Management Consultants and Butterflies
What I’ve learned about consulting, experience, and my aversion to PowerPoint in my first seven months at COMPLION
It’s January 16, 2026. I’m sitting in Cologne, holding a cup of coffee, and looking at an Excel presentation with 8-point font.
In front of me are tables, numbers, and more columns than any human should have to take in on a screen at once.
In a few days, I’ll officially become a management consultant.
Is this my future?
Starting at COMPLION was a jump off the deep end. A friend had recommended me and put me in touch with a colleague. Interviews followed, and eventually the question arose: Could I imagine joining COMPLION?
I could.
Whether I could actually add value there was another question for me.
The welcome in Cologne was warm, open, and supportive. At the same time, I found myself sitting among colleagues whose depth of expertise was quite intimidating at first. Many had master’s degrees, and some had decades of experience in their fields.
And me?
I brought a pretty unconventional resume with me.
We’re only human, after all
A dear colleague put my initial doubts into perspective in a pleasantly down-to-earth way over dinner that evening:
“We’re only human, after all.”
She was right.
Of course, there are situations where I lack knowledge. That will likely always be the case. Some of my colleagues are years or even decades ahead of me in their fields.
At the same time, I’ve come to understand over the past few months that experience generates its own form of knowledge.
I come from a background in insurance sales, web development, and self-employment, as well as marketing and management. I’ve built systems, advised clients, sold projects, made decisions, led teams, and eventually held responsibility as Chief Digital Officer.
None of these roles involved management consulting.
Nevertheless, consulting was almost always part of it.
People come to you with a problem. You try to understand what it’s really about. Then you look for a solution that works in the real world.
A college degree provides knowledge and methodological depth. Professional experience offers different perspectives, routines, and sometimes a rather keen intuition for when something won’t work in practice.
Things get interesting where the two come together.
And presumably, it’s precisely this mix that’s the reason why a team with very different backgrounds works well together.
Management consultants advise companies. Or so I thought.
My naive assumption before joining the field was that management consultants do one thing above all else:
advise companies.
After seven months, I’d say: That might not be entirely accurate—it’s a bit like assuming that butterflies are made of butter.
What I had underestimated was the craftsmanship behind the visible act of consulting.
Before a sound recommendation can be made, there’s analysis, structuring, coordination, documentation, and consolidation.
And yes: Excel and PowerPoint play a very relevant role in this process.
Above all, PowerPoint and I have had a difficult relationship so far.
My colleagues aren’t just faster than me at it—they’re also considerably more precise. At the same time, I’ve learned that a five-minute management presentation can very well be the result of two days of serious analysis.
Then those two days are well spent.
After all, the value doesn’t lie in the number of slides. It can lie in the fact that a complex issue has been distilled to the point where a sound decision becomes possible in the first place.
There’s another aspect I still struggle with, though.
Once the insight is already established, I want to spend as little human time as possible mechanically transferring it from one format to another.
Not because presentation design is unimportant.
But because that’s exactly where technology can increasingly help.
I feel the same way about Excel.
Excel is an amazingly versatile tool. But that’s precisely why there’s a risk that it will eventually be used for tasks for which another tool would be more suitable.
If all you have is a hammer, everything eventually looks like a nail.
The Excel file that didn’t want to be an Excel file
A few weeks later, I’m staring at Excel again.
This time, my first thought is:
Why is this even in Excel?
In a client project, we were working with an extensive collection of spreadsheets.
My first impulse wasn’t to make the file look nicer. I wanted to know if Excel was even the right tool for this.
I must have asked this question often enough until the existing collection eventually gave rise to the concept for a web-based relational tool.
That was an important moment for me.
Not because web applications are inherently better than spreadsheets.
But because I realized that my perspective could be useful.
My instinct is often to take a step back.
Is the problem we’re currently working on actually the root cause? Or are we just seeing a symptom? Is the tool wrong? Is the process wrong? Are we asking the right question?
This way of thinking is helpful.
However, at COMPLION, I’ve also learned that it has a downside.
Finding yet another dependency doesn't automatically make an analysis better. Sometimes it just makes it bigger.
Not every problem gets better when you make it bigger.
For someone like me, whose instinct is to look beyond the surface of the problem, this is not a trivial realization.
Learning to Think Differently
COMPLION has already helped me refine my approach to work over the past few months.
I approach topics in a more structured way. I think more in terms of levels, dependencies, and structures. At the same time, I’m learning when this meta-level is actually helpful and when it just creates additional complexity.
Language also plays a bigger role in this than I had expected.
Twenty years of sales, marketing, and corporate communications don’t just disappear overnight simply because my new business card says “Consultant.”
Consulting often requires a different kind of precision.
Less rhetorical embellishment. Clearly separating cause and effect. Formulating statements in a way that keeps them technically sound.
This paradigm shift is, in some ways, harder for me than learning new technical topics.
On the other hand, I bring a different work culture with me.
MVPs, agile prototypes, trying things out, measuring, discarding, improving. Plus a keen curiosity about AI and automation.
A colleague once described our different paces quite aptly:
COMPLION is the hedgehog. I’m the hare.
That’s probably a pretty good description.
I’d like to try out some things, while others first examine very carefully under what conditions that makes sense.
Today, I see things in a more nuanced way.
After seven months, however, I’m less convinced that there are simple answers here, either. The hare can learn from the hedgehog that speed alone isn’t progress.
And the hedgehog can perhaps occasionally learn from the hare that you don’t have to map out every path completely before you set off.
AI as the very busy junior consultant
This question is particularly interesting to me when it comes to the topic of AI.
I joined COMPLION with great enthusiasm for automation and artificial intelligence. The past few months haven’t dampened that enthusiasm.
But they have changed my perspective on it.
The more I learn about consulting methodology, the clearer it becomes to me: You can only meaningfully automate—or have AI execute—what you’ve understood.
Research, initial analyses, documentation, data preparation, and the conversion of results into various formats can already be partially automated or significantly accelerated today.
This trend will continue at a rapid pace.
When you consider that less than two years ago we were still marveling at AI-generated images of people with eight fingers, and today we’re watching AI-generated videos that are barely distinguishable even to trained eyes, the pace of progress is remarkable.
For me, however, this does not mean that young consultants or older career changers should no longer learn the fundamentals of this work.
On the contrary.
A consultant should have gone through the fundamentals with all their joys and struggles.
They should experience firsthand why poor source data can ruin an analysis. And they should understand why a small inaccuracy at the beginning can later lead to an incorrect result.
Anyone who has never experienced this pain will find it difficult to judge where AI provides useful support and where it merely produces nonsense more quickly.
“Garbage in, garbage out” remains surprisingly relevant for the future. An AI is only as intelligent as the person operating it.
My vision of AI in consulting is therefore not so much an all-knowing replacement for consultants.
Instead, I picture a rather busy junior consultant.
We give it research tasks, have it prepare spreadsheets, create initial structures, and translate our conceptual frameworks into actionable results.
This shifts the focus of human consulting.
Thinking doesn’t disappear.
On the contrary.
Experience becomes more important. Methodological confidence becomes more important. The ability to recognize connections, draw the right conclusions, and contextualize results becomes more important.
And so does the ability to see, behind an assignment, what problem a client actually wants to solve.
Provided, of course, that one also knows exactly when it makes sense to think outside the box.
Seven months later
When I think back today to January 16 in Cologne, the Excel presentation still serves as a pretty good illustration of my first few months.
Not because Excel is the problem. But because I had to remind myself when a tool is simply a tool and when it’s a sign that you should look at a task from a fundamentally different perspective.
I’ve absorbed a lot over the past few months: methods, structure, different perspectives, and a more precise way of breaking down and reassembling problems.
Above all, though, my perspective on consulting has changed. I started out with a pretty clear idea of what makes for good consulting.
I still consider some of that to be true today. In other areas, I was surprisingly naive.
The question that was still on my mind at the kickoff event has also changed.
Can I even make a difference here?
Today I would say: Yes.
Not because I now work and think exactly like my colleagues. But because I don’t.
And because, at the same time, I now better understand how much I still have to learn from them.
If I could send Sebastian two sentences tonight, the night before his first day on the job?
Be confident.
And take that darn PowerPoint course.
Author: Sebastian Berger