The "sponge consultant" refers less to an individual than to a functional role stabilized by large contemporary organizations. It is neither an anomaly nor a caricature: it is a rational response to a precise combination of economic incentives, governance structures and managerial fears. The problem with this emblematic figure is therefore not moral. It is systemic.
This consultant is defined by their ability to absorb organizational complexity without ever transforming it into responsibility. They capture information, unassumed arbitrations, latent conflicts, internal political constraints, and restitute them in a neutralized, disembodied, technically presentable form #jesuisenretardsurmaprèz.
This operation is presented as analysis. In reality, it is a decanting mechanism: everything that is sharp is dissolved, everything that is conflictual is reformulated, everything that could engage a decision is converted into a hypothesis.
This absorption function is central. It allows the client organization to give itself the image of a rational structure, in motion, capable of introspection, without exposing itself to the concrete consequences of this introspection. The sponge consultant does not come to disturb internal equilibria, they cushion them. They act as a buffer layer between operational reality and the decision-making level, which explains their popularity with general management as well as intermediate management.
From a strictly economic point of view, the sponge consultant does not produce new value. They redistribute existing value in the form of ex post or ex ante justification. The mission serves to legitimize an already decided orientation, or to dilute the responsibility of an orientation that will never be clearly decided. Billing is not indexed on a measurable result but on a presence, a method, a deliverable conforming to the firm's standards. The cost is certain, the benefit is narrative.
This is where the deleterious character of the model appears. The sponge consultant operates in a regime of structural irresponsibility. They do not own the decisions they illuminate, nor the effects they produce. They are evaluated on their ability to maintain the commercial relationship, to respect the client's implicit codes, to never create too strong a dissonance. The failure of a project is never attributable to the mission itself, since it only had, by construction, a role of accompaniment, framing or recommendation.
This absence of responsibility is reinforced by the rapid rotation of teams and the fragmentation of interventions. The sponge consultant intervenes on short time frames, without exposure to the implementation or exploitation of the strategic choices they helped formalize. They can therefore produce seductive but disconnected conceptual architectures from operational constraints, without suffering the backlash. The debt they generate is organizational, never personal.
One could object that these consultants are often highly qualified, analytically solid, technically competent. This is correct. Their intelligence is not feigned. It is simply oriented toward optimizing the system that employs them. Knowledge is mobilized not to solve a problem, but to make it presentable, shareable, sellable. The sponge consultant is an expert in formatting, not in transformation. They excel in translation, not in action.
This logic perfectly serves the interests of large firms. The sponge consultant is standardizable, interchangeable, scalable. They can be quickly trained in generic methods, massively deployed, billed at high rates without depending on the project's actual success. The value created does not reside in the impact on the client, but in the capture of budget and its transformation into margin, growth, stock market valuation. The wealth produced is strictly for shareholders.
But reducing the phenomenon to external predation would be an analytical error. The sponge consultant prospers because organizations demand it. They respond to an implicit demand: to think without deciding, to transform without breaking, to act without risk. In environments where decision-making is penalizing for careers, where error is sanctioned more severely than inaction, externalizing thought becomes a rational defensive strategy.
The sponge consultant is therefore an institutionalized alibi. They make it possible to demonstrate that means have been engaged, that experts have been consulted, that structured approaches have been conducted. They fulfill a function of managerial compliance. It doesn't matter whether the recommendations are applied, or even applicable. The essential thing is that a process has taken place.
As long as organizational governance values the traceability of decision processes more than their relevance, as long as internal conflict is perceived as a dysfunction rather than as a driver, as long as decisional courage remains an asymmetric risk, the sponge consultant will remain a central figure of contemporary service capitalism. Not as a marginal drift, but as a cog perfectly adjusted to a system that has learned to confuse activity and value creation.
Prospective
The reorientation of this narrative and structural anomaly toward an effective production of economic and industrial power supposes a profound displacement of responsibility postures. It is not about adding safeguards or indicators, but about modifying the very conditions under which intellectual intervention is made possible, evaluated and legitimized.
The first condition is the reintegration of responsibility over time. Any strategic or organizational contribution must be conceived as a longitudinal commitment, exposed to the deferred effects of the formulated choices. Temporal discontinuity, characteristic of standardized missions, mechanically favors conceptual productions optimized for immediate acceptability rather than for structural viability. When continuity is imposed, models simplify, useless abstractions disappear, and arbitrations become conservative in the noble sense of the term: oriented toward sustainability.
This continuity also imposes strict decisional traceability. Structuring hypotheses, renunciations, compromises must be explicitly recorded and linked to identifiable actors. Not in a logic of sanction, but in a logic of incentive alignment. The absence of traceability favors an inflation of recommendations at low cognitive cost, while its presence tends to rarify strategic speech and increase its density.
A second displacement concerns the status of conflict in value production. The systematic neutralization of internal tensions is a factor of economic inefficiency. Complex industrial and technological systems progress through explicit confrontation between incompatible constraints, not through their semantic distancing. A responsible posture consists in exposing these incompatibilities, making them intelligible, then forcing their resolution at an appropriate decisional level. Value is not born from the pacification of discourse, but from the clarification of irreversible choices.
This clarification supposes a requirement of materiality. Any proposal must be formulated in regard to its implementation conditions, its failure modes and its costs of maintaining in operational conditions. Strategic thinking that does not project itself into the real exploitation of the system it designs relates to narration, not to organizational engineering. The systematic backing of recommendations to constrained execution scenarios acts as a natural filter against the production of purely discursive solutions.
Another fundamental displacement lies in the redefinition of the relationship to desirability. Devices that privilege immediate adherence of stakeholders produce unstable compromises. Responsibility supposes on the contrary the acceptance of temporary friction, even of a loss of organizational comfort, when this conditions the robustness of the system. The permanent search for consensus weakens industrial capacity by diluting structuring decisions into ambiguous formulations.
Furthermore, the production of economic power requires the reconstruction of internal capacities for understanding and piloting. The externalization of strategic thinking creates a cumulative dependency that progressively reduces the decisional autonomy of organizations. External contributions can only be productive if they are inscribed in an ecosystem where structuring intelligence remains internalized. Otherwise, the organization becomes a consumer of interpretive frameworks that it no longer masters, which mortgages any coherent industrial trajectory.
Finally, a posture of responsibility supposes the explicit recognition of the debt generated by the decisions taken. Technical, organizational, regulatory or human debt, it constitutes the real cost of transformation. As long as this debt remains diffuse and impersonal, it is produced without constraint. When it is identified, measured and linked to precise choices, it becomes a central parameter of strategic arbitration. Value creation then ceases to be evaluated in terms of deliverables or schedules, to be appreciated in terms of resilience and capacity for evolution.
These displacements do not relate to a marginal reform of consulting, but to a redefinition of its perimeter and its legitimacy. The production of economic and industrial power can only emerge from a regime where thinking is exposed, situated and costly. In such a framework, the figure of the sponge consultant becomes structurally obsolete, not by moral disqualification, but by functional incompatibility with a system oriented toward real transformation rather than toward its narration.
