Chapter 2 — Setting the Scene (plain-language version)
The ground the argument stands on
A practitioner absorbs the ground of the work without examining it. This chapter examines three parts of it: a definition of consulting, the distinct character of European infrastructure advisory, and the third box.
What I mean by consulting: the ChMC framework
By consulting I mean management consulting as defined by the Chartered Management Consultant (ChMC) framework, launched in 2021 by the Chartered Management Institute 1 Chartered Management Institute (2024) Chartered Management Consultant (ChMC) Competency Framework. . It gives the analysis two axes 💡 a 2x3 matrix, did you see it coming?. The first is four areas of competence: ethics, leadership, the client’s environment, and personal development, meaning how a consultant becomes a consultant. The second is three career stages. At Foundation, early-career consultants learn through formative tasks under supervision. At Applied, mid-career consultants lead teams and produce the analysis that shows the firm’s value. At Chartered, seniors contribute mainly their judgment.
Later chapters use these stages as their scaffold, with caveats: the framework is young 💡 put less politely: some people we know would not be able to name the four competencies, and every one of them would pass Chartered on the spot, says little about the public obligations of infrastructure work, and is one of several such schemes.
Why European infrastructure advisory is its own kind of work
Amsterdam, 2022. An advisory team recommends a price path for a Dutch drinking water utility, and the analysis is robust. Then the regulator’s lawyers invoke the legal requirement that drinking water be a public service regardless of cost recovery. The senior partner calls a pause: we advised as if the client’s constraints were commercial, and they are not.
Three features set European infrastructure advisory apart, from transport and energy to water and defence. The first is a tradition of engineering for public purposes: essential services for whole populations, whose aims are decided as public policy and not by the market alone. The second is regulation, heaviest in energy and water, which gives public obligations legal force. The third is a tightening European Union frame of climate, strategic-autonomy and AI commitments. Together they make the work a matter of public interest, not of analytical sophistication alone 💡 the cash-flows review is never the hard part. It’s the part students and juniors think is the hard part, which is roughly the whole thesis in one sentence.
The profession’s own account shows the gap. A 2026 white paper by the HEC Alumni consulting club locates consultants’ old legitimacy in knowing more than the client 2 Club Consulting & Coaching (C3), HEC Alumni (2026) ConseilIA : le nouvel âge du Conseil Augmenté. Réinventer le Conseil : comment l’IA redessine le métier, les compétences et l’avenir du secteur. p. 136. . Across its 248 pages the public appears only as regulatory context, and future generations not at all. That is no charge against the paper; it measures the distance to the people who bear the consequences.
The third box
Standard advisory thinking has two boxes: the firm that produces the work and the client that pays for it. The third box holds those who bear the consequences without being party to the contract: the publics whose lives infrastructure decisions shape, including future generations. 💡 also, not coincidentally, the only box that never receives an invoice, or at least, not directly.
Berlin, 2021. A team ranks the national rail operator’s stations for modernisation by passenger volume and network importance. The public consultation brings 214 responses from disabled passengers in rural eastern Germany, mostly about small, low-ranked stations. They had not been in the model, and they changed the conversation.
Two philosophers ground the idea. For John Dewey, a public comes into existence when people share exposure to the consequences of decisions made by others 3 Dewey (1954) The Public and Its Problems. Alan Swallow. . For Hans Jonas, responsibility extends to those whose lives present decisions will shape, including future generations who cannot be represented in today’s politics 4 Jonas (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. University of Chicago Press. .
Other advisory work has a third box too, but in European infrastructure it is most visible and most formally binding 💡 binding in the sense that a regulator can, and occasionally does, ask you directly who bore the consequences of a decision. It concentrates the mind.: the publics are named in the regulations. Answering to those publics is what distinguishes legitimate advisory practice from practice that has lost its grounding. Third-box thinking is the habit of attending to people whose interests are at stake but who are absent from the contract. Amsterdam and Berlin were both failures of it.
How the research was done
The work is written from inside the profession. Three commitments follow. I name my position and mark where a chapter draws on my own practice. I engage the wider research, because experience grounds the analysis and does not replace the reading 💡 a note mostly to myself, since practitioners writing theses are notorious for citing their own war stories and calling it method. And I acknowledge limits: the work is reflective and conceptual, not systematically empirical.
One rigorous argument finds advisers’ remaining value in proprietary information, relationships and accountability, and treats it as a stable stock. This work begins where it stops: with the process that produces the value.
The domain in place
The ground is set: a distinct domain, its third box, a career path mapped by the ChMC framework, and an insider’s position with stated limits. Chapter 3 supplies the philosophy.