Stone Soup, and the Art of Business Transformation

I grew up in the mid-Hampshire countryside, in a small village, and attended the local Church of England primary school in the late 1980s. It wasn’t an exceptional start to an education and probably lacked much in the way of cosmopolitan outlook, but after nearly twenty years living in a capital city, I find myself looking back on it with increasing fondness.

One long-running school tradition was the Friday morning assembly. All the classes would gather in the main hall to be addressed by a guest speaker, before a kumbaya-style sing-along accompanied by a teacher on an acoustic guitar. Beyond a general sense of pastoral wholesomeness, few specific memories from that period remain. But one story told by a visiting speaker has stayed with me for nearly forty years. It was the story of Stone Soup.

A traveller arrives in a village with nothing but the clothes on his back and an old cooking pot. The villagers, wary and unwilling to share their food, turn him away. Undeterred, the traveller fills his pot with water, drops in a single stone from a nearby stream, and sets it over a fire. Intrigued, the villagers begin to gather.

The traveller explains that he is making a wonderful stone soup and will happily share it once it is ready. As the water boils, he casually remarks that while stone soup is delicious on its own, it’s even better with a few carrots for texture. One villager, curiosity now firmly piqued, fetches some carrots. A little later, the traveller muses that parsnips improve the consistency. Another villager obliges. Soon, others join in - some cream for colour, herbs for garnish, seasoning for depth. You get the idea.

In the end, the traveller shares the soup with the village. Everyone agrees it is the best soup they have ever tasted. He departs, leaving the stone behind so they can recreate the soup whenever they wish.

The story was clearly intended as a moral lesson about the value of sharing. But I think its lasting appeal lies elsewhere. It’s really a story about ingenuity: the traveller uses his wits to secure a hot meal, and in doing so creates the conditions for the villagers to do right by one another—sharing what they already had to produce something far better together.

In many ways, this should be the founding myth of transformation consultancy - digital or otherwise.

The processes, frameworks, and intellectual property that consultants bring to an organisation are, at best, the stone in the pot. The real ingredients for change always reside within the organisation itself. Most barriers to transformation are not about capability, but about visibility and willingness: an inability to see the value of what already exists, or a reluctance to share it. One business unit clutches its raw carrot, rather than contributing it to a larger, more nourishing pot of soup.

But as I revisit this tale and try to extract value from the metaphor, there’s a crucial detail that’s easy to overlook. Once the traveller has persuaded the village of the miraculous soup-creating properties of his stone, he still needs to know how to cook. If he doesn’t know how to make good soup, all he has achieved is ruining everyone’s supplies - and he will likely find himself leaving the village quickly, pursued by the sharp end of a few pitchforks.

Having spent much of the last decade working as an independent consultant in digital transformation, I now often find myself on the client side, reviewing pitch decks and proposals from would-be transformation partners. And from this vantage point, I see a lot of stones.

You can usually spot them easily. They come with elaborate diagrams, plenty of boxes and arrows, and a very large price tag. And to be clear: I’m not against a good stone.

What concerns me is how often it becomes apparent that the people selling them don’t know how to make soup. And that, inevitably, is where the trouble starts.