0.1 What a consultant actually sells

A consultant is paid for judgment applied to someone else's problem, under conditions where the client cannot or should not form that judgment themselves. Everything else, the analysis, the reports, the workshops, the frameworks, is packaging that makes judgment transferable and defensible.

Clients buy consultants for exactly four reasons. Knowing which one applies to a given engagement changes how you behave in it, and misreading it is a common cause of engagements going wrong for reasons nobody can name.

Reason	What they need	How you should behave
Capability	Expertise they genuinely lack	Teach as much as advise. Leave capability behind or you will be needed forever, which sounds good and is not.
Capacity	They know what to do, nobody is free	Speed and reliability beat brilliance. Do not redesign their approach unless it is wrong.
Independence	A contested finding needs an outside name	Protect your detachment visibly. Your value is that you are not them.
Cover	The decision is made; validation is wanted	Identify early. Sometimes decline. If you take it, make the analysis honest anyway and say so at the start.

Being paid for judgment has an uncomfortable implication. If the judgment is wrong, no amount of packaging saves you. This is why the thinking levels sit before the business levels, and why a practice built on marketing before capability tends to grow quickly and then produce work that does not stand up.

How to detect a cover engagement before signing

Cover engagements are not rare and they are not always unethical. What makes them dangerous is taking one while believing it is something else, because you then produce a genuine finding that contradicts the decision already made, and the engagement ends badly for reasons you did not see coming.

Four signals, in rough order of reliability:

The scope specifies the analysis but also, somewhere, specifies the conclusion. Read ToRs for phrases like "to validate the proposed approach" or "to confirm the business case."
The timeline is far too short for the stated question. Three weeks to assess a national system means the answer is expected, not sought.
Nobody will tell you who commissioned it or why now. Genuine engagements have a traceable trigger.
Access to the people who would disagree is repeatedly deferred.

What to say, early and neutrally "Before we go further, I want to check my understanding of where this sits. Has a direction already been chosen that this work needs to support, or is the direction genuinely open? Either is workable. I would just scope it differently."

Asking this is not confrontational and it is almost always answered honestly, because the client usually assumes you already know. What you must not do is discover the answer in week five.

The judgment premium

Fee levels track how much of what you sell is judgment rather than execution. Execution is priced against the cost of the person doing it. Judgment is priced against the cost to the client of getting the decision wrong. This is the entire economic logic of the profession, and it explains why Level 5 is about method design and publishing rather than about working harder.