“We Use the Method™”: How to Charge €400/hr for a Matrix and Get Away With It

Strategy was once a noun. Then someone turned it into a 2x2 matrix and started charging €400/hour for it.

In the beginning was the memo. Then came the workshop. And lo, the workshop begat the brainstorm, and the brainstorm begat The Framework™. And thus the modern consultant emerged, blinking into fluorescent light, clutching a PowerPoint deck entitled “Strategic Options: Phase Zero Deliverables – Client Version 1.”

One might have hoped that, having mapped the known world into quadrants and acronyms, consultants would rest. But no. The invention of frameworks—like debt, Excel tabs, and think tanks—is subject to recursive inflation. The more of them you have, the more you need. And when the old ones fail, the solution is always to reapply them, only this time with more colours and a better font.

Origins of the Madness

Let us return to the primordial soup from which modern business methods crawled, clutching a clicker and demanding your undivided attention for the next 94 slides. The 1970s gave us the BCG Growth-Share Matrix, a tool that brought metaphysical clarity to the boardroom. It plotted a firm’s business units across a two-dimensional grid: market growth vs. market share. What emerged was not insight, but zoology—Stars, Cash Cows, Dogs, and Question Marks. The implication was clear: treat your business like a farmyard and hope the cows don’t bark.

Soon followed SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), an inspired rebranding of “make a pros and cons list.” But the genius of SWOT was not in the framework—it was in its presentability. Executives could now talk about their firm’s “externalised opportunity vectors” and “internally facing threat clusters” with the gravitas of a NATO general briefing a crisis.

Then came Porter’s Five Forces, McKinsey’s 7S, the Ansoff Matrix, PESTEL, Blue Ocean Strategy, and eventually frameworks for managing frameworks. In time, the act of choosing the right framework itself became frameworked. The snake had not just eaten its tail—it had licensed the image and was selling it as part of a digital transformation seminar.

The Snowball of Frameworks

A peculiar pathology afflicts those who use frameworks not as tools but as identities. The problem is not that frameworks are wrong—they are often trivially correct—but that they metastasise. Once you’ve used one, you must use them all. A good strategy presentation now resembles a metaphysical bingo card: Porter, BCG, SWOT, plus something bespoke to show you're “adding value.”

Before long, every problem becomes framework-shaped. Pricing isn't about incentives or political economy, it's about quadrant 3C on the pricing elasticity matrix, cross-referenced with your strategic intent vector. Market access isn't about patients or public policy—it’s an “Access Maturity Model, v2.3,” colour-coded from green to red like a weather warning.

The process feeds itself. Once a team internalises a method, it begins to look for ways to apply it not just to products or departments, but to people, decisions, time allocation, ambition. Everything is sliced, mapped, and codified. “We’re using the Decision Heat Map,” someone says confidently, “with a fallback to the Accountability RACI Grid.” No one knows what this means, but it is nodded at solemnly, like scripture read in Latin.

This is how one ends up with entire workshops dedicated to “Framework Harmonisation.” Slides are shown comparing the BCG Matrix to the Ansoff Matrix, resulting in—inevitably—a new matrix combining both. One senior VP remarks, without irony, that “we need a meta-framework to sort out all these frameworks.” You laugh. He does not.

Taleb’s Paradox and the Consultant’s Folly

Were Nassim Nicholas Taleb invited to such a gathering (which he most certainly would not attend), he would ask: what is the skin in the game here? The answer, alas, is none. The Method is, by design, unaccountable. If the strategy fails, it was due to “poor implementation.” If it succeeds, the framework worked. Heads I win, tails you misunderstood the matrix.

And so the consultants thrive, floating serenely above the chaos, occasionally tweaking the framework's labels from “stars” to “champions,” or rebranding “synergies” as “adjacencies.” Their job is not to understand your business—it is to help you misunderstand it in a way that feels strategic.

Academic Cousins: Methods Without End

This Method obsession is not limited to consultants. Academia, too, has its addicts. Researchers, once content to discover things, now spend months defending their choice of methodology. Ask a sociologist to justify their findings and you will receive a 40-page annex outlining the epistemological basis of thematic qualitative content analysis. Ask an economist and they will reply, “We used a DSGE model,” as if that excuses everything.

The result is similar: an ironclad devotion to tools regardless of whether they fit the problem. It’s not about answers. It’s about showing your work in a way that earns praise from your methodological tribe. “Ah yes, a modified grounded theory approach—how very brave.”

Consultants merely turned this into a business.

Nobody Ever Got Fired for Hiring Someone With a Framework

The genius of The Method is not that it works. It’s that it absolves. The decision to hire a prestigious consultant is not about truth; it is about plausible deniability. If your biotech IPO flops after you restructured according to the “Innovation Readiness Maturity Model,” well—it wasn’t your fault. You trusted the process.

This is why the same frameworks get recycled across industries, geographies, and decades. A method devised for consumer packaged goods in 1987 will be deployed with confidence to restructure oncology clinical trials in 2025. The only thing that changes is the font.

In Lieu of a Conclusion: An Unmarketable Truth

One could suggest that instead of The Method™, companies invest in hiring people who actually know the field—who’ve priced a drug in Hungary, filed reimbursement dossiers in Portugal, or survived a French price committee negotiation. But such people lack the sheen of the consultant. They speak plainly, dislike frameworks, and tend to say things like “it depends.”

Worse, they cannot be easily matrixed. They are not MECE-compliant. They cannot be colour-coded.

Which is why they’re rarely invited to the workshop.