The Unexpected Reality

I thought consulting was about having the answers—walking into boardrooms with frameworks and telling executives what to do. What I discovered at Alexandra Group was the opposite: consulting is about being a professional question-asker who helps organizations understand themselves. On day one, they handed me a data room and said "Figure out what's happening in this company and tell us in two weeks." No frameworks. No training. Just: go extract truth from chaos.

Why This Experience Mattered

After my MBA and enterprise sales experience at Oracle, I chose a consulting firm strategically. They specialized in go-to-market consulting, and I saw an opportunity to weaponize my unusual background—I had the analytics training most consultants lacked, plus I'd actually carried a sales bag. I thought this would be my crash course in "thinking like a consultant" while getting accelerated exposure to dozens of revenue organizations. What I really wanted was to understand what consultants actually do that makes their thinking so sought after.

The Learning Laboratory

They operated like a content factory for executive decision-making. Partners would sell projects, then throw management consultants at them to do the actual detective work. We'd interview everyone in an organization—and people would tell us things they'd never tell their own managers. Our job was to synthesize hundreds of conversations into slides that could cut through organizational politics and give leadership clarity.

The system was fascinating: we had "supercharged PowerPoint" tools that let us crank out presentation slides at incredible speed. Junior analysts handled heavy analytics, but the real skill was pattern recognition—taking messy, contradictory human insights and structuring them into frameworks that revealed what was actually happening versus what people thought was happening.

My Systems Thinking Advantage

While other consultants were learning industries from the outside, I could talk to sales teams like a peer. When I interviewed enterprise reps, I'd mention my Oracle experience and suddenly they'd open up about the real dysfunction—how much time they were actually wasting, whether they were really making their cold calls, what their managers didn't understand about their territories.

I approached each organization like a system with hidden flows of information and misaligned incentives. Instead of just collecting complaints, I was mapping the actual decision-making pathways and identifying where the system was breaking down. My sales background let me ask the probing questions that revealed the gap between what leadership thought was happening and what was actually happening on the ground.

Key Insights Gained

First insight: Organizations don't hire consultants to be told what to do—they hire them to see themselves clearly. Most companies have intuitive leaders who sense problems but can't articulate them with enough precision to act. Our job was translating gut feelings into data-backed clarity.

Second insight: The real skill is synthesis, not analysis. Any smart person can collect information. The magic happens when you can take 100 interviews and distill them into a heat map that makes an executive stand up and walk to the screen because finally someone has shown them what they've been sensing but couldn't see.

Third insight: Slides aren't just communication tools—they're thinking tools. When you force yourself to articulate complex organizational dynamics on a single slide, you have to understand the system deeply enough to make it simple. The constraint forces clarity.

How This Rewired My Thinking

Now when I encounter any organizational problem, I instinctively start thinking: "How would I explain this situation to someone who needs to make a decision about it?" I don't just gather information—I'm constantly organizing it into frameworks that reveal patterns and point toward action.

The experience taught me that most organizational dysfunction isn't about bad people or bad intentions—it's about misaligned systems where good people are working against each other without realizing it. My default approach became: interview everyone, assume positive intent, then map the structural forces that are creating the problems.

What I Bring Forward

I can walk into any revenue organization and quickly identify the friction points between what leadership believes is happening and what's actually happening in the field. More importantly, I can translate complex organizational dynamics into simple, visual frameworks that help teams make decisions.

This isn't about having consulting experience on my resume—it's about having internalized a systematic approach to organizational problem-solving. I can take messy, contradictory information from multiple stakeholders and synthesize it into actionable insights. I know how to ask the questions that reveal hidden system dynamics and how to present findings in ways that cut through politics and drive decisions.

The Bigger Picture

The goal was never to become a career consultant—it was to understand how to bring order to organizational chaos. What I learned is that the most valuable skill in complex environments isn't having the right answers, it's knowing how to extract the right insights from messy systems and communicate them in ways that enable action.

But here's what consulting also taught me about myself: I'm someone who learns through application. I'd built this incredible skill to analyze, synthesize, and recommend—but I was only experiencing half the learning cycle. As a systems thinker, I understood that research activities build theories, but the real knowledge comes from translating those theories into practical application.

Consulting improved my skills, but I wanted to improve my learning and knowledge. I loved understanding how consultants thought, but I wasn't applying it myself—and that's where the deepest learning occurs for me. I realized I needed to get back inside an organization where I could do it all: collect data, assess, summarize, make recommendations clear, decide, plan, implement, execute, and then start the cycle over again.

Every organization is a collection of well-intentioned people operating within systems that often work against their intentions. The ability to see those systems clearly and help others see them too—that was the consulting skill I needed to master. But the ability to actually change those systems? That required getting back into an operational role where I could put all this skill building to the test and move into the next evolution of my learning and development.