Page 23 of the strategy deck. You’ve been in this room for two and a half hours. There have been a lot of charts. There has been a framework with four quadrants. There was a section called “The Evolving Consumer Landscape” that described the internet. And now, on page 23, after all of that, the consultant pauses, looks around the room with the gravity of someone about to reveal something that will change how you understand your business forever, and says: “Fundamentally, your customers want to feel understood.” The room stills. A director writes it down. Someone nods slowly, as if hearing a truth they’ve always felt but never had the words for. You have just paid €85,000 for someone to tell you that your customers want to feel understood.

The strategic insight that isn’t is one of the consulting industry’s most durable products. It is an observation disguised as a discovery, a platitude dressed in the vocabulary of proprietary methodology, a thing everyone in the room already knew, elevated to strategic clarity by being said with confidence in a deck that cost a lot of money to make look expensive. It is almost impressive, as a feat of professional performance. It is also, if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of it, genuinely maddening.

What Makes an Observation Sound Like an Insight

The gap between an observation and an insight is supposed to be evidence: data that reveals something non-obvious, a causal relationship that changes how you act, a finding that would not have emerged without deliberate inquiry. A real insight has consequences — it should change what you do. “Your customers want to feel understood” has no consequences because it applies to every customer of every brand in every category, which is the marketing equivalent of saying “people prefer to be treated well.”

The consulting industry has developed an extensive toolkit for transforming observations into insights without adding actual content. The most reliable method is proprietary framework nomenclature. “Your customers don’t just want a product — they want a ‘Value Realization Journey’™” sounds like an insight because it has a name. The name implies a model. The model implies research. The research implies specificity. None of that chain is necessarily true, but the vocabulary creates the impression of it.

Another method is the counter-intuitive setup. “You might expect that lower prices drive conversion. But our research shows — ” and then what follows is either actually counter-intuitive (rare) or a restatement of the original premise with a slight reframe (common). “Our research shows that customers prioritize value perception over price” means “people don’t only care about cheapness,” which means the original premise was a straw man set up specifically to be knocked down, creating the sensation of revelation without the content of it.

The Confidence Premium

Here is the mechanism that makes the non-insight viable as a business proposition: the people delivering it are very confident, and confidence is genuinely valuable in contexts where the audience is uncertain. When a company brings in external strategy consultants, they are usually doing so because something is unclear, some direction needs to be chosen, some argument needs to be settled. Into that uncertainty arrives someone with a deck, a methodology, and the manner of someone who has seen this situation many times before and knows exactly what to do about it.

The confidence is not fraudulent. Most consultants genuinely believe what they’re presenting. The issue is that genuine belief and genuine insight are not the same thing. It’s entirely possible to be completely convinced of an observation that is completely obvious. And it’s entirely possible for a room full of intelligent people to hear that observation delivered with conviction and experience it as new information, simply because the delivery elevated it above the threshold where they would normally filter it out.

This is the confidence premium: paying for certainty in a moment of uncertainty, regardless of whether the certainty is earned. Companies pay it because the alternative — sitting with the ambiguity, making decisions without external validation, trusting the knowledge that already exists inside the organization — is uncomfortable in ways that a €85,000 invoice temporarily resolves.

The Insight You Already Have

Most companies contain the insights they’re paying consultants to discover. They exist in the customer service team, which has been listening to customer complaints for years and has detailed, specific knowledge of what goes wrong and why. They exist in the sales team, which knows exactly how competitors are perceived and what objections come up in every conversation. They exist in the product team, which knows which features get used and which ones were built for a persona that turned out to be fictional (see: Jennifer).

This knowledge doesn’t get elevated to “strategic insight” because it comes from inside the organization, because it’s messy and specific and sometimes contradicts the official narrative, because it requires listening to people who are not senior enough to have opinions that count. The external consultant’s version of the same knowledge, repackaged in a framework and delivered on slide 23, becomes the strategic direction for the next three years.

There is a version of external strategy work that is genuinely valuable: bringing a perspective that the organization can’t generate internally due to proximity, ego, or politics; structuring a decision-making process that moves faster than internal dynamics allow; providing the political cover that sometimes allows good ideas that already existed to finally be acted upon. That version exists. It is surrounded, in the market, by a much larger volume of expensive restatements of the obvious.

The Test Worth Running

Before commissioning the next strategy project, try this: ask your customer-facing teams to write down what they know about why customers buy, why they leave, and what they wish the product or service did better. Read it carefully. Compare it to what the strategy deck will cost. Ask whether the gap in understanding justifies the investment, or whether the investment is mostly buying confidence and a good-looking deck to show the board.

Sometimes the answer will be: yes, we genuinely need external perspective here. Often the answer will be: we need to listen to our own people better. Neither answer requires slide 23. The NoBriefs shop sells, among other things, the reminder that the most important things in marketing are usually obvious — what’s rare is the courage to act on what you already know. The Spreadsheet Sloth has sat through that deck. It did not change his life. It did not need to.