Consultants Should Be Catalysts

The starting question

Earlier this year I heard two ambitions that stayed with me. A corporate leader wants to make Thailand a core player in the AI era. An academic wants to discover algorithms that change the world.

Both are worth working towards. Both also made me ask a less comfortable question: where do we, as consultants, fit in?

Three forces that move a country

A country's progress is driven by three forces: the private sector, the public sector and academia. The private sector creates value. The public sector sets the rules. Academia pushes the frontier.

The problem is that they often work in isolation. A company has capital but lacks research talent. A university produces breakthroughs that never reach the market. A government writes policy without knowing what is technically possible. Each corner of the triangle is strong on its own. Together, they could be much stronger.

I see this often in energy efficiency work. Factories sit on the operating data, even when they have not measured it properly yet. Policy makers design incentives without always seeing the plant floor. Universities and research institutes develop better solutions that rarely reach the right factory at the right time. A lot of the value in that work comes from getting all three to the same table.

I believe consulting belongs at the centre of this triangle, acting as a catalyst.

What a catalyst actually does

I studied chemical engineering before I became a consultant, so I do not use the word loosely.

A catalyst speeds up a reaction without being used up by it. It does this by offering the reaction a different route, one with a lower energy barrier, so that far more molecules have enough energy to react. But speed is only half of its value. A well-chosen catalyst can also favour one reaction over another, steering the same ingredients towards a better product. What it cannot do is make an impossible reaction possible. It only speeds up what the chemistry already allows.

That is what consulting should do. Lower the barriers that keep business, government and academia from working together, and bring the right people and knowledge together under the right conditions, so that progress moves faster and in the right direction.

Four skills a catalyst needs

A poorly chosen catalyst does nothing useful, or worse, speeds up the wrong reaction. To earn a place at the centre, I think we need four capabilities.

1. Continuous learning: stay active

In practice, a catalyst loses activity over time. One common cause is poisoning: impurities bind to its active sites and block them. For us, the poison is outdated knowledge, old assumptions sitting where new information should go.

After Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft, he pushed the company to move from a "know-it-all" culture to a "learn-it-all" culture. Consultants need the same shift. Go broad: megatrends like geopolitics, sustainability and AI. Go deep: real expertise in the industries we serve. Breadth without depth cannot earn trust. Depth without breadth cannot connect the dots.

2. Time management: be fast

The first job of a catalyst is speed. If we are slow, we stop being the catalyst and become the slowest step in the process, what a chemist would call the rate-limiting step. Every hour, ours and our client's, should go to work that moves things forward. This is one place AI genuinely helps me: it takes first drafts, formatting and translation off my plate, so more of my hours go to the thinking.

3. Critical thinking: choose the right reaction

The same raw materials can produce very different results. A great catalyst does not only accelerate. It selectively favours the reaction that produces the most valuable outcome. For us, that means analysing problems rigorously, identifying which path creates the most value, seeing risks before they materialise, and having the courage to recommend a different direction when the obvious answer is not the best one.

4. Communication: bring the reactants together

Many catalysts work by bringing molecules close enough, and in the right position, to react. Communication creates that closeness in our world. It is the work of translating between stakeholders who speak different languages, carry different incentives and see different realities, and then finding common ground. For me the different languages are often literal: Thai, Japanese and English in the same project. I wrote about that in The Slow Process Is the Point. When we communicate well, we bring the three corners of the triangle close enough for new reactions to happen.

The work ahead

I am still working on all four. But I know what I am aiming for: to be a catalyst that is knowledgeable enough to be trusted, fast enough to matter, sharp enough to choose the right path, and articulate enough to bring people together.

The raw materials are already here. Our job is to help the reaction happen faster, and in the right direction.