Becoming a sommelier takes years. Thousands of tastings, blind exams, certifications most diners will never know exist. All of it invisible. What the guest sees is someone who listens, asks the right questions, and makes a recommendation they can trust. When it’s done right, it feels effortless.
Solutions architects, business analysts, presales engineers - anyone bridging engineering and the customer - do the same thing. Years of technical depth, compressed into a conversation that builds or breaks confidence. The sommelier translates the complexity of the cellar into a decision the guest can trust. The solutions architect translates the complexity of the platform into a recommendation the client feels confident taking to the board. Both roles are bridges. Both carry the same risk.
A sommelier can do everything right. Present the bottle beautifully. Explain the terroir with confidence. Decant with ceremony. Pour with precision. The client is impressed throughout. Then they taste it with the dish - and it just doesn’t work. The tannins clash. The wine overwhelms the food. What seemed like expertise in the moment is revealed as a misjudgement. The failure was baked in at the recommendation stage, but only visible at consumption.
Technical consultants face the same problem. Discovery goes brilliantly. Stakeholders feel heard. Architecture diagrams look elegant, the proof of concept demos well. Everyone signs off. Then it hits production. Latency is unacceptable. Costs spiral at scale. It can’t handle the actual data volumes. The failure was baked in at the design stage, but only revealed when the business actually consumes it. The client trusted your visible expertise, and the invisible judgement behind it turned out to be wrong.
There’s a form of service called guéridon - tableside preparation. Crêpe Suzette, Cacio e Pepe, Steak Diane. The dish is finished in front of the guest. It’s theatrical, but the stakes are real. Too much brandy on the crêpe and you’ve got a fire hazard. Take too long and the food goes cold, ruining the rhythm of the entire meal. Drop something and you’ve made a mess in front of everyone.
Consulting has its own tableside moments: the demo in front of the board, the workshop with a room full of expensive people, the steering committee where you’re asked a question you weren’t expecting. When these go wrong, they go wrong publicly. The visible performance carries genuine risk. That’s what makes it valuable. If anyone could do it, it wouldn’t signal expertise. But theatre without substance underneath it is worse than no theatre at all. If the kitchen can’t execute, the front of house performance is just misdirection.
Black and white vs colour
I picked up Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality after hearing Rory Sutherland recommend it on the Uncensored CMO podcast. (Jon Evans would later have Will as a guest on the podcast too.) Took me months to actually read it. I wish I hadn’t waited.
Guidara ran front of house at Eleven Madison Park while Daniel Humm ran the kitchen. Together they took the restaurant from #50 to #1 on the World’s 50 Best list. Neither could have done it alone. Humm’s food was exceptional - that’s the back stage excellence. Guidara’s hospitality made the experience unforgettable - that’s the front stage.
His central distinction is between service and hospitality:
“Black and white means you’re doing your job with competence and efficiency; colour means you make people feel great about the job you’re doing for them. Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service. But genuinely engaging with the person you’re serving, so you can make an authentic connection - that’s hospitality.”
Most technical consultants operate in black and white. Competent. Reliable. Delivering the right solution, on time, within scope. But interchangeable. The ones who build lasting client relationships add colour. They make people feel heard. They remember the context from three meetings ago. They follow up with an insight that wasn’t asked for but lands perfectly.
The sociologist Erving Goffman analysed social interaction as performance. He distinguished between “front stage” - where we perform for an audience, managing impressions - and “back stage” - where we prepare, where we can drop the act. Service design borrowed this framework. A service blueprint maps what’s visible to customers versus what’s invisible. The line of visibility separates front stage from back stage.
For consultants, the question is: what should clients see? Research from Harvard Business School found that when customers can observe work being done, they report higher quality and feel more gratitude. Visible labour triggers what researchers call the “labour illusion” - the perception that more effort went into the result.
But it goes further than watching. The best client sessions aren’t performances - they’re collaborations. The client doesn’t just see the whiteboard fill up. They help fill it in. They walk out feeling like they shaped the solution, not just received one. It’s not just visible. It’s shared.
The unreasonable part
Guidara writes about the importance of listening - that people usually want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with. This is the discovery trap. Technical consultants often rush to demonstrate expertise, to show they know the answer. The Trust Equation from Maister, Green and Galford’s The Trusted Advisor identifies this as the single biggest trust-destroying behaviour: the rush to come up with the answer.
Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up. Paid discovery isn’t a cost centre. It’s the sommelier actually asking what you’re eating before recommending the wine. Skip it and you might get lucky. Or you might pair a bold red with delicate fish and ruin the meal.
Guidara’s approach to investment:
“Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent ‘foolishly.’ It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it’s anything but. Because that last 5 percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend.”
The famous example: overhearing guests say they hadn’t managed to try a New York hot dog during their trip, Guidara sent someone out to buy a $2 dirty water dog from a street vendor. It came back, was plated beautifully, and served as a course. The guests called it the highlight of their trip. The point isn’t what the gesture cost you - it’s how it made them feel.
For consulting, the 5% might be a follow-up insight shared proactively, not billed. Remembering a detail the client mentioned in passing. The thing that makes them say “they actually get us.” Small gestures can outperform massive operational investments because they signal attention. They say: you’re not just another account.
Athletes watch footage when they’ve had a bad game, to see what they can fix. They rarely do it after a great game - but that’s how you hold on to what you did well. Most teams only run retrospectives when things go wrong. The best teams study their wins too.
Rory Sutherland’s line: the opposite of a good idea should also be a good idea. Guidara applied this through “reverse benchmarking.” Instead of copying what competitors do well, he’d visit top restaurants and ask: what about this experience was disappointing? Mediocre coffee and a poor beer selection at the #1 restaurant became EMP’s differentiators.
For consulting: where do competitors underserve clients? Slow response times. Generic recommendations. Transactional relationships. No follow-through after the project ends. Those gaps are opportunities.
The weight of the role
We serve for the pleasure of the customer. The expertise, the theatre, the hospitality - none of it matters if you’ve forgotten who it’s for.
So here’s the model. Four components.
Deep invisible expertise. The back stage work. Architecture patterns, industry experience, technical knowledge. This is the wine cellar. Without it, the front stage is empty.
Diagnostic attention. Genuine curiosity about context. What are you actually trying to achieve? What’s worked before? What’s the constraint nobody’s mentioned yet? People want to be heard more than agreed with.
Visible demonstration. The tableside performance. Whiteboard sessions, workshops, live problem-solving. This creates perceived value and signals expertise. But it carries real risk if you can’t execute.
Unreasonable hospitality. The 5% investment. The follow-up that wasn’t required. The insight shared proactively. The gesture that shows you were listening.
The sommelier doesn’t taste the pairing for the guest. The architect doesn’t run the system in production. Both make recommendations now that are only proven later.
That’s the weight of the role. That’s why the expertise has to be real, not performed. And that’s why, when you find someone who combines genuine depth with the ability to make you feel understood, you don’t let them go.