No More Consultants: We Know More Than We Think

Preface

In 2001, we wrote our first book together - Learning to Fly. At that time, we were both working for BP, the energy company and wanted to share our experience and learning from a successful knowledge-sharing programme. Three years later, we wrote the second edition: Learning to Fly - Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations, which incorporated the experience of many other others in the public, private and development sectors, using a number of tools and techniques to help knowledge flow around and between organisations. Since that time, we have been practising what we know - and, as independent consultants and advisors, working in many more different contexts, learning a lot more.

I guess we have all smiled wryly at the author Robert Townsend’s well-known quote: ‘Consultants ask to borrow your watch to tell you the time, and then walk off with your watch!’ Whilst we smile though, we know that there is an element of truth in the quote.

During our roles in multinational organisations, we have been on the receiving end of recommendations offered by external management consultants. We have both had roles in those same organisations as internal consultants; and over the past four years, we have also experienced being hired as external consultants. From these various viewpoints we have observed that consultants are not always hired for the right reasons and are frequently not deployed to optimum effect.

No More Consultants is a book which raises the question of how we can be more purposeful in our use of management consultants. It is a book for managers who commission consultants to help deliver their business results. It is also a book for the people within organisations who feel that they have the knowledge and capability themselves to solve some of the issues that highly paid consultants are brought in to address - leaving their recommendations for others to implement. No More Consultants is the book you’d buy for someone who is committed to continuous improvement, and is frustrated that their organisation unthinkingly relies too much on external help.

We believe organisations can do more to learn what, and where, their strengths are in order to first benefit from their own good practices. We have used the self-assessment approach described in the book in many settings and for a number of topics. From our experience, we know that this approach is transferable. We will explain in detail how to determine and make best possible use of what your organisation already knows. This in turn will help you to establish whether and when to bring in consultants so that you get the best from what they have to offer you.

There are many people to acknowledge who helped in the writing of this book but in particular, we want to thank:

Sophie Smiles Director of i&i

Graham O’Connell, Head of Organisational Development at the National School of Government

Karen Eden, Director, EMEA Partnering Excellence Programme Office, Oracle

Deborah Pilkington at the Government Office of the NW

Lynne Keech, Knowledge Consultant at Nationwide

The coaches at the Constellation for AIDS Competence

Rachel Cooke, research fellow at the NHS Institute for Improvement and Innovation

Professor Vicharn Panich of the Knowledge Management Institute in Thailand

Professor Martin Elliott at Great Ormond Street Hospital, (and Ferrari)

Charlotte Diez at UNITAR

Phil Forth and Barry Smale for painstakingly reading and editing the proofs.

And of course, our wives and families for their enduring support and encouragement - again!

Geoff Parcell & Chris Collison August 2009

1

Introduction - Why No More Consultants?

From time to time, most organisations bring in teams of consultants; perhaps to help develop strategies, advise on policies or solve thorny problems. Your organisation might be planning to move to the next level of performance, and need some inspiration from outside. It could be that you believe that you need professional assistance in introducing change: a new enterprise software platform, a new strategy, evaluating new business opportunities, outsourcing or off-shoring. Consultants are also brought into organisations to help deal with something unexpected; a financial downturn, an opportunistic acquisition or disposal, or the succession of a senior executive.

Why is it that so often the instinctive response to such changes, planned or unplanned, is to employ consulting resources from outside the organisation?

Sometimes we need a neutral agent to disentangle the emotion and politics from hard-nosed business decisions.

Sometimes, the personal stakes are high, and we feel we really don’t want to get this wrong.

Sometimes our own internal staff are too busy doing the day-to-day work, so we need to buy in temporary extra capacity.

Sometimes it seems the external consultant’s voice carries more weight with senior management, or is considered to be impartial.

Sometimes they are expected to make unpalatable recommendations and it will be cathartic to be able to blame them for the decision (and also if things go wrong!).

Sometimes, however, we just press the consultancy button without really thinking it through. That’s not smart.

So the consultants arrive, interview the stakeholders, diagnose the problem and formulate some recommendations. Their recommendations are often afforded a level of respect by the management team, a level which would never be offered to suggestions which came directly from the employees. As a consequence, members of staff are left with a frustration that the consultants drew all of the ideas, solutions and expertise from within the organisation, yet they took all the credit for the recommendations themselves.

Having delivered their finely crafted PowerPoint presentation, the consultancy team exits the stage, leaving behind a set of strategies or solutions to be implemented.

Unfortunately, the staff who are tasked with implementation don’t feel that they ‘own’ the solutions, and the results often fall far short of the PowerPoint dreams from the boardroom.

‘Perhaps we need to bring in some trouble-shooters to help us understand why the implementation failed? Now where’s that business card that someone gave me …?’

Stop! Please stop!

Since we left major organisations and became independent consultants we have learned a lot by working with a variety of different groups and organisations. In particular, we have learned that a self-assessment approach is a highly effective way of having the right conversations. The right conversations are the ones which lead you to discover the knowledge and experience which is most important to the organisation, and the actions it needs to take in order to be successful.

Five Key Questions

We believe that there are five key questions for an organisation to pose:

• Can we identify the issue?

• Do we know our internal capability?

• Does anyone do this well internally?

• Do we know who is good at it externally?

• Having identified who does it well, are they available to help us, either by sharing what they know or by implementing it?

Let’s explore each of these questions in more detail.

Can We Identify the Issue?

One of the biggest challenges facing an organisation that is striving to improve its performance is to identify the right issue to tackle. Much valuable time and resource can be wasted by people solving the wrong issue. In our experience, the person posing the question ‘What’s the real issue here?’ will get a different response depending on whether the respondent has the title of IT consultant, Business Manager, HR professional or Senior Engineer. If you have a tool in your hand when you pose the question, this will inevitably frame the way you define the issue too. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail! But if the real issue was hanging a picture to maximise its impact, then perhaps you should have been considering if the picture was right for the style and colour scheme of the room long before you reached for the wall-fixings.

There have been many instances where lack of diagnosis of the issue has led to a lot of wasted effort in resolving the wrong issue. Time spent analysing the underlying issue is well spent to ensure that the solutions considered address the right issue. Sometimes this can be more obvious to a pair of ‘outside eyes’, that is, people not too close to the issue and who have the benefit of other contexts. Are you recognising the symptoms and dealing with those or diagnosing the root cause? After all, it is more effective to do the right thing than do things right.

Do We Know Our Internal Capability?

Donald Rumsfeld the US Defense Secretary is quoted as saying:

I don’t know what the facts are but somebody’s certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know.

Now I don’t know if I know what I think he wanted to say … but many organisations simply do not know what they know.

As individuals, we are usually known for the work we are currently doing, and even if our résumé is up to date and available for others to read, it probably does not describe what we know, merely what our past positions were or what we have done.

Once you have the issue clear, ask yourself ‘do you know if anyone is already doing this in-house?’. The emphasis here is on the knowing because frequently we do not know what the organisation knows. If someone does know and has experience of doing it, we can then check if they do it well and if they are available to help us. If we do not know whether or not we have good practice in-house - and in our experience this is most often the case - then finding out if the knowledge exists in other departments or project groups is a good first step. If you do have a way of finding out that the knowledge exists then getting together to share that knowledge may be all that is required to tackle the issue yourselves. In previous books, we have written about bespoke ‘yellow pages systems’ to share who we are, what we know and what we are prepared to share. In today’s Web 2.0 world we can use any number of social networking sites to achieve the same end. It’s often easier to discover the abilities and experience of your work colleagues through LinkedIn, Facebook or Xing, than it is to use the formal corporate systems.

Does Anyone Do this Well Internally?

Find out who does it well, where the strengths lie in the organisation. Too often we look only at the current competencies being used and are ignorant of what additional strengths people have that are also available to the organisation. It is possible that all the knowledge and resources you need may be there, but since this is not a business-as-usual activity, it can be worth having a coach help the team get to ‘match fitness’.

For example, in any change programme it is common to assemble a task force from those in the organisation who are likely to have to live through the change and to make it happen. One reason for doing this is to ensure ownership of the solution; there is nothing worse than feeling that you are having change imposed upon you. This task force team might comprise a wide range of people, levels and roles. A temporary project team such as this, which includes accountants, engineers or nurses, may or may not feel confident to facilitate brainstorming sessions or draw process flow diagrams. Their diversity is positive when it comes to understanding the issue but it may need harnessing.

Do We Know Who is Good at it Externally?

If we know that we don’t have the capability in-house, then who does possess the key knowledge that we could reach out to? By extending our social networks further, we might identify and be able to approach ‘people who know’ in other organisations. If you are not competing directly with the organisation, or if the issue is not commercially sensitive - Health and Safety for instance - then people are normally receptive to requests to share good practice. People feel appreciated for their strengths, and it gives them a sense of pride to be helping