The Consulting Practicum
A progressive, self-paced programme from beginner to expert consultant.
For people with no consulting background who want to run paid engagements. No MBA, prior client or big-firm background needed.
- How long
- About 12 months at 6 to 8 hours a week
- Cost today
- Level 0 free
- The rest
- Early access, by invitation or request
By the end
- Run paid consulting engagements and set your own methods.
- Define a problem precisely enough to be solvable.
- Gather evidence that survives challenge and reach a defensible view under incomplete information.
- Get a person with authority to act on your analysis.
- Price your work and run a practice that does not collapse when you take a holiday.
Most consulting courses teach frameworks. Frameworks are the least valuable part of the job and the easiest to look up. This programme teaches the four things that actually determine whether someone succeeds at it: defining a problem precisely enough to be solvable, gathering evidence that survives challenge, reaching a defensible view under incomplete information, and getting a person with authority to act on it.
Every level ends with work on a real organisation, not a case study. Real organisations have politics, missing data, and people who disagree with each other. Case studies have none of these, which is why people who are excellent at case studies are frequently poor consultants.
Nothing here is passive. Each lesson carries knowledge checks that explain why the wrong answers are wrong, which is where the learning actually is. Each level carries working tools you use on your own situation, not demonstrations. Three branching simulations put you in engagements where early decisions constrain later ones, exactly as they do in practice.
Cadence
Six to eight hours a week. Roughly two hours on lessons and checks, four to six on the exercise. A learner doing five hours every week for a year finishes far ahead of one doing twenty hours a month for three months and then stopping. Consulting skill is built by repetition against feedback, and repetition cannot be compressed.
Prerequisites
None formally. No MBA, no prior client, no big-firm background. What is genuinely required is the ability to write a clear page, tolerance for problems that stay ambiguous for weeks, comfort being the least knowledgeable person in the room about the client's own operations, and willingness to be briefly disliked. The first of these is the most fixable and the most often lacking.
The levels
- 0Orientation and practice visionWhat consulting actually is, what it is not, and the first honest description of the practice you intend to build.Free
- 1Structured thinkingThe core mental discipline. This level separates consultants from opinionated people, and it cannot be skipped or shortened.Locked
- 2Evidence and synthesisTurning a defined problem into gathered evidence, and gathered evidence into something a busy person can act on.Locked
- 3Client craftCorrect analysis that nobody acts on has produced nothing. This level is about the human system the analysis has to survive.Locked
- 4The business of consultingWhere work comes from, what it should cost, and how to run a practice that does not collapse the moment you take a holiday.Locked
Consulting visioning
The phrase carries two meanings. Both matter, and confusing them is the most common early mistake.
Meaning one: the vision of your own practice
Before a consultant sells anything, they must be able to say what they are for. Not a list of services. A position. A services list describes what you are willing to do. A position describes the specific change you exist to produce, for a specific kind of client, at a specific moment, with specific evidence that you can produce it.
Most beginners skip this because it feels premature. It is not premature, it is load-bearing. Without a position, pricing is arbitrary, referral is impossible because nobody can remember what to refer, and every enquiry looks equally attractive so you chase all of them. With a position you can decline work without anxiety, because you know what the work is not.
The four questions
- Who. Which organisations, at what size, in what sector, facing what circumstance. "Small businesses" is not an answer. "Nigerian NGOs of five to fifty staff that have just won their first multi-year donor grant" is an answer, because it excludes almost everybody.
- What problem. The problem as the client experiences it, in their words. Clients do not buy "organisational development." They buy an end to the specific thing keeping them awake.
- What change. The observable difference after you leave, stated as before and after. A report is not a change. A report is a thing you leave behind on the way to a change.
- What proof. Why anyone should believe you. Early on this is borrowed: relevant employment history, a qualification, a named mentor, a first engagement done cheaply. Later it is your own record.
You have a position when you can state it in two sentences to a stranger at a wedding and they respond with a follow-up question rather than a polite nod. Until then you have a services list wearing better clothes.
Worked example
"I help organisations improve their operations and build capacity through tailored solutions that drive sustainable impact."
Every word is true of every consultant alive. It names no client, no moment, no fear, no change. Nobody can refer this.
"I work with Nigerian NGOs that have just won their first multi-year donor grant and are about to fail their first audit. I build the financial and reporting systems the grant requires, in eight weeks, before the first reporting deadline."
Client, moment, fear, change, constraint. Someone who hears this and later meets such an NGO will remember it.
A position is not permanent. Expect three or four revisions in the first two years, as you learn which problems people actually pay to solve rather than which ones you find interesting. Revising deliberately is a different thing from never having had one.
Meaning two: visioning as a client-facing method
Visioning is also a facilitation technique: the structured process of getting a client group to agree on a described future state before anyone argues about how to get there. It appears at the front of strategy work, institutional reform, digital transformation, and in development programming it usually sits at the head of a theory of change.
The technique exists because of one specific failure. Groups that jump to solutions argue endlessly, and the argument looks technical while actually being a disagreement about goals. Two people arguing about whether to buy a case management system are often really disagreeing about whether the organisation should serve fewer people better or more people adequately. Until that is surfaced, the technical argument cannot resolve, because it is not a technical argument.
The six moves
- Ground it. Establish the current state with evidence rather than opinion. What is measurably true today. This prevents both nostalgia and catastrophising, which are the two default modes of a group asked to reflect.
- Set the horizon. Far enough out that people stop defending current arrangements, close enough that they still feel accountable. Three years is usually right. Ten years produces fantasy because nobody present expects to be there.
- Describe, do not aspire. Ask people to describe an ordinary working day at that horizon. What does a citizen experience at the counter. What does a field officer do first thing. What has stopped happening. Description produces specifics; aspiration produces slogans.
- Surface the tensions. Where descriptions conflict, name the conflict rather than averaging it away. The conflicts are the content of the session. Everything else is agreement you already had.
- Test for cost. For every element, ask what the organisation would have to give up. A vision with no trade-offs has not been taken seriously by anyone in the room.
- Convert to markers. Turn the described future into observable indicators with named owners. If nobody outside the room could tell whether it happened, it is not a vision element, it is a mood.
- The most senior person speaks first and the session becomes an endorsement exercise. Take contributions in writing before any discussion.
- The output is a paragraph of adjectives. "World class, innovative, citizen centred" describes nothing. Push every adjective back to an observable fact.
- Nobody who does the actual work is in the room. A vision authored only by leadership does not survive contact with delivery.
- The session ends in warm agreement with no owner. Assign each element to a named person before anyone leaves the room.
Why the two meanings connect
A consultant who has never done the work of defining their own position facilitates the client version badly. They treat it as a workshop format to be run rather than as a genuinely difficult act of commitment, and the group senses the difference immediately. Level 0 asks you to do it for yourself. Level 3 asks you to do it for a client, and it will be obvious in the room whether you have done the first.
Worked exemplars
Four real deliverables, annotated. The course describes these at length; this is what they actually look like on the page.
Every annotation explains a choice, not a rule. Each one is numbered against the part of the document it is about. The same fictional engagement runs through all four: an assessment of grievance handling at a state Ministry of Community Development, commissioned after a donor review criticised the ministry's complaints process.
Read the storyline first. It was written before any of the other three, which is the point of it.
What is open, and what is not
Level 0 of every programme is free: its lessons, checks and gates need no account, its tools need a free account, and the other levels and the worked exemplars are for early-access members.
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