Consultants must have skin in the game
Consultants earn contempt not for telling you what you already know, but for having no skin in your game.
Advice without exposure is cheap. Slideware and blue-sky architecture cost the advisor nothing when production hurts.
Skin in the game means shared outcomes: delivery accountability, operational proximity, and a stake in whether the system works after the workshop ends. Counsel without consequence is entertainment.
If there is no stake in the result, there is no reason to trust the counsel—especially in platform work where the failure modes are slow and expensive.
