Most boards did not set out to abandon the concept of consulting in 2025.
It crept in.
Unremarkably and largely unremarked.
Until by the end of the year, a common theme had emerged among both European supervisory boards and American boards: traditional models of consulting were an unacceptable divergence from board responsibilities.
This was not a rejection of expertise.
It was a rejection of asymmetry between those who provided guidance and those who absorbed the consequences.
In 2025, boards became accountable in ways that had not been seen before.
Regulators. Investors. Employees. The public.
All insisted that boards be accountable for much more than a reasonable level of oversight.
For outcomes. For performance. For delivery.
For failure to deliver, most of all.
When things went wrong, you could point upwards and up and up.
Traditional consulting arrangements provided a structure for accountability to be avoided.
An expert advises. A board accepts the advice. Management delivers on the advice.
When delivery fails, the scrutiny stops at the door of the board.
This asymmetry was not acceptable to boards.
It was clear by 2025 that advice without a commitment to delivery created a multiplier effect for risk, not a neutral advantage.
Consultants had been blind to this because they had never had to bear the costs of inaction.
Boards had seen something in traditional consulting processes that tempted them to embrace its structures: safety.
Traditional consulting arrangements with all their frameworks, diagnostics, benchmarks, and phased implementations provided a sense of security that other governance arrangements did not.
In practice, however, these processes created the illusion of control that board members found increasingly dangerous after 2025.
They created a logjam for decision-making.
They created a blurring of who was accountable for what.
They created initiative fatigue.
They drained the time of leaders in other governance institutions that needed to make decisions quickly to keep pace with rapid changes in their organizations.
Boards that expected “best practice” governance delivered paralysis for execution.
Consulting firms operate under a governance model that optimizes the creation and dissemination of insightful data.
They reward their consultants for producing perceptive data, for presenting it elegantly, and for honoring the commitments they make to their clients.
They protect their consultants from the adverse effects of poor decision making.
An engagement has an end point when the consultant has delivered what he promised the board would gain from the engagement.
Boards operate in a different reality.
In 2025, boards treated consultants who failed to adapt to this reality as out of date.
The acceleration of technological developments, particularly developments in AI, exposed boards not just around the country but around the world to what traditional consulting arrangements would not deliver:
A credible partner who could identify challenges and solutions in a fast-changing environment.
Someone who would assume accountability for transformations, investments and products that boards needed to approve but whose success was anything but assured.
Traditional firms had no mechanisms that would bind consultants to the performance of their clients after engagements had ended.
What happened to their customers after they had delivered their reports was not their concern.
By late 2025, many boards had determined that delegating authority to provide guidance was not sufficient.
Delegating authority to share accountability for AI initiatives was a requirement for continued relevance.
Boards did not reject transformation in 2025.
They rejected a specific brand of transformation program.
For decades, boards had accepted the premise that permanent structures were needed to establish the firms they governed.
Transformation programs that needed to be expanded, enhanced or even reformed during the lifetime of the program had become the norm for boards that wanted to keep their firms competitive and nimble.
By 2025, however, boards had lost confidence in programs that promised a virtuous cycle of change, but whose implementation was always one year (or one initiative) away from delivery:
Years of rolling roadmaps that promised a world of perfect governance that was one year closer with every new program introduced.
Decade-long programs whose “finalization” was nothing more than an on-going process that had become an end rather than a means to an end.
Shortcuts to the goal of perfect governance that had become the journey itself.
Boards were looking for what works in their firms for what would create the best results for their firms without pretenses or pseudo-scientific structures.
Traditional consulting arrangements with all their “best practice” formulas had created such pretenses and boards would no longer invest in them.
There was nothing wrong with consulting services in 2025.
What was lacking, however, was Boards’ understanding of what they required from external partners after the governance shocks of the years 2020 – 2025.
Boards needed to learn that: Expertise without a commitment to the course of action being recommended was not a value addition; it was a threat to what they were trying to achieve.
What they needed from external partners was not just information but also assurance that their governance infrastructures were aligned with best practice.
Boards into 2026 require external partners who can:
Consultants who could not or would not comply with these requirements would revert to their previous role in governance institutions:
Advisors to management. Not partners who shaped board decisions.
Conclusion
Traditional consulting services did not failed because what they offered to corporate boards was unwise or devoid of merit.
They failed because they no longer fit the concept of governance that Boards had accepted by 2025. Boards are now about execution outcomes, not advisory process. Boards need partners who can get close to accountable for this, not just advise on it.
In 2026, we won’t be having discussions around “what we should do”.
We’ll be figuring out who we can partner with that will help us make it happen and with us take the hit if we fail.
Consulting that can’t answer that question will be articulate, but ultimately irrelevant.
Author: Cyril Moreau
At International Executive Consulting, we excel in driving business transformation and organizational change - enhancing corporate performance while optimizing efficiency.