Great consultant frameworks: FADA, RAPID and more
Tried-and-tested frameworks and an example of FADA in action
Why do consultants use frameworks?
As a consultant I often rely on a few tried-and-tested frameworks to help organise my thinking. Frameworks are also powerful tools to help clients make decisions.
To help clients make decisions you need four things to be in place:
Access to relevant information & expertise
An appropriate framework for decision-making
The decision-making environment
Confidence
Today I'm going to talk about the second thing on that list - an appropriate framework. Frameworks help clients because they make complex issues clear, through the power of structuring.
Often clients will come to consultants because they can't quite work out how best to think about a problem. A framework gives them that. They can hang their thoughts, data, experiences and judgements on to the framework. It helps them keep what is useful and reject what isn't, using clear logic rather than personal bias.
A good framework also covers all the relevant inputs to a problem-solution. It gets rid of that nervousness that we might not have thought of everything.
There are lots of different consulting frameworks out there. If you became a consultant via case-study interviews you'll be familiar with many of them. Generally I like to stick with ones I know well and have used with clients - that way I have confidence they work well and I'm not second guessing myself.
That said, I've recently started using a new one - FADA - that I'm finding to be powerful. I'm in that tricky moment of growth that happens when I step out of my comfort zone to do something a bit different. I'm testing, observing, getting feedback, and learning. I’ll share that experience at the end.
Frameworks for assessing market size & growth potential
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Market size = Population x Penetration x Spend per user
This works for historic, current, or forecast market size. It also works for market growth forecasts, if you think about the drivers of each of the elements. (By driver, I mean the things that will influence the growth or decline of that thing)
Addressable population is the total potential customer base for the product type. It's important to properly define the business your client is in so that you calculate population accurately, including substitute or alternative products that are part of the same buying decisions. Addressable population changes can be driven by many different things - from GDP to demographics to affordability to innovation.
Take a product like robot hoovers. The earliest I can remember a friend of mine buying one was around 2010. It cost over £1,000. He is an early tech adopter with lots of disposable income - a broad definition of the addressable population for innovative tech products. Fast forward to 2023 and costs have come down, expanding the addressable population to include those with lower levels of disposable income.
Not everyone in the addressable population will be buying the product type. This is where penetration is an important number - the percentage of that population actually buying the product type.
That gives us the number of people buying the product type. We then need to multiply that by how much they are spending, on average.
There's lots of detail you can break down underneath a framework like this. Even that this level it helps clients make decisions. E.g., should we prioritise expanding appeal, increasing awareness, or bundling to increase spend? The right answer will depend on the dynamics between population, penetration, and spend.
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Revenue growth: Market growth, share, relative advocacy
Often a consulting case will need to answer questions around how fast we can expect revenue to grow. This is a simple but powerful framework to get to the heart of what matters for that. With this we assess market size & growth as above, then layer on what share of that growth they might take.
Share gain potential depends on their current market share and how much customers like them relative to competition. That relative advocacy is critical - if your client isn't well loved by customers, it will be hard for them to grow their market share.
In using a framework like this it's critical to speak to customers and get to the heart of how they see your client vs competition.
Frameworks for designing organisations
A lot of the consulting work I do these days is focused around organisational design and decision design. Here are three tried-and-tested consulting frameworks I frequently use in that work.
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Organisation, Talent, Skills, Culture
I first used this working the South African arm of a global consumer products business, back in 2010. We were helping them figure out how to achieve their growth ambitions in the context of a complex talent supply & demand environment with the post-apartheid political & cultural backdrop.
I'll keep it simple. This framework boils down to four questions:
Organisation: What roles do we need? (boxes on an org chart)
Talent: Who do we need? (names in boxes)
Skills: What do they need to be able to do? (role descriptions)
Culture: How do we want them to behave? (values)
Those questions can help your clients think systematically through the choices they have. There are levels of detail underneath them, and implications that stem from them - such as career progression and skill development - but these questions alone often help simplify complex decisions.
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Decisions: Quality, Speed, Effort, Outcomes
Designing an organisation is not enough. To make it work you also need to clarify decision processes, and that starts with knowing what makes a good decision.
This framework (based on research done by Bain & Company) helps my clients get clear on how good their decisions are currently.
Are they making decisions that generally turn out to be correct in hindsight?
Are they making them at the right pace - not too fast, or too slow?
Does it take an appropriate amount of effort to make decisions?
And are they able to implement them once taken so something changes?
Another great example of a framework that helps identify where issues might be occuring, so my recommendations can be laser-focused.
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Decision design: RAPID framework
The third organisational design framework I use all the time is Bain & Company's RAPID. This is a powerful way to design decision processes that optimise for quality, speed, effort and outcomes.
I'll write a more detailed guide to how I use it separately. For now, I'll just say that RAPID boils down to identifying single decision owners and empowering them to take the decisions they own. By building processes around these single owners clients can often clear away a lot of wasted time and effort that bogs down decision-making.
A framework for evaluating strategic options
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FADA: Feasibility, Acceptability, Desirability, Affordability
This is the new framework I’ve been using. I give credit to Rachel Healy of Healy Consulting who introduced me to it.
I'm finding it a powerful tool to help clients evaluate different strategic options. It's a framework that ensures all the elements of an option are considered - from whether it's possible, to whether it's politically or culturally acceptable.
Each element of it answers a specific question:
Feasibility: Can we do it?
Acceptability: Do we want to do it?
Desirability: Will it be welcomed by our customers?
Affordability: Do we have the capital, and will we get a return on it?
It's powerful at the hypothesis stage of a project when we're generating a shortlist of ideas to do deeper work on, as well as at the end to present a comprehensive evaluation of the different options.
I can't share current client examples for confidentiality reasons, but here's an example of a hypothesis I use to introduce the concept to people.
(as this is at hypothesis stage, I use the traffic light bubbles as an indication of how confident I'm feeling in the sub-assertions - the goal of the consulting project is then to acquire sufficient confidence that decisions can be made)
Making strategic choices is rarely simple. The answer is not usually obvious. Using a framework like this helps clients identify exactly where the trade-offs are.
Different clients and different decisions have different weightings across the four areas. Some clients have red flags for acceptability - things they won't do for cultural reasons, or policy reasons.
For example, I used this framework with a client recently. I was helping them decide whether or not to initiate a process to acquire a competitor.
This business is owner-operated and has a long history of weathering difficult financial times. They are very risk averse and keep significant cash balances in ready access in the bank.
To acquire this competitor was feasible - the business was for sale, and the client could run the process.
It was desirable - the combined business would provide better service for customers.
It could be affordable - but only by taking on debt and breaching the policy of keeping 9 months reserves in the bank.
In this case, that meant it was unacceptable to the owners. The beauty of this framework is we uncovered that "red flag" very early on, before investing significant time & money in a diligence process.
By framing the decision in this way we cut to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible.
And that's the real power of a good consulting framework.
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