There is a detail in The Hobbit that is easy to read past. Thorin’s company doesn’t recruit Bilbo despite him not being a dwarf. They recruit him because he isn’t one. Gandalf’s logic is explicit: the quest needs someone the dragon won’t recognise — someone who doesn’t smell like a dwarf, doesn’t think like one, and can therefore go where dwarves cannot.
That is the most honest job description of consulting I know. Clients don’t need a fourteenth dwarf. They already have thirteen excellent dwarves. They need a burglar.
The naive question
My most useful contribution in the first weeks of an engagement is often embarrassingly simple: I ask naive questions. “Why do you need three approval layers for this?” “What value does this weekly meeting actually create?” The answers are revealing because the insiders can no longer see them — the approval layer that solved a quality problem years ago and was never removed; the standing meeting whose original programme ended long before the calendar invite did.
None of this requires brilliance. It requires not belonging. The insiders can’t ask these questions. Partly the answers have become invisible to them, like furniture you have stopped noticing. Partly asking would be politically awkward. The burglar has no furniture and no politics. That is the whole job.
The burglar between two kingdoms
The burglar’s position — inside the company, but not of it — is one I have held literally. At a global technology company, the central architecture team sat in the headquarters country and the biggest operations site sat in another, and the two were at war. The site felt looked down on, with some justification; the centre could be startlingly condescending about it. Years of mutual contempt had hardened into the furniture.
I belonged to neither camp. I was not from the headquarters country, and I was not a local at the site either. I was simply the architect assigned to operations — structurally in the middle, smelling like neither a dwarf nor an elf. That turned out to be the entire value. I spent time with the site team and they felt genuinely understood, perhaps for the first time in years. The architecture side, meanwhile, treated me as one of their own with something worth hearing. Both sides trusted me before I had any mandate over either.
When the reorganisation came, that bridge was the explicit reason I was asked to take over the global computing operations. And the endorsement I still value most came from the site’s most critical architect — the hardest sceptic in the building, won over argument by argument — who later wrote that my departure left “a Martin-shaped hole.” A sceptic’s endorsement is the only kind that cannot be bought.
Nobody ever wrote “burglar” on my contract. But it was the burglar’s position — trusted precisely because I belonged to neither side — that did the work.
What this means for your transformation
The outsider’s view is the insider’s blind spot. Well-run organisations build the burglar role in on purpose, rather than waiting for a crisis:
- Protect the naive question. When a newcomer asks “why do we do this?”, the answer “that’s how we’ve always done it” should be treated as a finding, not an explanation.
- Rotate fresh eyes through old processes. The burglar doesn’t have to be external. Anyone far enough from a process can see its furniture — if they are given permission to say so out loud.
- Don’t ask insiders to audit themselves. Not because they are dishonest, but because expertise and blindness are the same adaptation. Knowing a system deeply means no longer seeing it.
This is exactly why boards are reaching for outside advisors on AI adoption. The internal teams know the technology better than any advisor will. What they cannot supply is distance — the burglar’s view of which approval layers, which habits, and which comfortable assumptions won’t survive contact with the dragon.
“I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my paths led. And through the air, I am he that walks unseen.”
— The Hobbit, Chapter 12
Part 7 of ten in There and Back Again — Transformation Lessons from an Unexpected Journey. Previous: Sting Glows Blue. Next: The Arkenstone — on knowing which treasure is irreplaceable.
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