For centuries, tribes who’s territories bordered this region of endless rolling, silty loess hills, considered The Palouse to be neutral territory, common grazing land, a place where horses would not be stolen and war would not be waged. War had not been waged until US Army Colonel Edward Steptoe blundered into armed conflict near the present day Steptoe Butte, a jutting rock the natives called “power mountain.” Steptoe got his butt kicked and retreated back to Fort Walla Walla.

But that’s history. Today, the drive pulls you through capricious speed zones and expansive wheat and lentil fields. The place feels remote enough to allow for unregulated speeding, a false sense Whitman County depends upon to write a steady stream of speeding tickets. Best to pay attention and use the speed control to help you go slow enough to avoid the contribution to the county.

The drive up through The Palouse is a great place to talk, and Amy and I chatted last week as we chugged through. The topic? Consulting. The context? Why is it that so many of our colleagues are starving consultants? Why are we starving, too? Is it market or marketing?

The insight that came to me in that conversation was that the very term consultant serves as a context marker, one that poorly frames what consultants actually do.

Look at the questions clients ask: How much will it cost? What, specifically, do you recommend? What are the steps to achieve the goal? How long will it take?

These are questions best aimed at change. Aim them at transformation and invite endless confusion.

I used to define as contractor anyone who is hired to do defined work. They do the client’s bidding. Consultants I defined as those who do what needs doing, whether or not the client asked for that to be done. It’s common in consulting that the initiating purpose, target, goal, path, and cost shift. This is failure for a contractor, but success for a consultant.

Taking these rather limited definitions of contractor and consultant, I claim that contractors produce first-order change while consultants produce second-order transformation, but I might be the only one in the world making this distinction. What I didn’t fully appreciate until that drive through The Palouse, was that the label consultant introduces a change context rather than a transformation one. So of course the prospective client comes loaded with the usual change questions: How much? When? How long? How many? What process?

They come expecting to receive directions or methods, recipes or formulas. They expect the consultant to be an expert in the sort of problem they face and able to slay that dragon with experienced precision. That is contractor work.