Security consulting offers no shortage of methodologies; it also offers no shortage of methodological dogma. There are excellent consultants who come from federal and local law enforcement, the military, the intelligence community, private-sector security, academia, and other backgrounds. Each brings valuable expertise, but each also brings assumptions shaped by previous missions, training, institutions, culture, and experience.
In April 2025, I ghostwrote an article about embracing the Jaggedness Principle in security consulting. According to the principle, complex abilities are multidimensional, and individuals possess substantially different strengths across the dimensions that matter. Because security consulting engagements are more often than not multidimensional themselves, consulting teams should be deliberately composed so that different forms of expertise, experience, and perspective compensate for one another’s limitations and support the client’s needs.
No One-Size-Fits-All Security Consultant
Relevant knowledge should be distributed across a team rather than concentrated in one person. Unless this were a truly well-established scientific discipline and the consultant were John von Neumann – which security consulting is not, and I have yet to find a von Neumann-like figure in it – no individual could possess enough knowledge to be a bona fide expert across its many disciplines. For context, von Neumann’s extraordinary contributions spanned mathematics, physics, computing, game theory, operations research, and nuclear science, making the comparison intentionally ridiculous. Even von Neumann, however, had limitations relevant to this article; his genius and good judgment were often at odds.
Security consulting can make these individual limitations easy to see in practice. For example, someone who spent an entire career protecting elected officials as a Secret Service special agent is likely highly skilled at planning and conducting executive-protection advances. A high-ranking all-source analyst from the intelligence community may be excellent at building a protective-intelligence program. A leader from the military special operations community may be a legitimate expert in threat and vulnerability assessments and criticality and vulnerability analysis, including the CARVER methodology. But it does not follow, especially depending on how long these professionals have been separated from their respective fields, that each is adequately knowledgeable about private-security standards and guidelines promulgated by ASIS and the various other entities that publish them. To be clear, I am not commenting on whether familiarity with certain private-security publications is inherently good, bad, or even particularly important; my point is that it is impossible for any one person to know everything potentially relevant to a consulting engagement.
Moreover, especially when conducting a security-program audit or providing broad security advice, it is a plain fact that a retired Coast Guard officer and a former narcotics detective will view particular security issues through different lenses. The same is true of an experienced woman who cut her teeth exclusively in private security, first as an executive-protection agent and then as a program manager, and a retired male Central Intelligence Agency case officer. In every case, lived experience, training, organizational mission, culture, and much more influence how practitioners interpret security problems and provide consultation.
A Necessary Tension to Improve Security Consulting Outcomes
All that said, it is not ipso facto the case that team diversity automatically creates better outcomes. Much like the story of Goldilocks, too little can limit a team’s flexibility in understanding and tackling complex problems, while too much untethered cognitive diversity can make it difficult to organize and integrate competing perspectives into a coherent path forward. The national-security literature describes one manifestation of this tension as polythink. With polythink, competing perspectives can broaden deliberation, but poor integration of those perspectives can produce disjointed decision-making processes or decision paralysis. Diversity, in other words, creates the potential for better security-consulting outcomes; leadership, culture, and method translate that potential into what actually matters for clients.
Part of what I do at Convoy Group is make sure our security consulting team and approach remain within the habitable zone of composition, assessment, and recommendations. Our professionals come from the U.S. special operations, law enforcement, intelligence, private security, and academic communities, and everything doesn’t just so happen to look like a nail because we have a hammer.
In private-sector security consulting, the paths are myriad and the guardrails are mostly nonexistent unless they are self-imposed. It is imperative that we select the right team and tool for the job, create enough common structure to integrate competing judgments, and lead the process correctly – lest a metaphorical O-ring lead to disaster.