on the court, you know, uh, because it's very different. You can watch it, right? And you can intellectually understand it, but you have to actually do the verb in order to be able to understand technique and application and get to outcomes. And you know, it's the same with with modern change.

35:12 Whereas in the past, there was an advantage, you you I don't want to be a first mover, I want to be a fast follower because you know the I don't want to take take the hit on the learning curve. I want to I want all that to be figured out and then I want to come in behind that that doesn't work anymore, right?

35:26 Because actually all of the differentiation comes from learning the processes and and learning the failures and just being in that adaptive cycle. That's yeah, that's definitely how we see it. And um no one has answers. Um, I've had some really, really interesting conversations with peers about how they are using technology and capabilities available today to disrupt their own models.

35:53 Um we're wrestling with the same thing, right? So, you know, the the technology advisory relationship is definitely changing very much. We are in partnership, very much in design partnerships with large language models to build um offerings in shorter spaces of time. You know, when we when we deliver adaptive MVPs to our client, a lot of the deliverables and value that come out of that are not just the traditional artifacts, but it's all of the knowledge assets that allow them to build their own uh domain-aligned uh advisory capabilities.

36:29 So you know, recording meetings, um, transcripts which can be uploaded into training models to help with application of those use cases in new use case areas. The uh methodol, a lot of the methodologies to generate artifacts throughout the lifecycle are essentially artifacts that populate um models, train training those models so that a lot of that can be done, you know, query-based in partnership and generated directly from um from you know agentic platforms.

36:59 Yeah. Yeah. Mark, you talk about, I mean, I guess, you know, again, whether you're chief outcome officer or chief relevance officer, but how does that translate in terms of how you package and sell? I mean, I think there's a lot of people saying, you know, it can't just be a race to the bottom. And you've given an example there where you're helping, you're showing that you're doing things quicker.

37:17 How do you pass on that saving to the customer or not? And how do you package and sell on your value and outcomes rather than it just being the traditional hours of people and sort of TNM billing model?

37:30 Yeah, I think um velocity is critical. Um, you know, definitely the the the differentiation comes from velocity because if you um if you have permission to record conversations and then you you know you run that through your with your models where you've built your ontologies and your design patterns for your, in our case, adaptive MVPs, you can very quickly assimilate meeting context, evolve deliverables, and play that back, you know, um easily within 24 hours, you know, which means that you've got velocity.

38:08 It validates that that we love that approach because it enables to validate understanding. We've had a conversation, we're reflecting on our conversation. Here is our understanding of of the direction that we we want to head in. Let's assess that before we then figure out what a partnership proposal looks like.

38:26 That's I think that's probably the one of the most important things. But also how we, you know, how back to growth, right? How we have net new conversations with with customers that we don't have existing partnerships with. You know, the case study is dead, the tell me who you are is dead, in our opinion, its relevance, right?

38:45 So if you can um arrive at a call having sent a sensible briefing note, there's no point in sending information that's going to take time to consume because everyone's busy, but something that will allow you to anchor and frame the conversation in deep context and understanding, then you you know, you don't need to establish credibility.

39:05 You've already done that, right? So now you're you're able to have a conversation which is anchored in, you know, having understood your customer, demonstrating you understand your domain through the thoughtfulness of preparation and questioning, you know, that changes how conversations happen. And, you know, one of the areas that we focus in a lot is we focus on customer experience and customer operations because it ties to growth value levers, right?

39:31 Like uh net promoter score, which improves cross-sell and upsell. You know, the the the advantage of doing that is a lot of customer sentiment and experience of journeys from the outside in is public information, right? Trust pilots, um, reviews. So you can correlate uh an indisputable external understanding of how customers perceive clients.

39:55 We all have to apply the filters, right? It's like we all know that they're all edge cases, right? So it's not very often that people go and put a review on trust pilot because they're super happy, right? It's it's often frustration. But you can apply those filters and you can normalize, right? So I think pay or if you want to have a net new conversation with a client, right, you have to pay them the respect that if you want to have a 30-minute discovery conversation with them, you should have spent at least 30 minutes deeply understanding their business so that you are coming to the conversation, adding value from the initial sentence.

40:29 So both of those things come to come back to the two themes, right, which is relevance and velocity. You know, you can't have a discovery meeting with a client unless you're relevant to them and you understand their relevance. And you know, everything you need to do, you need to act with velocity. So you do that discovery meeting, you ask for permission to record, you run that back through the process, you immediately play back your understanding, um, and then you ask for permission to move to the to the next stage of the relationship.

41:03 Yeah, that's I think relevance and velocity were probably the two mantras.

41:08 Yeah, and I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think we're even seeing this within our business. I think the way people are buying is you you say changing. I love that expression. Yes, study is dead because I absolutely think it is. I mean, I think you go in with your generic case studies on a slide or on your website.

41:22 That's not what people want here, as you say, they want it to be deeply relevant to them. One of the challenges I battle with is that we're all using AI to, as you say, in just a meeting, you know, give us a summary. But are we then truly um uh um being relevant to them? Because there's a risk, isn't it?

41:39 You're just sending out the AI summary. Like, how do you think the people in your business are truly understanding the customer and be being relevant to the customer and not over-reliant on AI that's just gonna be able to do that?

41:51 100% payload. And I think you know, AI is great, but it requires context and it requires grounding and it requires training, right? So, you know, we we we believe that we've, you know, our approach is to separate our knowledge from our execution layer so that we can chop and change as we see fit. So for one use case we may be using Copilot, for another use case, we may be using a different large language model with embedded agentic capabilities, because most of them do have embedded agentic capabilities today.

42:22 So we believe the differentiation comes from um you know the ontologies, the design systems, the knowledge corpi that you're using around use cases and value frameworks, um, so that you're able to quickly make it relevant to your point of view, right? So when a point in case, so when we do a discovery meeting, we're doing discovery uh essentially around you know, um pain points, points of friction, capability maturity, um, focus areas for the next 12 to 24 months, you know, all of that provides relevance to where might the best initial and adaptive MVPs come from.

43:04 So, how can we parcel up a piece of work where we can demonstrate impactful change in a short space of time that the customer feels that, okay, this is, you know, you're credible, you understand the domain, you're proposing a sensible scope, your method aligns well to us being able to mobilize a team.

43:25 So now we're willing to make the investment because you're not asking for a long transformation program, you're asking to prove it in a use case, right? And so that it's a little bit, it's not try before you buy, but it's it's it's try quickly, right? Commitment is to the next, it's to the next phase.

43:41 And and all of the gates throughout that adaptive MVP are mutual. They're they're by agreement, right? So it's like we we agree, we move to the next phase once we're happy with the problem statement, with the value framework, with the event scope, with you know how we're going to contextualize. So we build that in to the execution gate.

44:00 So we we go into a discovery meeting with a purpose in mind, which is how can we propose back to you the most relevant area where we could deliver an adaptive MVP and get you to a measurable business outcome that you can evidence in your organization? And as we do that, we learn each other together. So we can go through that process.

44:18 And essentially what it does is it spins off more observations. So we deliver on the MVP, but as we go through the checkpoints, we can say, here's our reflection document, having gone through discovery. We see capability gaps in these areas, we see opportunities to engage in other adaptive MVPs in these areas.

44:36 So you're giving that extra as you go. And the I guess the best analogy is if if you've you've ever been to a like a Michelin-style restaurant, and you know, uh they're usually experience-led, you know, there are maybe 12 courses on the menu, but you always end up getting three or four extra courses.

44:52 Here's a little something from Chef, right? So you want to go through that discovery process and keep giving the customer something that you you didn't tell them you were going to give them, which delivers value and insight, right?

45:03 Yeah.

45:03 And so I think if you the most important thing today is to understand your mission and your purpose, understand your own value framework, build your methodology, then you can instantiate that in whatever technology platforms you want to use to be able to make sure you're able to filter for relevance for your clients and deliver with velocity.

45:23 And you know, all of those statements are above technology, right? So they're completely independent of the implementation. You know, choose your preferred AI provider technology platform. The same is true.

45:35 Yeah. What's been the hardest um thing for you as a business and maybe even for your customers you work with about that transformation and particularly the sort of process you're going through, you know, what have you learned along the way? What would you do differently looking back, or you know, where have there been the sort of key challenges on that transformation?

45:52 Yeah, so I th I think probably the hardest thing was um having the courage to stop and relabel everything and use different terms and essentially go against the grain, right? So, you know, not follow the beaten path of saying, okay, if we work with technology provider X or why we'll just come in and do a you know a pilot or a POC or a proof of value using those technologies, which is what everyone does, is just going against the grain and saying, no, there's a different way.

46:22 We're gonna we're gonna establish a new methodology, we're gonna establish new terminology, we're gonna make it entirely anchored in business language. You know, I think that that was the hardest thing was was actually stopping and resetting rather than refining. And, you know, that that we did as a collective executive team, right?

46:40 It was it was a collective decision to say we are we are at a moment in the market. You know, I I I I hesitate to use the word inflection point, right? Because I think it's it's like that's it's I don't know, there's something I don't like about inflection point, and maybe it's an overused term, right?

46:58 But there are, I think there are moments, and those moments are then an inflection point is more driven from outside, right? You you we I think we have to find our own rhythm and we have to understand when is the right time for us as an organization to accept that things are sufficiently different from the way we were doing things that we actually need to take a little bit of a step back and do a reset around how we think about how we're relevant to our clients, right?

47:25 And so that was probably the hardest part was accepting and acknowledging and um getting a balanced perspective across the whole executive team in terms of you know, what is the approach? Um, what's the terminology that we want to use? Um and ultimately our test was on ourselves, right? It's like can we can we deliver this to can we do this internally to deliver our own change?

47:49 And if we can, then we should be able to work it, make it work for our clients.

47:54 Yeah. I think you may have said this, Mark, or I think it's been said by many people, but I guess you're sort of, you know, you're building the plane and flying the plane at the same time.

48:01 Yeah.

48:01 And I think we're doing this today because everything's that's the new normal. So it's the new normal and the course keeps changing on us. So it's uh that's the new normal. So how do you measure that you're on the right track? Like are there things or or measures now you're looking at at an exact level that then and proof points you've seen that it's working, or you know, what are you using to measure that you're on the right course and you are adapting quick enough?

48:24 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it it's it's very early days, right? So the the the adaptive hypothesis, we have a why and a how deck and then a methodology deck, right? So we we started by testing it on our trusted customers and saying, look, you know, we want to get your feedback on this. It was like we're not we're not selling it to you, right?

48:45 And that's so our customers and our partners, so our technology partners, um actually some partners, some business partners we work with, so we're quite collaborative in the consulting space. So we we work with other consulting firms. So we tested it there, and you know, quickly we got to the point where some of our trusted clients were, this makes sense, we like this, we actually want a verb with you, we want to do this.

49:08 Um and from then on in, it in growth it's easy, right? Because it's it's net new propositions, it's um it's pipeline, it's qualified pipeline, um, it's deal cycle time, right? And I I you know we're not we're not being super religious about um putting measures around the the flow of opportunity yet, because we're we're testing many different things, right?

49:37 So we're having um conversations which are somewhat more strategic, which typically take longer to embed. Um we're having conversations where we're intercepting existing deliveries and we're saying let's do it in in this way. Um so we we're we very much test and learn, and we kind of accept that while we're in this phase, we're gonna do macro observation of you know, is it resonating?

50:01 Um, are we seeing a flow of opportunities moving in this direction? And and all of the early signs are very positive around those elements. We're all starting to internalize the the methodologies and the meaning. And you know, the the the greatest test, you know, this is where we started as an executive team is okay, so if we we're in we're in it, we're we're at at the site of one of our clients and we're going to a meeting, we get into the elevator, we in someone's in the elevator with us, we introduce ourselves, right?

50:34 And it just so happens that um the lady in the lift is the CEO of a company of the company or the COO of the company, right? And it's like, oh ABP, yes, ABP, we we're working with you. I know that um it's like remind me what you do, right? And it's like you're in a lift, right? So it's like it has to literally be a sentence that falls out of your mouth, right?

50:56 And so we want to shift from, you know, we are the advisory firm that are outcome focused to, you know, we focus on being relevant, we're delivering relevance for you, for you and for your clients, right? It's got to be short, it's got to be sweet. So we're internalizing that message. Um we're we're actually we're taking a slightly different approach.

51:17 So we're doing practice before culture, right? So we're we're building artifacts, we're testing and delivering with clients, um, we're establishing operating practices and getting momentum before we then talk about um internal reboots, cultural reboots, how we might restructure the organization around uh new ways of working.

51:40 Um we we already moved from practices to pods. So we you know we're design thinking practitioners, so a lot of our organizations uh organizational principles are just are constructed around being able to ideate and you know build things and throw them away and you know, lots of test and learn type approach.

52:00 So we're already moving the business in that direction, and we're we're actually quite excited about if we now apply the lens internally and say, okay, what structure best serves helping clients become adaptive and relevant, that that's not the conversation we've had yet, but it's it's gonna move in that direction, I'm sure.

52:19 Yeah, absolutely. Um and I think it's really interesting in terms of you know, I think some of the change that you're driving in the business. I want to go back to something I think I read on your website, which you sort of talked around the idea that, you know, I guess uh you think like clients because you were clients.

52:33 Like, and I guess one of the things we're all um challenged with in this industry is how do we bring in that next level of talent? Some of this goes back to the education sort of use case you talked about earlier. But how are you staying relevant, but also bringing in the new talent that you need to stay relevant, you know, in two years' time, five years' time.

52:51 So how are you tackling that challenge and any advice for listeners basing based on what you're doing?

52:57 Yeah, it's it's the most important question, right? Because we're speaking to sustainability now. And and actually, I think we tested ourselves in in the years where we shifted to more task automation and more commodity type work because we're a nearshore organization, we're small, so we were competing with large offshore organizations that were able to differentiate on cost, we were differentiating on value, we believe.

53:24 Um, but we always reckon recognized that we had a we had to fix that sustainability problem. So, how do we get access to good quality talent? Um, you know, and George and and other members of the executive team, they actually within the group established a separate company, the School of Automation, which is to all intents and purposes a not a not-for-profit, right?

53:45 So it essentially it enables um young professionals that you know don't have access to be able to go to higher education, they can't afford to go to university, or they're neurodiverse or ethnic minorities, underprivileged backgrounds. Um, and we work with you know all of the government institutions in in England, in Scotland, in Wales, uh, so that there's funding because we do a lot of work with public sector customers.

54:16 So, you know, that actually makes it super helpful. We offer this these educations to our clients as well to enable their own teams. But essentially what it does is it enables us to create uh knowledge tracks for young professionals where they can certify um it's vocational, so it has application, and we use it as a feeder program for our own talent.

54:39 So we've had talent that have come up through um through the School of Automation. Some of our best and brightest people came through that route, which is you know uh evidence uh that you don't need a higher education degree to be incredibly successful in um in your career. And that's something that then um at the point at which graduation occurs, we then we either place those individuals at ABP consultancy or we place them with our with our clients into the market because almost all of the funding, so Department for Education, for example, you know, their funding is mandated on placement metrics.

55:17 So if you take a cohort of 20 uh graduates through a 30-week program, you know, your funding is gonna be based on being able to place 50-60% of those cohorts into long-term employment. So that's the concept. Um, we think it's brilliant. Um we you know, we work with NHS, many NHS trusts, we work with NHS England, we work with you know public other public sector organizations, and it gives them an incredibly incredibly effective access to um to young talent.

55:52 And what they find is it's it's a way that they can sustainably build automation programs, and you know, because they're bringing that talent in at a young age, there's there's a lot of loyalty around um you know maintaining uh their career in that organization, certainly in the formative years. And it even though it could be considered to it to an extent cannibalization, it works very well because you know we provide that um that deeper senior expertise and guidance, um, whilst those young professionals do do a lot of the heavy lifting for the clients, and we use that same model internally.

56:30 So we've we found it's worked very well. Um and you know, it's also a great story, right? Being able to give back, um, being able to bring the next wave of talent into technology. You know, we've we've shifted that syllabus as we've grown as an organization. So we started largely with with RPA and BPM.

56:50 Now we do lots of AI fundamentals, lots of design thinking, um, you know, agentic design practices. Um and actually we're working with a couple of universities right now that that we're that are customers on adjusting our syllabus so that we continue to maintain relevance, and that's a bi-directional thing.

57:11 Fantastic. I think that's uh really exciting and great to hear, Mark. Um, as we sort of, I guess, wrap up, um we've talked a lot about like how do you fix sustainability? How do you make sure you stay relevant? How do you move to being an adaptive enterprise? I think some of the sort of core themes that you know you're obviously really focused on in driving as a business.

57:30 To our audience, what would be your three key takeaways if you know they're thinking about that and they're you know thinking, well, I've got to address this challenge. Yeah. Where do you suggest they start? And what if you know, what would be your three key messages to those audience?

57:43 Yeah, I mean, definitely um courage, velocity, and relevance are the three things. And I I it's not like I'm giving advice that that I don't see practiced by every organization and and leader that I talk to, right? I think it's just it's reinforcing that we we all collectively need to have the courage to think big and to embrace change.

58:06 Um, relevance, you know, is if we if we want to sum it up into one single word, it's even better than competitive advantage, right? Relevance is really what drives sustainable value in the markets that we serve, right? And velocity, everything has to be done more quickly, right? And actually, what we found is when we've challenged ourselves around velocity of follow-ups and um engagement, everything's more fresh, um, everything's more uh on point.

58:35 Um, so that that's a virtuous circle. So yeah, courage, relevance, velocity in in any particular order you like, right? Yeah. Points on a triangle.

58:46 Absolutely. And then us as leaders, I think we have to personally maintain our relevance in a world where there's a lot going on.

58:53 Yeah.

58:54 And then also we have to maintain our velocity and be prepared to change. Um, personally, how do you manage that yourself? How do you keep up to date, you know, whether podcasts you watch or you know, um things that you do that you would recommend other leaders start to do?

59:10 Yeah, I mean, I I mean, of course, I love I love your podcast because it's from peers in the industry, right? And so um, so many sources. I actually think interestingly, we don't have a challenge around um access to relevant information, right? Um what what we probably have a challenge around is maintaining the discipline to allow us time to consume it.

59:34 Yeah, um, my biggest learnings come from so we pract we practice uh reverse management principles. So we do mentoring and we do we do executive shadowing as well. So we'll have meetings where we bring you know some of the grads from SOA into our meetings as peers, because we're a very flat organization, to challenge thinking and some of the freshest ideas come from those perspectives.

59:58 So I think that's the I think the most important thing is you know that the the the conventional wisdom of like if you're experienced and you're in senior roles, then you've got wisdom that that you know um is completely different from the wisdom elsewhere in your organization. Actually, flip that thinking completely and and embrace deeply the the bottom level of your organization because it's the it's the generational shifts that uh change how thought processes work and that they're they're such healthy challenges.

1:00:35 Um I was in an event yesterday with a a bunch of interns that were doing um work for a technology partner for a year between A levels and university, a paid vocational track. And um it's incredible talking to them about some of the experiences they've had and how they think about where technology's at today and where the opportunities lie, um, because they have a different worldview, right?

1:01:03 So be open, be open. Um don't go to all of the conventional knowledge sources, right? Test and learn in in the the material you consume, I would say.

1:01:14 Yeah, I love that idea, Mark, and I might take that away of like as you say, bring, you know, we've got an exec team who are all sitting there with 30 plus years experience, but how do you bring in, you know, the more junior talent into your executive meetings and really challenge, you know, it's a great challenge, it's a great challenge.

1:01:29 Right? Because they they see the world from a different, a completely different perspective, and they see the business from a completely different perspective, right? So it drives a lot of honesty challenge around how messages are cascading throughout your organization, and you've got intent and then you've got consumption, right?

1:01:47 And I think it's really, really important to test all of the layers in your org. It's much easier for us to do it with the size of the organization we have. Um, but it's it's definitely worth the investment to do those things.

1:02:01 And is there anything the audience here could help you with? I mean, the leaders in consulting is all about sharing experiences. So when you think about some of the challenges you've still got to address.

1:02:10 Yeah.

1:02:10 Like where do you think the audience could help you? What would you see as you know, experiences that you'd like to?

1:02:15 Yeah, I mean 100% is um, you know, I look forward to the next Connect because, you know, at the end of the day, the first thing I do, I was at a technology event yesterday with a number of other business partners and we're comparing notes, right? Because never more so than now is there a spirit of collaboration in in markets where you know there may be overlap, but there's there's there's more opportunity in alliance than there is in, you know, sharing is always better than hiding, right?

1:02:46 And actually, you know, I think our our whole executive team, particularly George, George has always embraced partnership, and I think it's culturally uh really important part of our identity.

1:02:56 Yeah.

1:02:57 Um, so I I always I I try and learn from from my my peers, and you know, we we we don't get to connect as as peers as much as we do because we're all busy, you know, connecting with our customers and our partners. Um so when we get the opportunity, then we should take advantage of it. So I look forward to to our next opportunity to to connect as a group and and learning from everyone else as a humble student.

1:03:23 Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Mark. And if people want to learn from you, where can they get in touch with you?

1:03:27 Yeah, wherever. So uh LinkedIn, Mark Robbins um is probably the easiest place. Just connect with me. Um I'm always open to connect, I'm always open to to discuss. So if anyone is interested in anything that that that we've discussed or just wants to connect, then find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the easiest place.

1:03:45 Well, look, thank you, Mark, for your time. This has been a great discussion. I really appreciated you sharing your experiences on the transformation that you've you've you're driving. It's definitely made me think, and I think I'm gonna go away and think about like absolutely how do we all stay relevant in this ever-changing world.

1:03:59 But um, it's been great to spend the time talking to you, Mark. Thank you.

1:04:02 Likewise, likewise, appreciate the thoughtful discussion, the opportunity, and uh look forward to connecting soon.

1:04:10 Thank you for listening to the Leaders in Consulting podcast. To learn from and grow with fellow consulting leaders in person, apply to join our monthly confidential forums and peer to peer coaching groups in your city. Visit leaders inconsulting.com for details.