Where does your picture of 2029 start?
Photo by Matthew Dlr
You've got three plates in front of you. On the first, this year's numbers and results. On the second, compliance and regulatory requirements that tighten every year. On the third, the question of how you stay relevant and meaningful to clients in a world that keeps speeding up.
The third plate is rarely empty. Most of the time it's piled with food from the other two.
What sits on the third plate
What counts as 'the future' at your firm?
In most organizations, it's the tech stack that has to hold up three years from now, an org structure that fits the size you are today, hiring and keeping talent, and integrating firms that used to run separately.
Every one of those topics starts in the same place, and that place is inside the firm: what we need to build, become, and put in place. Quietly, the third plate fills up with items from the first, without anyone ever making that call. The question that started there was about clients.
Why the third plate fills up unnoticed
Three forces make this shift almost inevitable, and we see all three at work:
A question with an owner and a deadline naturally comes up first. A question about your systems has a team, a vendor, a budget, and a completion date, while the question of what's shifting in your clients' world has none of those. Under pressure, every organization picks the problem it can close out. The market reinforces that pull, because it's full of firms selling answers that point inward. For a system, a structure, or a leadership program, someone will have a proposal ready tomorrow. For the question of what earns you your place with clients three years from now, no one has a proposal and no one has a delivery date.
The inside is also much easier to measure. Data on utilization, margin, cycle time, and turnover is already in your systems, while what's changing in your clients' world surfaces mostly in conversations, and conversations rarely fit in a dashboard. When an organization steers by what it can measure, the conversation about the future drifts inward.
Underneath both sits an assumption nobody says out loud. Every inward answer assumes client demand stays roughly the same, and that the job is doing the same work better, faster, or cheaper. An assumption like that is a bet that demand will hold steady. The bet may well pay off, but nobody calls it a bet, so nobody ever tests it.
The question changes shape
Meanwhile, something is shifting on the client's side that's hard to ignore once you notice it. A few examples. A client once asked an engineering firm to design an installation and now asks whether the site makes sense at all, given grid constraints. Where a lawyer used to draft the contract, the question now is whether to trust this AI vendor with company data. The accountant audited the financials and now fields questions about what sustainability reporting means for financing. And where a director asked to fill a vacancy, the conversation now covers how to keep the work going with a permanently smaller team.
What these questions share is that they come earlier in the process. The old question was about execution. These are about the thinking and the decision, and whoever sits at the table helps shape what happens next.
Starting outside
What does it look like when an organization starts outside rather than inside? An example from our own practice shows how small that start can be.
An insurer covering a large municipality and the organizations around it holds a century of policy and claims data. In the classic role, that data is mostly administrative: someone insures a risk, something goes wrong, someone determines the cost, and the insurer pays the claim. Step back from a hundred years of claims and risk data, though, and patterns start to appear in what happens across a city. The same knowledge takes on a different meaning, namely how the city can get safer and more livable.
That shift from administrative data to risk intelligence took shape when the city explored building more sustainably with mass timber, an ambition that ran into fire safety and insurability. The classic response fits on one line, because the risk is hard to underwrite.
Instead, the fire department, the construction firms, and the insurer sat down together to work out what it would take to make it possible. That work falls outside the policy, and it was exactly what the client was wrestling with. From the outside, it still looks like insurance, while on the inside something else has taken shape: an insurer becoming a center of risk expertise.
What stands out most is how small the shift started. No strategic program and no blueprint for the new role, just one pilot with an existing client, small enough to fail. Three findings came out of it: looking at risk together works, data turns strategic the moment someone connects it to tactical and operational decisions, and the financial impact runs wider than the premium.
Why the offsite is hard to sustain
A start that small runs counter to how organizations usually take on a question about the future, and the contrast explains an experience many leaders will recognize. The offsite is energizing, the analysis is sharp, the plan is clear, and commitments get made. Three months later, the energy sits somewhere else.
The difference lies in the kind of problem. Inward work is complicated: expertise exists, the approach is proven, and enough analysis produces a design you can then execute.
The question of how you stay relevant to clients works differently. No answer is waiting anywhere. It emerges in the client conversations you haven't had yet, and it becomes visible only once you move and see what comes back. Take that question on with first-plate tools, and you'll likely end up with a tidy roadmap that stalls the moment the first assumption wobbles.
What the third plate asks of you
The good news is that this change costs little money. What it asks for is something other than budget.
First, a different rhythm. One annual session is too little to keep sight of what's changing with clients, while a recurring moment lets you track how client questions shift.
Second, different people in the room: alongside leadership, the colleagues who talk with your clients every day. Their conversations supply the content for the third plate.
And finally, room to start without a predetermined endpoint. Room like that is the hardest to give, because the other two plates run on certainty, and this approach works only when leadership has your back.
A first step can be small. Take a few hours, pick five of your most important clients, and answer the same questions for each relationship:
What are we to this client today?
Do we deliver what they ask? Help them think through what's coming? Or share responsibility for where it's headed?
What sits on our third plate for the next three years, and how many items start with something changing at the client?
Counting takes two minutes. The conversation that follows is about your relevance and your place with clients for the next three years.