Death Knell for the Consulting Process?

For my first substantive post, I really wanted to nail a humdinger. A post about the most universal or common consultant issue. One that we could all relate to and have an opinion on..... but that would take brainpower I do not have today, so I'll just start with the mundane question laid out in the title.

In graduate school and new consultant training, we were trained to think or operate in a precise manner. Back in the mid-90s it was referred to as "issue-based consulting" and probably several other terms. Basically, issue-based consulting is the process of:

1. formulating hypotheses about the client's situation
2. using those hypotheses to drive your data collection
3. issuing findings from the analysis
4. conclusions from the findings
5. and finally recommendations for action based on the conclusions.

In a nutshell:

hypotheses --> data --> findings --> conclusions --> recommendations

(Not the consulting process of "initiate - analyze - design - implement") This was the first thing we were taught in consulting school and the most fundamental to our practice as consultants.

The value of this process was immediately evident to me and I never questioned it. The crux of what we do as consultants is think for clients. The consulting process described above makes that thinking transparent, so the client can understand, follow it, and participate in it both when we are there and after we have left.

Thinking or operating transparently brings us to one of my cardinal rules of consulting;

"Thou shalt not make s*** up", or more appropriately,
"Thou shalt not pull recommendations from thin air."

But that is a different post for a different day (or more like a week of posts).

The process also lends validity and objectivity to our recommendations whether they be a new org design or a redesigned process. Being transparent with our thinking shows that we did not make recommendations based on uninformed opinions, or simply "cut-n-paste" them from somewhere else.

Starting in 2002, whenever I have described this process to most project teammates, their eyes glaze over, or they look at me as if I am speaking Greek. Also, I am increasingly witnessing problems from not using this approach:

1) There is no transparency
2) The client cannot tell what you are doing and therefore starts to doubt or suspect
3) Without this approach, the consultant does not have any approach and simply cannot fulfill their tasks

I will write with an example of this tomorrow since this post is so long. Right now, I am curious to know the following:
1) How many of you were trained in this thinking process either in grad school or as a new consultant?
2) What value do you place on it? and
3) Whether or not you have witnessed or sensed its demise, and to what degree?